Pet? Child? No, it’s just…

…my bike.

I’ll explain.

It was a beautiful midwinter day yesterday: low thirties, breezes, enough sun to make the day both sleepy and crystalline.  I had a two-hour slog planned for the trainer, when I thought I’d pull a trick your mom used to use, back in the day. I don’t have those nifty neoprene overboots for cold weather cycling, so I grabbed a couple of plastic bags, tossed a handwarmer in each one, wrapped ‘em around my feet and then encased the whole kiboodle in my shoes: windproof and a vapor barrier, all for cent-fractions.  Headed out all bundled for a February ride. About fifteen minutes out the tube on my camelback froze (I’ll pause here while you consider just how unhip I am in riding circles: plastic bags, a camelback, sheesh), so I took it off and put it underneath the windbreaker, something I’ll do forever, now, in cold weather.  It took a while to unfreeze, and so my dehydrating mind wandered over several topics, one of which was how different real riding is from trainer-riding: it’s harder, for one good thing. But eventually I noticed all the salt and grime that was building up on my bike.  Now I was riding my cross bike, because my mountain shoes are a bit more insulated than my tri shoes (those have holes in them to let water drain away), and my cross bike is steel. How’m I gonna get all this crap off my bike? I thought. If I leave it on, I’ll forget about it and it’ll be rusted through by Wednesday.

Then it came to me.

Why hadn’t I ever thought of this before? I’d always sought out unmanned hoses, or dumped bucket after bucket on my stand-hung bike. This would be so much easier, and the mess would just drain away.

I’d take a shower with it.

The long and the short of it is: it works like a charm. The water pressure is low enough that you don’t have to worry about your precious bearings, and it’s easy to direct the flow to get all those hard to wash areas. Then, as your bike is drip drying, you can clean yourself up, too.  Go over your bike with a dry towel, and then hit those bolts with some lubricant, to keep them rust-free.  Re-lube the cassette and chain and there you go, a clean bike and its clean rider.

There’s no moral here, unless it’s one of love.

Flailing

Hey all, another long stint between posts. Now that I’ve got this monthly gig on memultisports.com I find I post less often here, as there’s a bit of overlap. Visitors of this and that site will find that old Addiction piece, spiffed up a bit with some help from David Foster Wallace. Next month you’ll get to hear me tell triathletes how to race in a criterium. Yikes.

But enough of me, let’s talk about me. Headed off to swim practice last night and Hank, our coach, says we’re going to do some sculling. Now I’ve seen people sculling before, moving about the pool like crawfish, their heads above the surface and a kickboard under their hips, hands stirring the water. I’ve never done it (in the same way that, once, I didn’t focus on using my hip flexors or shortening my stride, while running; it was easier to rely on my engine to haul along the inefficient parts of my body), choosing to focus on longer yards to make myself faster.

So we started sculling, lying on our stomachs and kicking lightly (your legs sink, otherwise). You reach far out in front of you, putting your hands right at the point where, while swimming normally, you catch the water. Keeping your hands out there, you move your arms out and then back in, swiveling your hands to present the pulling (palm) side first out and then towards the center. By slightly angling the pulling surface (towards the back), you can move forward. I don’t think this even sounds easy, so I won’t ask you if it does. In practice, it’s even harder. I’ve grown accustomed, at practice, to leading the fast lane for every set. After this first attempt I was demoted a lane and sent to the back. Hank called me a dunce. The truth is, I barely moved down the lane, resorting, at one point, to gently pushing off the bottom when I thought no one was looking. We moved through two more sculls, one a deep water scull where your hands are still in front of your shoulders but at the point where, in your normal stroke, you’d really start exerting force on the water. Standing up, you sort of look like you would if you hung your arms over a mailbox. This one was easier for me, but I noticed my left arm started getting tired quickly. The last scull mimics the finish of your stroke, where your hand brushes past your thigh on the way out of the water. This one was pretty good too, although the left arm continued to hurt.

