Pride

Last I left you I was preparing to head down to Rhode Island for the last round of the Verge Cyclocross Series. One of my students is making a documentary on cyclocross racing, and as we drove through the cold, bright December Sunday, we talked about what makes us tick as athletes. I’ve covered most of that ground already in previous posts, so I won’t repeat myself here. I think it’s enough to say that the question, for those who ask it once, will always hover, spoken and unspoken, around them. Articulating my reasons for training and racing never quite makes that giant Why? disappear.

In any case, after a few directional missteps we arrived at the race. The course, as always, appeared to be a disaster of confused yellow tape. You can understand cyclocross courses from either the air or from behind your handlebars. I went down to Warwick not looking for any real result; I was more interested in getting a good workout and staying fresh for Nationals, which are this coming weekend. The race was delayed for about half an hour, as an injured rider was taken away in an ambulance, with a fire engine escort. I saw him as I took a warm-up lap. He was curled on the sand in one of the pits, the painful focus of four or five people. He was grimacing and a woman was rubbing his back. He still had his helmet on. Someone near me said Did you see it? He did like two complete flips. I cannot speak for the others in the race, but as we moved aside to let the emergency vehicles leave with their injured cargo, I felt the usual prerace jitters muted by something heavier.

The Verge series decides its starting order by standings based on previous races. I’ve done only one other Verge race this year, finishing 28th and well out of the points. I watched as Hunter Provonost, my friend and sometimes rival, moved up into the third starting row. I was in the 8th. When the whistle blew I got my usual slow start, and found myself somewhere among the rear third of the pack. I went to work. Cyclocross is good to me, because, like triathlon, you are essentially racing yourself. If you are a poor rider, technically, sure, others will pass you. But if you ride mostly mistake free, it’s just your training versus everyone else’s. The results are mostly predetermined. The mystery lies in those variables of training and genetics. Start order, luck, and skill are components of performance, but really people show up knowing, somewhere in their bodies, how they’re going to do.

I found myself passing people. I would be at the back of a group, as we came into a sandpit, and think: I’m going to pass these guys in this pit. I would. As the number of laps came down, I tried to shake a final group, and have a safe run into the line. I could see Hunter ahead, not far. I made the final turn onto the finishing strip, and got out of my saddle. Someone was coming up on me from behind, but I held him off and finished 8th, one spot behind Hunter, and good enough for some series points.

I’m feeling something about this race that I don’t usually feel: pride. Why? I’ve won races but nothing that I can remember feeling as sweet about as this race. Maybe it was the big effort that paid off, or the feeling that I could, given a good starting row, do even better. I really think it’s the way I crossed the finish line, sprinting ahead of a chaser and then dry-heaving for two or three hundred yards. Not often do you get the honest feeling you did your best. But when you do feel that way, not much beats it. Usually, at the end of a race, even a good race, you find yourself looking forward to the next one, trying to figure out, as detail obsessed athletes will, how to get better (the outcome, I hope, of working harder). Not this time. The next day, I wandered over to Bikereg.com, checked out results, and thought, honestly, Yeah, look at that: 8th.

December 9th 2006

Another double today, on the run and in the pool. Both harder than yesterday.

Swim: 200 Warm-up; 4 x 50 Drill (heads-up swimming and one-arms); 8 x 300 (break 300s into 100s by effort: hard 100-easy 100-hard 100 on the odd 300s; easy 100-hard 100-easy 100 on the even 100s); 100 Cool-down.

Try doing two of the hard-easy-hard 300s with fins on. Fins, more than anything else, let you feel the water pressing on the forward surfaces of your body. The best swimmers out there spend the majority of their energy not on propulsion, but on minimizing drag. Fins also show you what it feels like to swim fast; this is a good thing to know. As you swim with your fins on, try to keep your body firmly locked in the hole made in the water by your head. Keep rolling back and forth, so you’re not presenting a flat, barge-like body to he water.

Run: 90 minutes, with 20 minutes run at steady-state interval. For me, I keep my heart rate between 160-171 BPM and try to average just over 6:00/Mile. Steady state mileage is valuable to triathletes, especially those that compete at longer distances. You’re never over your lactate threshold, as you would be at tempo speed. During steady state workouts, it’s important to run smoothly, running hard is for later in the year. You’ll be running quickly, but not really fast.

Last VERGE race tomorrow, down in Warwick, RI.

December 8th 2006

Two short workouts today: an icy run on the XC trails around school, and then about 45 minutes in the pool.

Recovery Run (HR 90-150): 40 minutes

Swim: 200 warm-up; 2000 straight at yellow pace (aerobic); 10 x 50 drill; 100 cooldown.

I did some head-up and one-arm swimming for the drills. Most triathletes, when they do one-arm drills, don’t do them right. They keep their body flat in the water and and cycle that arm through the water. You don’t swim two-armed like that (or at least I hope you don’t!), so don’t drill like that. Swim with one arm extended out in front (the right arm, for this example). As your left hand (the pulling hand) enters the water, roll towards your right arm so that you can look under your armpit, to the right. Rolling this far will make you concentrate on body roll (another ignored principle by many triathletes), and gets you to reach out beyond that extended right arm. As you catch and then pull yourself through the water, do it slowly, so you can feel the water pressure on your hand and arm. You aren’t supposed to be doing these fast, remember! You’re learning how to hold more water, that is, to be able to exert force on a greater surface area of water. You know what that adds up to. If you don’t, surf over to a physics blog.

