December 11, 2008 · Filed under Cycling
I didn’t get a chance to write very much about cycling this year, which is one of my favorite topics when it comes to this blog. 
It’s been quite a year for cycling in our household, with both Michelle and I buying our dream bikes and, more importantly, us getting out on them much more frequently and moving towards something that resembles fitness.
But the professional cycling season was something of a mixed bag. Doping continues to cast a huge shadow over the sport and, while the nature of the racing seems to point towards the sport getting cleaner, the emergence of the blood-booster CERA seemed to make it seem just as dirty as it has ever been. Add to that the re-emergence of riders who have tested positive (Alexander Vinokourov, Floyd Landis, Tyler Hamilton), admitted to involvement with doping (Ivan Basso), and were suspected to be doping despite any actual proof (Lance Armstrong) and it paints cycling into a corner that I don’t believe it should be in.
The bottom line is that cycling is doing much more than any other sport to clean up, and – whether or not these guys have the right to return (they probably do) – the sport and the fight against doping is complicated considerably by their involvement.
Drugs also spoiled what I look back on as the best ride of the year: Frank Schleck’s ride up Hautacam during the Tour de France. He happens to be my favorite rider, and not just because we almost have the same name. It’s also not just because he’s tall and lanky like me. It’s because he rides his bike beautifully, races intelligently and aggressively, and is a really nice guy. But those other things don’t hurt. It also helps that he rides my bike.
Team CSC played the perfect tactical game over the day’s earlier passes to demolish the race and set up their leaders to take the lead in the race. Jen’s Voigt set a brutal pace over the Col de Tourmalet (Michelle’s and my favorite pass) to shell some of the main contenders off the back before the final climb even started. Meanwhile, they had sent Fabian Cancellara up the road in a break which was caught by the Voigt group in the valley between the Tourmalet and Hautacam. Together, they set a brutal pace that put pre-race favorites Damiano Cunego and Alejandro Valverde out of contention for good.
Then, at the base of the climb, Frank Schleck attacked and did a magnificent ride to get within 1 second of the Yellow Jersey. Disappointingly, his breakaway companions included eventual stage winner Leonardo Piepoli who later tested positive for CERA. It’s a perfect example of how drugs damage a sport: Frank Schleck would have won the stage and taken the Yellow Jersey but was cheated out of that experience by a rider who was on a blood booster. It breaks my heart that my boy was not given the stage win, but watching that stage was the most exciting moment of racing of the year.
December 6, 2008 · Filed under Cycling, Entertainment
Cycling is a funny sport. Funny not so much in the way that it’s hilarious; it’s funny in the sense that suffering is a badge of honor. 
Greg LeMond once said, “It never gets easier, you just go faster.”
I moved to Seattle a few months before Michelle did. The first weekend I was here with a bike, I headed down a route that I’d driven with the car and veered off onto a road that looked “interesting”. (To cyclists, “interesting” means steep.) It was a one-way street (the wrong way) heading up Queen Anne. I figured, “one-way-street, schmone-way-schtreet”. As it turns out, this isn’t a one-way street because it’s better for the flow of traffic. It’s a one-way street because if a car tries to drive up it in wet conditions (this happens in Seattle more than you’d think), it will spin out and not make it up the hill. It’s somewhere around the 35% mark. Traffic is allowed down, but not up. When I drove down it in my car, my bumper scraped the road as I reached but bottom. I haven’t ridden it since, but it’s the only hill I’ve ever ridden a bike up where, when I got to the top, 2.2 km later, I got off my bike and laid in a stranger’s front yard for a while.
The point is, I will ride it again. That’s because cyclists love to hurt. A friend of mine turned Pro for Jelly Belly a few years back and at one point I was talking to him and I said, “It’s hard to attack when you hurt so much.” His response was, “It doesn’t matter how much you hurt. You just have to go harder.”
I think at a primordial level, cycling is about the locus of control. In Seattle, people never, EVER jay-walk. But it’s one of the most innovative cities in the world, which means we have innovative thinkers who don’t follow the “rules” (you can’t be innovative if you follow the rules. Einstein said something about this.) Obeying the law and breaking rules are not mutually-exclusive. It’s about the ability to choose.
Cyclists love to suffer because they choose to suffer. Because it challenges your mind. As Jens Voigt – my all-time favorite cyclist – says, “When you go hard, your body says, ‘STOP!’ and your mind says, ‘BODY, SHUT UP!’ And, sometimes it works! And then you GO!”
Cycling is about the glory of suffering, which is something few other sports can say. The men and women that race the Tours de France (yes, there’s a women’s race and no, they don’t play it on Versus, and yes, it’s every bit as challenging and exciting as the men’s race) suffer for 21 days, 6 hours a day, over the most challenging terrain and awful weather you can imagine – and they race hard. Cyclists don’t refer to their legs and “their legs”. Cyclists refer to “the legs” as though they are a separate entity from themselves. Something to tame but not to control. We can control our mind, but we can not control our legs.
Cycling folklore speaks of “The Man With the Hammer”. He is a man who lurks around any corner and will unexpectedly bang you on the neck with his hammer. He will cause you to go from smoothly spinning your pedals to pedaling squares and putting your bike in “reverse”. The Man With the Hammer strikes when your mind takes more from legs than your body can provide.
Most endurance sports refer to this as “bonking” but in cycling this is out of your control. For a sport that is centered around forcing your body through suffering unlike any other sport, this an interesting paradox. Cyclists can avoid him temporarily, but all cyclist are hit by him at one point or another in their careers. Eddy Merckx on the climb to Pra-Loup when he lost the Yellow Jersey to Bernard Thevenet. Bernard Hinault when he lost the Yellow Jersy to Greg Lemond at Serre Chevalier. Lance Armstrong when he nearly lost the 2000 Tour on the Col de la Joux-Plane.
So, next year, when the weather is warm and the roads are dry, and when my morale is high, I will ride up the 35% ramps of 4th Street to the top of Queen Anne and I will not climb off my bike at the top and rest in a stranger’s yard because – I am quite certain – the Man With The Hammer will be waiting on another hill. The next hill.