Then we tried them one-arm-at-at-time, and I got to remember what learning to swim felt like: flailing desperately in a dangerous, alien environment, one that I could hold onto as well as the open air. My left arm, when I tired to scull with it, moved oddly back and forth, thrashing the water. Have you ever tried writing your name with your non-dominant hand? It looks like all those signatures on the portraits your mom used to hang on the fridge, when you were little. This is what I looked like in the water: a five year-old, and a big one that likes to sink, at that.

When we went back to swimming normally, I could feel the water (with both hands) as more of a medium I could grab, something on which to pull. But the left arm thing wasn’t going away, if anything, it was getting worse.

“Hank,” I asked. “Is it possible I’ve been swimming with only one arm for years? My left arm is getting really tired.”

“That’s what this drill is for,” he answered. “Better start working on those left-sided sculls.” He gave me a long, bemused look, and walked away.

I know what you’re thinking: this sounds suspiciously like working smarter, but it isn’t. I’ve been working easier all these years, just slipping my left hand through the water, the way you feather a kayak paddle to minimize resistance. Building my left side up to the smug comfort of my dominant side is going to take a long time, I think. Sometimes we’re walking the easiest path and we don’t even know it.

Take a Hike

This afternoon, after classes, my friend Blake and I headed out for a short hike in the Vermont foothills, where we live.  Blake got some bad news last night, and needed to take his mind off it.  I’d spent a boring two hours on the trainer (why does ESPN2 carry tractor pulls in the middle of the day on Saturday?) and wanted to reaffirm my existence as a person.  Riding the trainer, since it is simply a way to stay on top of one’s fitness, is empty of any of the pleasures of exercise: the world going by at a more pedestrian pace, the winter’s first snows, a tree of orange leaves.  The pool presents the same problem, really, the sense of one as doomed mouse, slaved to desire and ambition.

It was a short hike, about an hour out and forty minutes back, and our only view came at the turnaround, where we looked out onto a grey and white valley silenced by snow (even this only lasted minutes, as the eerie rumble of a plow rose from somewhere far below us).  We only talked a little, and that was the nervous chatter of two good but not great friends, and it was spiked with poses and irony.  But although each other’s company gave the reason for the hike, we were both out there for ourselves.  As we walked, I found myself falling into that contempletive, dreamy state that long effort brings.  Another friend of mine, named Ben, is a schemer. He likes to dream.  I didn’t realize this until I’d known him for years, and I would respond pragmatically to his grandiose plans.  He’d talk about buying land and real estate and profiting hugely on it, or about opening the first Krazy Kreme franchise in New England.  I used to think that either he was serious or joking, the only two options I could see.  It wasn’t until he answered my pragmatism with “I just like to scheme. I’m not serious. But I’m not joking, either,” that I realized the significance that dreaming held for him.

And then I recognized that I did it too, but I would be disappointed, later, when I realized I hadn’t acted to bring those dreams to fruition.  I had fallen into the results oriented world in which so many of us exist, a world that thinks dreams are foolish, if not acted upon.

As Blake and I walked through the snowy, grand, quiet woods, we each sunk deeper into our thoughts.  I dreamed about the articles I was writing in my mind, about a wild canoe race in Quebec and an access issue here in Windham county.  Blake was, I’m sure, erecting a positive end to his current troubles.  The possibilities seemed so simple, there, walking easily through the snow; all you’d have to do, upon returning home, would be to take the steps one at a time: call the subject, then the magazine, schedule the interviews, write, re-write, discuss, publish, bask.  It was lovely.

This is one of the gifts of training. The body moves repetitively, sometimes for hours, and the brain slowly becomes disinterested in the bland physical.  The world lines up in simple terms, understandable and uncomplicated.  This is all illusion, but don’t be disappointed at the illusion’s dissapation upon your return home.  We only get to live a few of those dreams our active bodies shake free from the darkened corners of our brains.  Enjoy the schemes.

New Year, New You?

