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.