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Now, There’s A Question.

Saturday morning I took a step that was far from monumental, but certainly not a trivial one on life’s forced march.  To be specific, I showed up for the Saturday morning shop ride in my new town, not knowing a soul.

For the record, I’m not a particularly shy person.  Okay, I’m not exactly Zig Zigler, but I can work a crowd when need be.  I’ve gotten on stage in front of a lot of people and said what needed to be said.  As part of my job, there isn’t a week that goes by that doesn’t have me shaking some new hands.  Most of the time I enjoy it, and when I don’t, it’s usually because someone has passed the threshold of tolerable.  Which is all to say that I don’t shudder at plopping myself into a new group and seeing what happens, unless, of course, those people are fellow cyclists and I have reason that they may be hard core ones, at that.

So, Saturday at 5:45 am, I’m wide awake.  My alarm hasn’t gone off yet, and actually won’t for another 13 hours, because I’ve fat-fingered it to wake me at 6:45 PM for the shop ride that starts at 8:00 — in the morning.  Doesn’t matter.  I’m awake.  I’m awake because of the shop ride starting in a couple of hours.  The one that appears to be the polar-opposite of the coffee-ride.  The one that is described as warming up for the first ten miles at a pace around twenty, and then getting ’sporty’ for the next 35 or so, before cooling down on the way back to the shop.  For the record, I don’t usually warm up at twenty miles per hour.

Anyway, since I moved to Texas I’ve been in need of an adjustment.

See, in St. Louis, where I’ve been riding for the past three years, racing is often like a barroom knife-fight.  First there’s beer, then there’s music, and everybody’s having a fine old time, until somebody throws down and somebody else brings out a blade, and things get complicated.  In cycling parlance, you roll out in a group start and everybody behaves themselves for the first few miles until the legs are warmed up and people have picked their desired spot in the peloton, and then some angry hill jumps in your way and it’s nothing but double-digit grades for a quarter mile, or maybe a half, and any civility is quickly lost.  A few slashes of the pedals later, the peloton is a joke, blasted to pieces, while every rider is trying to get back under max heart rate while looking for a grupetto to work in with for the long slog home.  All the while, you’re wondering exactly which gear-ring you should have brought: 26? Maybe even 27.  But you’ve got a 25 and your quads have been slashed.  Good luck.

Texas, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether.  First, we’re talking about North Texas, about 3 hours removed from Hill Country, where Lance lives, and where the hills are quite respectable.  But that’s there, and there isn’t here.  Here, we’ve got flats, and we’ve got rollers.  And the rollers are relatively flat.  Sounds easy, huh?  Well, it isn’t — because it’s just faster.  At the Hotter’n Hell Hundred in August, the Cat 4 race averaged 25 mph.  In St. Louis, we’d been happy notching a 5 hour century in a relatively flat area.  In Texas, you shave an hour off of that.

So I arrive at Mad Duck Cycles in Grapevine, Texas at 7:40 and there are a handful of cars, with guys going through the motions of getting the gear ready.  I parked near them and did the same, eyeballing sideways gauge what kind of intensity the workout was likely to be.  I was immediately intimidated at the apparent talent.

On the one hand, I told myself, as a Cat 4 racer I shouldn’t be too worried about embarrassing myself on a shop ride.  On the other hand, the small group that had assembled thus far lacked a single leisure-suit-Larry rider.  Everybody looked lean and experienced.  As I prepped the bike, pumped the tires, and worried, additional cars rolled in, and the group-size swelled modestly.  Once I’d buttoned things up, I introduced myself around, and was at least comforted that people were open and welcoming to the Newbie.

On the other hand, I quickly learned that the group would be led out by at least one Pro 1/2 rider, and a nice gentleman who just happened to finish second in the 45+ Master’s category at last week’s Texas State Championship races.  He mentioned he’d gone down there needing to pick up 7 more points for the season, and did it.  I didn’t mention that I couldn’t recall ever having won any points.  Then there was the gentleman who said he didn’t race, ever, but he was a personal sports trainer and regularly notched 10,ooo miles a year.  And so on.

Cutting to the chase, I got all the workout I wanted, and then some.  I came back sore after throwing in a shortened 35-mile loop, due to family commitments. And, encouragingly, I found the shop ride that’s virtually guaranteed to get me used to the Texas tempo and take my racing to a higher level.

And maybe that’s where it all starts.  The “why” of cycling.

The answer, for me, is the timelessness of it.  The fact that for a guy moving from his mid 40s to his late ones, I don’t face the prospect of having to slow down.  This year I rode better than the one before, and I can say that for each year for the past several.  Next year, I fully expect to be a better racer at 48 than I was at 47.  And this continual progression wasn’t built on a lifetime of participation in the sport.  In fact, it wasn’t until my mid 30s that I started cycling, and that was on a $200 Raleigh hybrid with a baby-seat mounted on the back.  Eventually I trashed that rig riding trails, to the point that one day the baby seat came loose and dragged behind me as I rode.  Fortunately, the baby wasn’t onboard.  Nowadays, I can get thoroughly pasted in a good race or a tough shop-ride, but it isn’t lost on me that when I’m just rolling around putting in solo miles, I’m almost never passed by another rider.  Once you’ve gotten to the point where you’re buying annual USACycling licenses, even at the entry-level, you’re already riding more and faster than 95% of people who put their butt on a bike seat.  Catting up just raises that percentage.

And it’s not hard to find examples of guys and gals still hitting new personal-bests into their 50s. French Pro Jeannie Longo regularly trounces young ladies her daughter’s age.  Dave Wiens plays to the spoiler each year to Lance Armstrong in the Leadville 100, notwithstanding Wiens’ almost a decade and a half higher age.  I find these folks just as heroic, and even more inspiring, than all those twenty-somethings sitting on wheels in the pro peloton.

So next Saturday I’ll probably wake up early and nervous, but less so than last week, and I’ll cruise down to the shop and get ready for another loop at the edge of my capability, and I expect I’ll hang in just a little better than I did last time.