Today's ride was more epic than usual, including some punishing uphill sprints against the formidable Bruce, a rough 300-400 watt stretch at the end, and ropes of snot half a foot long. However none of that compared to the grueling test of endurance I'm undertaking right now, by trying to even get started on my honey-do list before rolling over to the shop at 2:00.
Compounding this is the stream of youtube cycling clips I've been glued to for the last hour, daydreaming of racing the forgotten days and faraway places where a bicycle race seemed to mean something. Today? You jump at the sound of carbon skittering across pavement, and accidentally solo for the win at the Podunkville All-Flat All-Oval All-Out Hammerama, while eighty other clueless men in tight clothes on bikes too fast for them cuss you, hard. Your prize? A pair of plain white Defeet socks - and of course the adulation of the four fans-- as they goggle at you, they think "His palmares - it's showing through his shorts!" Or maybe "What a nerd, nice Racing Jackets, you Crash-5 dipshit!"
But then, and there, things must have been different. You would have lined up next to bitter, sinewy men with thousand-yard stares-- men with large calves and leathery faces and intimacy problems due to a habit of leaving women in the early morning without saying goodbye. You and these oddly wound clockwork men would grind for hours over ruined roads, over real mountains - so steep you might fall over going up, you might fall off going down. You cut through villages, shut down for the day because the significance of the race's outcome outweighs any single day's happenings. The long ribbon of riders shrinks to a gnarled vein of the most hardened, still punishing themselves at the front after the others have admitted their preference for comfort over glory. The selection reduces, from sugar water to Laffy Taffy to hard shit-tasting tar. And the shittiest-tasting, hardest tar man beats his bike and his legs into submission, and then he beats the others into submission, and even the fans with things on their heads and foam hands look at his face and admit that he is the finest in the world at the bizarre, otherwordly discipline of self-suffering.
If I ever met Greg Lemond face-to-face, I would have to give up racing rather than continue knowing that I could never make a race what he could make it. Who the fuck is Tom Boonen? I want Greg back.