Once again, it’s been a while, hardworkers. Cyclocross season finished with a manic but entertaining nationals in Rhode Island, where I started at the back of 170 guys. The highlight of the race had to be the off-camber muddy section just after the first turn. If you’ve never seen close to two hundred cyclists sprawled on the ground in one place, your life is missing something. Winter vacation hit, the kids went home, and I headed off for the kind of school break that ends up being more tiring than relaxing: Portland, New York City, Quebec City for New Year’s (for those of you penciling in Q.C. for next December’s festivities, consider Montreal instead; if you’re going to get stopped and searched by the cheery fellows at U.S. Customs, you might as well go to city that celebrates New Year’s Eve), back to Portland for a few more days of trying to see friends and sleep all at the same time. I came back to Putney exhausted, hungover, and few pounds heavier.

I only ran, during the 19 days I was away from Vermont, as pools were hard to find in the various locales of my vacation, so the training hours were fewer than normal. But instead of returning to training exhausted and discouraged, I found myself enjoying the workouts again this week. Thinking ahead to races this spring and summer, I felt anticipation, instead of the weary dread of last fall. Instead of wrestling with “Why?” I found myself thinking “When do I get to do this again?” Some of it is a month without racing. Most of it is the sense of possibility that a January brings. This is the time of year that you hear a lot of things like “Your body totally replaces its cells in a year (or seven years, or five; there’s a lot of dissenting opinion that associates with questionable science), so what are you going to make your body out of this year?” Also there are resolutions to save receipts, keep the sink free of dishes, get more sleep, quit smoking, et cetera.

When I left for a semester abroad in college, I crowed that I was going to be a totally different person, I would experiment with a new identity. Someone who’d been through the program advised me not to, saying it was too valuable an experience to waste parts of it crafting a new self. As if crafting a new self were possible. A few weeks into the semester I had established myself as…myself. My friend was right: the program was too demanding to think about something as radical as self-redefinition.

So these magazines that line the shelf this month, promising so much but really only lining their pockets on your best intentions, they rile me. Changes in behavior are not easy to accomplish; they require flinty determination and focus. As Annie Dillard says about being a writer: “You have to take a broad-axe to your life.” Luckily, most of us are good at that kind of determination and focus. And in some cases we are too good. Although I returned from my vacation less fit and seeping the excess alcohol of celebrations, I returned refocused. Dipping back into your past identities can remind you of the work you’ve done to efface a new one. I have made one goal as the calendar flipped over, but it’s the somewhat modest goal of keeping a food diary. Getting down to race weight will be easier with some accounting system in place, but other than that I’m just a refreshed version of last year’s Workharder. So here’s my take on it: you can only change one thing about yourself over a long period of time. Sit yourself down at a table or take a long drive, and try to figure out what you’ll work at this year. Meanwhile, ignore the promises shouted at you from magazine covers.

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.

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.

The Games People Play

Yesterday, after lunch, Scrabble Tim found me and asked “What are you up to right now?”

“I was thinking about getting a cup of coffee downtown,” I said.

“Time for a game?”

“Sure,” I replied.

“Great,” he said. “I’ll go and get the stuff from my office.”

For a second I paused, thinking about the odd way he’d framed that last statement: I’ll go and get the stuff.  It carried a whiff of the illicit, especially on our campus, where most of the students take euphemistic “walks in the woods” to consume their drugs of choice. It was a beautiful fall day; we both had work we could be doing; I drove over to his office and left the car running as I waited for him.  He arrived with the scrabble equipment tucked under his jacket: bag of letters, board, wooden trays, chess clock.  We drove down the hill, set up on an outdoor cafe tabel, and played one game.  I was down big early, but came back by playing YODELING on a triple word score.  In the last few moves it was close, but Tim prevailed, playing the phony RA on a triple word.  He took the point from my last letter, I lost it, and the final score turned out 317-315.

It was, as I said, a lovely afternoon here in Southern VT, way too warm for the 9th of November, but a real gift from the people in charge of climate change.  I poked my head into the Captain’s room at 2:30, with my cycling gear on.

“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“I’ve got stuff to do!” he replied.

“You’ve got to ride, man!”

