PANTANI 2017 - February 12th, 10 AM.

Pantani 2017 will be February 12th, 2017, which if you're doing the math, is 2 months from yesterday.

Meaning that if you're on a 2-month training plan to try to pull your pie-loving fat ass together before game time, you're already 1 day behind.  1 day behind AND COUNTING.

At this rate, I'm going to suck it, badly, at Pantani this year.  Maybe, indeed, the first year I'll DNF, or at least my slowest loop ever - and that's really saying something since last year I managed to finish it with a foul, oozy case of Shingles.

Because Shingles is one thing; obesity is quite another, and I'm soft right now.  Soft as that gelatinous stuff that seems to pour out of the bottom of the creamed turkey leftovers when you leave them in the fridge too long and then eat them anyway.  Soft like that part-timer, has-been Gordon Wadsworth's 42-tooth cog on his 11-speed cassette that he hasn't had the balls to bring to Pantani in 3 years.  Soft like a tater tot, which, no bullshit, I am eating right now at 10:45 in the morning.  This is not good.

Like everything I don't dig about myself, this valley of non-fitness I'm currently wallowing in is only accentuated by the reality that there are so many truly hard people out there right now, already training, already having cranked out Pantani or a fragment of it before the first flake of snow has even brushed the top of Brokenback.  Social media, or at least all the text messages I get from McCardell, are a healthy way for me to see what other people are riding, how fast they're doing it, and loathe myself.

You people disgust me.  And by "you people" I mean the me that I see in the mirror after I look at your strava data.



And maybe that's ok.  Someone around here needs a serious, hard kick in the ass, and it's not the dog.

I've got to get my shit together.  I've got to get focused.  We all know how this one ends -  one day, you're just puttering along, junk miles and pudgy and content to not give a shit about it, and the next day you're diagnosed with Diabietes, Hyptertension, Manic Depression, Gout, and you get dropped on the way up Mechums hill on a pretty Tuesday evening, landing you straight in the hospital with a laundry list of shit that needs fixed, pronto, and no health insurance.  The speed with which you can smack into the bottom of the barrel of life is directly disproportionate to your actual speed on the bike.  Just look at yourself.

What would Pantani say if he could see you now?
What did Pantani actually say, for that matter, when he locked himself in a hotel room by the sea, broke all the furniture, and drank all of that cocaine?

You read that right.  He DRANK it.  And he looked in the mirror, gave it a half-smile through the tears, and said out loud to whoever that was who he'd become that he couldn't recognize anymore:

MOTHER OF GOD.  Am I too late?

Up up up.