Wabbit or Coyote?

photo courtesy of teamJVA.com

I've heard numerous references to this article recently. The point taken is that we all rise a little with some healthy competition. Setting the bar too high can break one's spirit or even worse harm one's physical health. But reaching 2% seems to be the magic threshold. 3% I guess turns the Rabbit into a Road Runner and nobody wants to be Wile E Coyote.

In the movie, For Love Of The Game, Kevin Costner shuts out distractions by reminding himself to "Clear the mechanism". He then is able to focus solely on the task at hand as a (fictional) MLB starting pitcher.

The last 6-months I've worked through more PT with the hip to allow myself to get back on the bike for more than just easy pleasure rides. However, the motivation comes in irregular flurries.

Putting myself out there to "race" is humbling as I know what I need to do to compete and I also know what I am doing. The two are not intersecting.

A month ago the Newmaforma packed up and went to the first cyclocross race of the season. I rode around a tree with G instead of properly warming up. I had a mechanical and only rode 10-minutes of the 45-minute race due to previously working on my bike while playing with G in the garage and not focusing on tightening the parts correctly. The thing is, he didn't care. He got to ride the kiddie race, ride around a tree for an hour and eat a Nutella waffle.

The next chance to race rolls around and I'm off to it alone. All I need to do is finish to better my record of anonymity. I try to "clear the mechanism" and just ride the course consistently each lap. I want to improve on the technical hiccups and be smooth through the parts I am competent at. I'm alone off the back of the group quickly so focusing on the mechanics is really the only thing I can do. What I can't do is let my mind wander. If I do that I'll end up in the parking lot, quitting.

But competitive people like to have a gauge. Some want to compare themselves to others or to what could have been if this day was 5 years ago, 10 years ago or more. So by averaging my lap splits and that of other categories and being the math genius I am, I figure I would have finished:

@5th in the beginner mens race
@Last, 5-minutes behind the actual last placed rider in the Master A group
@72nd, but not last, in the Master B's
@35th in the Master C's.

What is more scary is that while I would have completely dominated the Junior Girls race, I would have been a mere 5th against the Junior boys.

Ten of the age 35+ women would have beat me. And even though I don't weigh 200 lbs but am still 25 lbs heavy, I would have managed 12th in the Clydesdale stampede. But worst of all, I would have been smoked by two old men in the 60+ race.

So all that just confirms to me that a 2% improvement is far less important than the half of the battle of simply showing up. Chasing anything at this point will only get me to ride myself off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote or as frustrated and empty handed as Elmer Fudd chasing Bugs Bunny.

Suspect Summer Lessons

G has been concerned about the fact that when we get to the park in the evening it gets dark sooner and he can't complete his routine round of adventures before dinner. Lately, it's dark by the time we make it home.

Two years ago we could do a quick lap of the park before dinner in the boat bike. Last year he was wise to the play structures and mastered climbing the ladder, spinning on the tire swing and drinking from the fountain. This year he graduated from tricycle to Scuut bike and discovered the paved path that descends into a gully and the lower part of the park.

The gully has a patch of trees and steep grassy slopes. After descending the paved path at full speed (10mph) wearing Crocks, no socks and no covering over knees, elbows or hands, I decided he needed to learn how to crash a little before he fully ate it and traumatized himself with major road rash his first time fighting gravity.

He dubbed the gully "Thunder-dome" and that's where we went nightly with the ambition of a lightly skinned knee or elbow.He loved coasting down the hills, around the trees and walking up the other side of the ravine a little further each night made for some fast descents on his plywood bike. Until he ate it.

I was so proud of him. He bounced down the hill using his feet to center himself like pontoons as he built up speed. Finally, near the very bottom, at maximum velocity he hit one last bump that shook him enough to want to stop. So he did. He put his feet straight out in front of himself and cartwheeled over the bike, flipped a couple times as the bike landed on top of him and stopped in a haze of dust.

I rolled down the hill and jumped off my bike to pick him up and dust him off. By the time I got there his shock turned to tears. I checked him over to make sure he didn't break anything. He hadn't even scratched himself. We talked about what happened and I convinced him to laugh about his "rad" crash.

A week or two passed and his confidence was restored. Full speed descents into Thunder-dome were a mere warm up. Yet after only a handful of rides through the trees he would stop and look at the purple sky and ask why it was getting dark. His astonishment at my explanation of the sun setting behind the hills summed up the look on his face as crying bullshit to my answer. Explaining the solar system and orbits only furthered his conviction that I was full of it.

He'd stomp back up the hill straddling his bike for one last free-ride descent before I'd carry him home on my shoulders, pushing my bike and his, strapped to mine with our helmets buckled through both bikes. He'd point to the moon and call out stars or airplanes or street lights. Explaining to me that street lights stay on at night because they are not behind hills and that airplanes fly over hills but that we ride our bikes down hills. And stars are just street lights on roads really far away.

Road Trip

Scott needed to go to Canada for a wedding. He was home from U.C. Berkeley the same summer I was figuring out what to do with myself at all. The previous autumn I returned from Belgium and found myself in Portland reconsidering my life's ambition. By the following spring I had been through Mono, Pneumonia, a failed attempt to get fit for the coming Cycling season, a broken foot, simultaneous day and night shift warehouse jobs, and an asleep-at-the-wheel collision in my mom's car. Emphatically finalizing the destruction of all my morale and financially wiping me out completely.