Flats and Gatsby

Captain Dondo came up to me the other day and said “Write something, Dammit. You’re on my list and I’m OCD, so I’m checking your damn blank blog every day.” I hedged, said something bland about work and time and a lack of inspiration, but I knew what had been going on. Once I get behind on something, even if it’s something I like to do, I begin to resent and even fear it. So I’ve been avoiding my blog, and have been finally shamed into facing my silence of the past three weeks.

But something Dondo said resonated. It was that admission of obsession. Most of us, I’m sure, have obsessive, compulsive natures. We wouldn’t be drawn to training and blogs with silly names like “Work Harder,” or (one of my least favorite) “Keep tri-ing,” with its faint allusion to another double i activity: skiing, which is a pretty silly word. But we are OCD, and we do seek out the company of others like us, even if it is only to stand around awkwardly and talk about racing. Dondo is an acquaintance, and we’re tethered by the recognizable traits of endurance athletes: we talk and laugh about bikes and races and mishaps and the darker side of endurance sports. Then we fall silent and bid each other a good day. Don’t get me wrong; I wish I could count Dondo as a good friend, but we don’t have any history beyond our shared addictions.

But it goes beyond acquaintance. I’ve known this woman, call her Maggie, for five or six years. We have the appearance of being close. We dated once, for a disastrous three months, before discovering we were better as something else. I’ve helped her move. We talk on the phone every now and then. She’s a former big time Nordic skiier. Won the Maine State Championship three years running in high school, and then skiied at Williams. She was good. She was obsessed. Like me and Dondo, she’s found a life into which to pour the energy left over from an athletic career. She runs and bikes, sometimes. She lifts serious weights. Like me, she is often awkward in coversation.

Do you feel this way? We dedicate so much of our lives to this thing, this pursuit of speed or greatness or grace or contentment or flight from pain, that other aspects of who we are can become atrophied or ignored. Or, on the brighter side, you speak what you know, and for many of us it’s easier to speak about lactate thresholds and wattages and training plans and grand hopes and titanic disasters. My juniors (I teach English at a small school in Southern Vermont) have been reading The Great Gatsby over the past few weeks. There’s a part, in Chapter Four, when Nick, the narrator, speaks about his rich and mysterious next door neighbor, saying “I had talked with himn perhaps six times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say.” Gatsby, the eponymous character, is obsessed with Daisy, a woman from his past, and his entire life has been built around the impossible dream of recapturing her. I read that line uneasily, as I think about my own discomfort around others; I can talk easily about racing, but who among you has had the experience of replying too long to the innocent question: How’s your season going? I think most of us have bored countless non-racing friends with monologues we’re conscious of spouting, but are powerless to halt. It’s easier, when you carry around the elephant of obsession, to say nothing.

This is not to say we have nothing to say. Gatsby manages to speak volumes in his silent, hopeless pursual of the ineffable: about dreams, love and its folly, the irresistible pull of the past. Like Gatsby, we’re eloquent on the field, out on the course, in the final sprint. We’re athletes, and we choose to leave, as our signature on the world, a small handful of race results scattered across the internet, some of them great, some of them that say both more and less about who we are. I have always had a fear and hatred of DNFs. When you do not finish a race, that’s all the scoresheet says. Nothing about how or why you failed to cross the line. Just a simple, all-capital abbreviation. I was in a cyclo-cross race this past weekend, down in Wrentham, MA, that I got to by fighting through game day Patriots traffic. I was late, as usual, and got a short warm-up before claiming a spot near the front of the staging area. When the gun went off, I got a good spot about five back from the leader. It was a good course for me, gently rolling with some technical bits, and I found myself soon in fourth, then third, and then right on the leader’s wheel. “Hey,” I yelled ahead to him. “Let’s put them under!” He was surprised to see me there. “Nice work to catch on,” he replied. I pulled in front and went to work. When I looked over my shoulder I’d found I’d gapped him, by accident. The field wasn’t too far back, so I continued without him. With a lap and half to go, I had about fifteen seconds, a comfortable lead. So when I came down off a rocky section and heard the slow, steady whistle of a flat tire, I was instantly livid.

Losing a race to a mechanical is an awful thing. Those things we treasure, our fitness and our training, do nothing to obviate a mechanical error in our bicycles. Your muscles keep whispering “Keep going…we’re fine,” but the machine is unwilling. I watched my two closest competitors pass me, and then I walked off the course, put my bike in the car, and drove away. I didn’t talk to anybody. I didn’t want to complain, to enter into the awful realm of “Should, could, would.” But for the rest of the day, I was unsettled. It was the feeling of frustrated release, the feeling you get when you try to go to the pool and find it closed.  You’ve been preparing for this all day, this workout or this race, and then it is gone.  What do you do?  You’d like to put this pent-up emotion and energy somewhere, but your outlet is gone.  You can complain or bitch, but that doesn’t finally do the trick.  You set some new goal, some dream that, you swear, is just out of reach, a goal that, if you only work harder, will be yours on some brilliant morning at the races.