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.