“You’re the second one in an hour,” he frowned. “Tattoo Dave was on the phone just a few minutes ago.”

“O.K,” I said. “It’s not gonna be like this for months.” I ran downstairs and climbed on my cross bike.  Spent a blissful two and a half hours getting covered in mud.  Rode a few of the dirt roads my new bike has made possible. Got lost. Watched as the light grew golden and severe on the green hills.  Pedaled through a stream six inches deep and discovered, to my amazement, that this was possible.  Rode a section of trail a bit too rocky for my bike, and found that if you take it slow and stay off the brakes, you can ride most things.

I was supposed to go to swim practice, but I’d overdone it on the bike. I made dinner and found Tim for another couple games.  Won an ugly game by a hundred points, and then lost another squeaker, 293-290.  Tim and I are evenly matched, but if you put us up against anyone with an ounce of skill, we’d get killed. We end all of our games lamenting, saying “We gotta learn more words.”

Today I’ve got soccer practice at 3:15. Would’ve had it yesterday, too, but my girls have a game on Saturday, so I gave them Thursday off.  They also played the best game of their season on Wednesday, thoroughly dominating a JV team from a big prep school about a half hour south.  They only managed a 2-1 win, but had many more chances than the other team. It was a wet, cold day, the kind of day that seems made for soccer, that recalls deeply green fields under grey British skies.  I changed how we played that day, looking for some more offense, to a 4-3-3 formation.  Usually I hate the 4-3-3, as it gives players the opportunity to stand, static, in their little corner of the field, and yell for the ball.  But it worked. The change freed up the center of the field, and my center forward and midfielder distributed the ball effectively. We went home happy, having beaten a good team on their home field.

I look at these days and I see games, games, games. I play obscure board games with my friends Justin and Elsa, race my bicycle on the weekends, keep my television tuned to ESPN.  What is it with games? As with anything, there’s a dark side and a brighter vision.  Games can be compensatory, an excuse to measure the world and find yourself superior, but most of the time I just find myself having fun.  There are the long hours, of training, of memorizing odd three letter words (Avo, Cwm, and Bel, anyone?), of finding drills to make my girls better soccer players. There are the records, the scoreboards, the times, the medals and the trophies, sometimes the admiration, but these things, although nice, remain things. I’d rather not talk to people about how a race went, unless it went badly and I’ve got a story to tell, but I will remember laying down that YODELING for 83 points, and thinking in that moment, gee, this is fun.

Addiction

I drink a lot of coffee. The students at the school where I teach reflect America’s current bipolarity (thin/fat, left/right, hedonist/ascetic), and the teetotalers say to me, with the sanctimonious tone typical of Vermont’s artist immigrants, “You sure drink a lot of coffee.” When I shrug and keep drinking, they push the issue: “Wouldn’t you rather not rely upon something to make your day possible?” I shrug again and say “There are worse things to be addicted to, don’t you think?”

And it’s true. I could be back in New York City, drinking too much and staying up all night, losing days to hangovers, missing work and embarassing myself, but I’m not. I’m going to sleep early tonight, so I can get up and go to the pool tomorrow, so I can be fresh for tomorrow’s long run. I’m not saying this because I’m pleased with myself. I’m saying this because I’ve clearly traded one addiction for another.

I bought a cyclocross bike recently (see “Newbie Once More”), I thought because I was sick of road riding after a long season on skinny tires. I realized today, as I was scouring Bikereg.com for races that would keep me competing each weekend until New Year’s Day, that I bought the bike so I could keep racing. Isn’t this an addiction? A habit I pursue regardless of near financial ruin and compromised relationships? Of course it is. Like the coffee, though, I would ask “Aren’t there worse things to be addicted to?” I’m in the best shape of my life. If doctors are to be believed, I’m putting years in the bank and managing stress (life, work, life) in a healthier way than self-medication.