So I returned to friends and the familiar comfort of free-couch-surfing, inland of California's Central Coast. Scott's option of being in a wedding was his most vexing immediate decision. His dilemma was that he had no car. When I offered mine and the scenerio of dropping me off in Portland to meet up with a girl I met the previous winter, amid my failed attempt of residency; he committed.

The girl and I dated a couple of times before I dismissed the northwest and returned to the bird farm of San Juan Bautista to keep it a-float while the Bird Man took his family on a cross country vacation. Bird farming had in the past, been an ideal flexible, part time job for an aspiring bike racer. Feeding, cleaning, shoveling and whole-sale delivering of birds was less my forte than Cycling and Cycling had broken me. The bird business made sense as a part of the whole equation, but was hugely depressing as a stand alone reality. I was free falling in a void of ambition and being a bird farmer was not helping me fly out of my dispair. A do-over in Oregon, even for a few days might be what I needed to reset my clock. I hoped.

The details were decided that we would need nearly as many cigars as gallons of gas. And a third contributor to bring the total cost down to something two penniless twenty-somethings could afford. I opted for hitch-hikers but was over ruled. My Honda Civic, purchased from the original owner, a large, single, Samoan women, had low miles considering the wear. Given my palmares and lack of SAT scores, the car was a shining asset and often 2nd home. The driver's seat was beat down and torn apart like a bike racer who had given up. The rest of the interior was mint condition 1982 blue-vinyl. The car needed suspension replaced on the driver side and a new carburetor. The body was in good shape but the paint, well, the paint was blue oxidized crap.

Customization's I made included a melted, improvised ashtray on the driver's side view mirror fairing from extinguishing cigars and a Candle Box cassette stuck in the tape player. This was 1995. Besides the car, I owned one pair of shoes, 3 shirts, 2 pair of shorts and one pair of Gap Khaki pants (for formal events), a sleeping bag and the complete REM catalog to date on CD but no CD player. I owned 3 books; On The Road, The Subterraneans and The Bible. As well as two suitcases stuffed full of cycling clothing for any season or weather condition. I had zero continuity.

Stu was happy for me to go, mostly because it got my free-loading apathy out of his house for a week. The twist was him choosing on the fly to go with us. Perhaps for bonus marital credits as it gave Doreen some serious solitude. Stu, 12 years my senior had been (and still is) a mentor and sounding board since I was 17. He was a Butcher by trade and as good if not better than any old, cigarillo chewing drunk Belgian at motor-pacing bike racers as well. For the trip, Stu would be let off in Tacoma where his brother would pick him up. A week later he would fly home. Scott would connect again with me in Portland after witnessing the nuptials.

During the drive up, I don't remember much other than Stu naming each song on the radio within the first three chords, and Scott reciting literature and grinding into me with each quote that I needed to get myself together and go to college. The Civic had no A/C so the oven hot wind pounded through the car as we each yelled whatever needed to be said. I'm not even sure how much I drove.

Portland was the briefest of rest stops for my companions as I quickly stranded myself so as to guilt my brother into let me into his house. The plea of, "I have no where to go and no way to get there" was enough to squat in his basement for a few days. My plan was to shower, call the girl and hope for the best.

Unfortunately Scott and Stu drove off with my shoes still in the car. Knowing that without shoes I would likely hang around the house longer, my brother hurried me into his car and chased down my friends at the Chevron station on Powell Blvd, half way between I-205 and the Ross Island Bridge.

The week passed quickly. The girl kept me entertained with a trip to the coast, walks in Forrest Park, a Toad The Wet Sprocket concert in Washington park and dinner with her parents one evening. The blunt questioning of her father from across the dinner table, surmising my sub-standard state, "So, you work on a bird farm?" confirmed my suspicion that I was likely the lowliest rescue his daughter had ever brought home. At the very least, I could not disappoint.

Four days on, I sat on my parents porch on a Monday, watching cars drive past on the wooded, rural highway. I don't recall if it was under the guise of wanting to visit them or if I had maximized my welcome at my brothers house prematurely as to why I was there. Regardless, by the time Scott drove up the gravel driveway, I was well into the 3rd Cuban Cigar of the dozen I brought home from Europe and stashed for special occasions. His tardiness didn't bother me so much as the fear I would still be sitting on the porch when my parents returned from their days work.

Scott had been held up at the border. Apparently when you are 22, a resident of California but driving a car registered in Oregon to your "friend" and there is no registration document in the vehicle, you don't profile well and your mother country isn't convinced they want you back. Fortunately for me, the 6 hour drive once he was released, to where he picked me up, allowed him to process and see the experience as a valuable life lesson and not want to choke me to death. But I still sensed some tension.

Nothing calms the nerves like a good Cuban and we were back on the road before dinner. Again, much of the drive is long lost from memory, but what is still vivid is the re-kindled motivation that comes with a goal. The optimistic, youthful conversations of a future you know nothing about, the glowing red light behind the ash of a cigar mid-drag, and the almost cooling night air in August on I-5 at 75 mph sometime after midnight.