The Long Arm of the Laws of Physics - AKA Your Chronological-Pantani Guide

Pantani 1, 2005ish

You can run but you can't hide.

And let's be honest, you probably shouldn't even be running in the first place.  I'm not sure if you've noticed, but foot travel is miserable, awful stuff, a leading cause of overuse injury in former athletes such as ourselves.  Which only makes my point for me: the truth always comes out.

Sunday, February 11th, 10:00 AM.  Delusions of grandeur.  They're so easy to let seep in.  On the drive out Earlysville rd on Sunday morning, quite possibly in a wide open deluge, it'll be tempting to imagine yourself mixing it up in the top 10 of Il Pantani Ride on Simmons gap, maybe taking a surge or two near the front, and then dropping everyone on the way down Wyatt Mtn with your imeccable handling skills, never to see them again. That's a solo attack, on a descent, from 21 miles out, and in your daydream you make it stick.

But somewhere along the way, be it the first car you see when you pull into the possibly submerged parking area or when you finally hit the wall on brokenback, physics eventually sets in.  It Always Does.  You can't hide from it.  No matter how much time you might have spent pretending you don't weigh 190 lbs, or how many half-hearted intervals you did on your indoor trainer that doesn't quite fit, or how often you considered trying to get up tomorrow morning and do a big ride before work, the truth comes out.

10:30 AM - Hopefully, that happens early.  Ideally, you pull into the parking lot, and it all goes up in smoke right away as you watch carloads of skinny, fit, racers put on a shocking lack of clothes, grab a single water bottle, and head for the start line.  They look like super-fit extras from a Lance Armstrong documentary.  Best case scenario - you immediately have a gut check - like, right in the actual gut, which is poking out of your bibs around the edges like some kind of small alien.  These guys are here to race, like, real, fast wide open racing - and you're just...not.  I mean, you'll have fun, don't get me wrong, but you quickly have the personal reckoning necessary for your own survival - right there in the parking lot - and you make a promise to yourself and your legs that you will let them go down markwood at the start.  Do not chase them.

11 AM.  Sadly, like a lot of promises you make to yourself, this one doesn't hold up either.  The gun goes off and the pace ramps up and for whatever reason, you find yourself on the 6 of some emaciated racer-type that looks like he's been skipping dinner to do intervals for about the last 18 months or so.  He also looks, from the back, like he might be 16 years old. FUCK THAT CHILD.  You can hang with these kids.
So you do.
For 3 miles.

11:07 AM.  Before you notice it, there's a gentle rise - this is arguably the first real hill, and it's barely that - but some asshole at the front has stood up, mashed a gear or two, and the elastic has snapped somewhere  about 5 bikes in front of you.  How has this happened already?  You don't even have your queue sheet out yet.  There's panic all around you as riders scramble to make it across the gap, on the first hill, and you're not even 10 minutes in yet.  You bury yourself, but you don't make it either, and you settle into what might be called "chase 3" were such a commentary taking place, which it is certainly not.  A left turn across traffic, an insane amount of drafting and hammering, and you finally hit the first bit of gravel, and holy shit, you are popped, and it's bad.  You look at your odometer, and it reads 7 miles.  It's real bad.

11:15 - 12:30ish.  For the next several minutes, you weave in and out of consciousness and hallucination, on gravel, pavement, and mud-road, at times with others and at times alone, wondering where in the world you possibly are.  Thunder cracks somewhere to your left, and it starts to drizzle.

1 PM.  Near the top of a terrible long climb, someone in Camo pants and a pink Hello Kitty sleeveless romper hands you a jar of what might be bourbon, and you suck at it, greedily, like a baby goat.  What will be will be, you tell yourself, the idea of your own fate being sealed is actually comforting for you at this moment.  This is actually the last time you look at your watch.

Sometime after 1 PM.  Down, down down from there - into the abyss that is Bacon Hollow, and down the pavement even farther, looking for that right-hander, harbinger of doom - the hell climb sign for brokenback mtn rd.  You see it, turn right, hit a 20% gravel wall, and immediately you cramp and everything goes red, and the walls along the side of the road start to collapse around you.  You're pretty sure you black out.

2 PM?  Here, we cut to a montage - 10 minutes or so of you rolling around in the mud and leaves on the edge of the road, down into the gutter, spliced to footage of your childhood, riding bikes in the yard and actually enjoying it, that time you ate all of your halloween candy the first night and threw up in your bed, your first real heartbreak, the birth of your first child, and back to you, rolling around.  You're actually downhill from where you dropped your bike now, fully in the gutter, and squealing like some kind of injured, wild animal.  Oliver Stone-like cut to Piggy in the chase scene from Lord Of The Flies...and, you black out again.


Time and date: Unknown.  A while later, farther up the mountain, and you regain consciousness just long enough to realize people are staring at you while you are having some kind of grown-man tantrum.  It's unclear how you've progressed up the mountain as far as you have, but it appears you've taken your front wheel off and thrown it off the road, down into the woods, and someone you recognize has actually gone down there, picked it up for you, and is trying to convince you to put it back on your bike.  NO.  You fall back into a rage-filled, bonk-induced tantrum, and it all goes red again.  It's unclear, doubtful even, that you will be going further.

But, moments of blackness later, by some miracle you do pop back out of it.  It's not good though.  You're in some kind of a trance, dragging your bike uphill by the front wheel, derailleur side down.  It occurs to you that you're weeping and you don't care.  It's super steep.  Like, self-arrest with your ice axe if you fall kind of steep, but you're near the top somehow.  Did you hitchhike?  Were there cars?  All questions you don't have answers for.  But you come to the top and that guy with the bourbon in the Hello Kitty Romper is there again.  Someone says this is an "aid station" and you yell Don't Touch Me.

Down, down, down again from there.  All the way back down simmons.  It's both pouring rain and the sun is shining, which doesn't strike you as odd at this point.  And there are still some pour souls on their way UP that mountain.  You tell them how awesome it is back there behind you, where hell happened, and somehow you really mean it.  That was amazing.

3 PM - Back onto pavement, there's sunshine, and a tailwind, and you realize you're actually getting hot and it feels amazing now.  You join up with a few other weary riders, in various states of disrepair, and together you limp back up markwood.  Somewhere near the finish, you sense the group starting to splinter, and someone jumps to sprint for the finish in what is, more than likely, the bottom 50 or so.  You finish, pretty destroyed, a shade under 5 hours.

4 PM - There's no shame at the finish line of Pantani, but there is a lot of beer.  Suns out, guns out, and - half-naked in the backseat of your car - you eat all the soup you brought that you intended to share with your fellow podium standers, back before the awful truth revealed itself about who and what you really are.

Pantani, if he could see you now, would be worried.

But you'll be fit next year, eh?

Just gotta get a little rest first.

Keep dreaming.

Keep looking up, up, up.