It’s the question of why, though, a question that haunts all of us who train hundreds of hours for only, at most, dozens of competitive hours. Why the obsession, the skipped nights out with friends, the fights with loved ones, the weekends spent driving to races instead of hiking, climbing, exploring, or sleeping? I think, for most of us, we’ve traded a more insidious addiction for the ostensibly safer habit of endurance sports. I work with a guy who was a big time bike racer a number of years ago. He was also an alcoholic, and his stories resonate for me: the highs and lows, the constant sense that this thing that you thought was a good friend, an ally in difficult situations, was waiting patiently to devour you whole. He doesn’t drink any more, and he’s a huge role model for the kids, users or non, at our school. I also think of a runner a friend of mine told me about once, a superstar back in the golden days of American running, who rose to mythic proportions and then simply disappeared, leaving a family behind, to resurface twenty years later in Hawaii. “Someone who spends that much time out on the road,” my friend said, “is running from something.”

I hear that, and I’m sure that some of you out there do, too. If I hadn’t bought that cyclocross bike, if my next race were months distant instead of days, I would be out tonight with two of my friends who were going to a movie and then on to “Hit the bars.” I know where that leads. Take away my sense of responsibility to myself, to the hours I’ve already logged, and I will overachieve in another, darker realm. So even though it is an addiction, I’m going to keep drinking the coffee. Aren’t you?

Newbie Once More

Tired of pavement after a long season on the road (kicked things off with a crit on the first weekend of March this year) I bought a cyclocross bike a few weeks ago. I attended a few practices at my local bike shop, got used to carrying my bike on my shoulder, and entered two races over the past weekend: a beginner race and an open race, both on the same day. I walked up to the registration table and handed my USCF card to the slim guy behind it.

“I’m doing the beginner race and the A/B race,” I said.

“O.K. You’re insane,” the guy said, handing me my two numbers and my card. “Good luck.”

Here’s the thing about starting over: you never know what you’re getting into. I found myself, driving to the races Sunday morning, thinking back through a series of firsts: marathon, 10K, 1/2 marathon, triathlon, 1/2 iron, criterium, road race, time trial, professional triathlon. And now cyclocross. What mistakes would I make this time? Each time I signed up for a new event, I rolled my bike, walked, or swam to the start quietly, listening to the confident chatter of the guys nearby. I’ve put my number on the wrong side of my jersey in criteriums, not been able to figure out where to put that number on my bike or body before triathlons, and wondered why that gaunt guy near the start of the D.C. Marathon was rubbing what looked like vaseline onto his nipples.

As I looked out at the course on Sunday, it looked hopelessly byzantine: hundreds of yards of police tape, cordoning off what would be a huge crime scene.  I figured I would just follow the guy in front of me and it would be fine.  We all lined up and listened to the marshall explain the odd way a cyclocross race is conducted: the marshalls clock the first lap, then divide the race time (half an hour, fifty minutes, etc…) by that first lap.  Our first lap took about seven and a half minutes, so when I came through the arrive/depart line there was a little card: 3.

Cyclocross is punishing.  No one goes fast enough to give any kind of drafting effect, and there are too many corners to follow someone’s wheel even if you were going above fifteen miles an hour.  There are steep hills you must carry your bike up, sand pits that glom on to your wheel, little barriers that try to nip the toes of your foot as you leap over them .  It’s like a time tria, but one in which you’re constantly getting on and off your bike, and trying to power over humps of steep dirt.

I was somewhat ready, but by the middle of the last lap, I was experiencing the kind of sensations that usually kick in ninety minutes deep into an Olympic distance triathlon: a hot heaviness in my thighs, and nausea.  But I realized I was close to the front.  Cyclocross is also confusing.  Since people can’t hang on, the way they would in a crit, dropped racers get lapped all the time.  But I saw this guy with a blue jersey who’d been leading the whole race, not too far ahead.  I caught him on a straightaway, while he was gasping and groaning about a cramp.  He swerved into me as I passed him and, when I asked “Are you trying to put us both out of the race?” he said “Yes.” Some people will try to tell you that cyclocross is less cutthroat than road racing.  Don’t listen to them.

I left him behind and got over the last barrier, through the last sand pit.  A kid–I thought he was a junior, actually, as they were on the course the same time as us–almost caught me, and I was amazed that a fifteen year old posted second.  But there I was: first place in my first cyclocross race.

The open race was, of course, a totally different affair.  It was twice as long, much faster, and I finished in about 30th place.  But, result or no, I’m hooked.  New things are crucial, especially in this endurance sport of ours, where value is placed on long periods of a repeated activity.  We do not have the grace of the diving catch, the last second touchdown, the magic of the game-changing play.  We make those adjustments in training, and our races are simply the displaying of training, plus or minus a few seconds from mental toughness (or weakness) and the desire to catch that guy ten yards down the road.  So get out there and do something new this weekend.  Your happiness will thank you.

The pleasure of simply running

I was not always an endurance athlete. Like most boys raised in the Northeast, I played a variety of sports growing up: baseball, soccer, basketball, hockey for one year, until my parents decreed the sport too violent. I never played football for the same reason. They all fell away one year, the fall of eighth grade, except for soccer. The World Cup was just under two years distant that fall, the fall of 1992, and my friend Tom Calihan and I had just watched the U.S. National Team upset England 2-0 before falling, narrowly, to Germany 4-3. That was the terrifying German side of Rudi Voeller, Jurgen Klinsmann, and the hard, unflappable Lothar Matthaus, who played in the central defense. We were good, the United States. We belonged. I gave up my other sports and focused solely on soccer, on the solitary, pressure-heavy position of goalkeeper. Now, of course, it seems obvious I fell into that position; those who are endurance-obsessed at heart may enjoy the company of teams, but at some point they simply want to be left alone.

I threw myself into soccer with a singularity that, once again, could have presaged my current avocation. I played indoor soccer in the winter, club soccer in the spring, summers that I wasn’t away at camp I played on the Bay State team. It was all practice, however, for fall. Fall, of course, is when you played with your team, your high school team. I hated high school just as much as any other confused, awkward, hormonal kid. But I still loved playing for my high school. I felt, for those two hours of the game, that I could do something for my town’s position in the world.

When I went to college (and I was obsessed, and good enough, to make playing in college a priority), I felt the same way, although now I was playing for a name, and a prestigious, august name at that. The fields were lovely, immaculate, kept lush and green by a team of men whose job was simply to keep the fields and athletic facilities in good working order. I felt that our good performance would somehow justify the labor of those guys who, I now know, would have been out there if we never won a coin flip. I played because I loved it, but I also played because I had something to prove.

So it is fall to which I connect truly important sport, even though now my crucial season falls between June and August. The crispness of the autumn air, the light breezes, the temperatures that let your body warm up to something comfortable, rather than something sweat-soaked. The days themselves seem to say get out there and compete; you don’t have much time. And, truly, the fall seems shorter than the other seasons, more desperate, as winter lurks in each fallen leaf and northwest blow. So now, even though I’m in my off-season, transitioning, thinking about races in May and June and how much work I need to do to bring my 10K down to 33:00, my 1500 swim down to 18:00, my body wants competition; it wants a bright cool day in October on which I can win ball after ball from some eternal opposing team. It wants the pleasure of work and play rolled into a couple of hours outdoors.

And I’ve found that solace, this fall, in running. Sure there’s Masters practice next week, and I’ve got cyclocross races through mid-December, but I’m having fun on my feet. Today, after classes and before soccer practice with the girls’ team I coach, I caught a sweet 45 minutes, with only my lungs and thoughts. For fun, I did six 800 meter repeats, enjoying the feel of my legs turning over quickly. I saw my first good orange tree on a run, a few days ago, and it’s still warm enough that I can go in shorts and tank, something, with cycling’s windchill, that’s impossible on a bike. I can smell leaves mulching themselves in the ditch on the side of the road, and that odor of woodsmoke that is the source of fall’s poignancy. I go on runs, now, without heart rate monitor, simply enjoying the time, the air, the light. Although I’ve got no important races, my body wants me to go, and running is the answer.