Pantani 2020 - February 9th at 10 AM

It's hard to get a straight answer about much of anything these days.  Facts are something that we, as a culture, used to do.
But we don't do that shit anymore.

Like when McCardell gave you, the masses, a heads up four days ago that you have 63 days until Pantani, that wasn't quite accurate.  Pantani2020 will be Sunday, February 9th at 10 AM, which was actually only 57 days from 4 days ago, and now is...I'm not sure.  I was told there would be no math.

But Sunday, February 9th, Pantani2020 will go live at 10 AM from the Paranormal field.

Nevermind the fact that I swore two years ago that if Bryan Lewis continues to ride Pantani in under 3 hours, I would make it longer and harder.  And while he has, I have not.
Nevermind the fact that February 9th seems early, especially to the eggnog swilling, candy cane chomping, Christmas cake eating masses.
Nevermind the fact that no one knows if there will even be a 2020 in this vituperatively divided shitpile of a country we have become.
Nevermind the facts.

For my money, there is only this: Pantani2020 will be SUNDAY, February 9th 2020 at 10 AM.
And Bryan will be back before 12:30.

Ride your bikes, folks.  The facts are useless anyway.

Dig?

Up, up, up.

Election Day

Our country began it's withdrawal from the Paris Climate accord today, leaving an already inadequate effort at saving this planet to be done by...whoever the fuck would like to even try anymore, but we did begin selling $5,000 Swarovski crystal encrusted dolls.  The children of the uber-rich will, if nothing else, be able to drown in luxury someday.  This is a good system, everything's fine.

All I did was ride my bike to the local school - where my kids are in 2nd grade - and vote.  Out front, where both political parties hand you a sample ballot of how they'd like your tiny vote to look on paper, people queued up tentatively.

We are squirrelly in the voting line now, Americans.  In a rhetorically divided country, it's tough to stand next to your neighbors and vote your conscience while they vote theirs and not feel uneasy about the whole thing.  These are the same people with whom your kids play soccer or you played baseball or your grandparents are buried next to or...whatever.  So of course there is a real sense of community that you can feel.  There's a bake sale.  There are handshakes and hugs and how's your moms.  There's literally your mom.  But there's a chill too, something beneath the surface that's coming undone.

Hold me down, as Ani called it long ago.
I am floating away.

After I voted, I rode the long way home, down Reas Ford and then back up bleak house, across the gravel at the top, then down the fringe, the beaver dam, across maple and alder-lined single track all the way back up to Allen rd and home and back to...work?  Is that what I'm doing here?  Is any of this going to matter?

Before I finished, I stopped above the creek at the overlook, took a moment that I should take more often to pause and consider big picture.  What is it that I'm even trying to say?
Hello Birmingham, I guess.
If you feel that the vote you cast today lacks real consequence, just wait 12 months.  Our inadequacy today will feel like peanuts compared to our inadequacy a year from now, whatever the result.  And then what?  There we'll be again, together, sorta.  Voting.  Trying.

Drowning?

Hang on, Country.  I can't afford a crystal doll to drown with and neither can you.  I'll keep swimming if you will too.

Up, up, up.

What-What. What. WHAT? The PARANORMAL is Saturday, 10/19.

You can't give the details without first describing the spirit.  And that spirit is THIS:


Oh that first 25 seconds.  When our universe starts to sink a little low in the sky, it puts me back together every time.

So, too, does the first couple hours of The Paranormal.  There's nothing quite like watching 150 costume-clad, entirely uncomposed, bike freaks race and talk trash at 115% threshold.

Veteran Piece of Advice #1: Above all else, go out HOT.  

Then, it all kinda descends into chaos, and racers fold like napkins.  And that's fun too.  Some would say MORE fun.


Whichever you prefer - the racing, the folding, or the general carousing - The Paranormal will go LIVE on Saturday 10/19 at 4 PM right on the lipsticked kisser.  That does not mean, however, that you should show up at 3:45, half-drunk, shirtless, and try to get your number and get to the start line whilst referring to your semi-nudity as a "costume."  No indeed, Veteran Piece of Advice #2 - get there EARLY, and then do all of those other things, and you'll fit right in.

That reminds me of Veteran Piece of Advice #2.5 - Expose your children to this shit.  Though sort of counterintuitive, Kids LOVE Halloween, and they love the Paranormal just the same.  Candy, hillybilly wooden stunts, shredding, and wide open grom-racing to be had from about 2 PM until...well past their bedtimes.  

One must also Veteran Piece of Advice #3 - REGISTER.  Deadline for registration is Thursday, October 17th at 5 PM, which just so happens to be Shawn's 65th birthday.  So think of your cash-entry as a nice little gift to distract him from his zombie-like decrepitness.  Also, just a side note about pre-registration, you people are the absolute worst at this.  Every year, 15 pre-registrants turns out to be 150+ actual racers.  Hey 10%ers: you complete me.  The rest of you should be sealed in a barrel and fired into the sun.

Which brings me to Veteran Piece of Advice #4: Shred first, then booze.  Anyone caught racing with a Blood Alcohol level above .27 will be fed to the Tyrannosaurus Rexes.  Plural.  Rexes.

Which, as water in a river, or pee in a costume, or any one thing which naturally brings you to another thing, brings me to Veteran Piece of Advice #5: Stay the night.  It's like Prom.  There's free camping, and plenty of cops on Earlysville road who will ruin your night far worse than Gordon Wadsworth's frenetic energy possibly ever could.  So just be tolerant.  Sip your cocktail, nod here and there, and allow him to vomit enthusiasm right into your very soul.  You will emerge, wet, but a better person.

That's all I have for you, people.
Sign up, dress up, and show up, up, up.

And don't forget to get down a little.

Until next week...I remain.

- The Haunted Head

The Paranormal Looms - 10/19/19 at 4 PM

The SM100 came and went last weekend.  Most notable moment actually came the night before the race when, while camping, it rained 4 inches and my wife and I had a waterfall in our tent.  Not as romantic as it sounds.

But with that foolishness now in the rearview, it occurs to me that in six weeks The Paranormal will be upon us.



Six. Short. Weeks.

But there you are, hiding out in the bathroom at work, slobbing and dribbling and thumbing at your phone, possibly vaping, too busy watching videos of Jolanda Neff slurping three bowls of oatmeal to go back to your desk, and you haven't even found your slutty catboy costume yet.  And it's already September.  This world, she is passing you by.


Doing trail work last week, I found a piece of Paranormal history that I'll share with you here.

It might not look like much to the untrained eye.  But this little relic happens to be the campaign pin that Joanna Krauss wore when she dressed up like Hillary Clinton to match James' Barrack Obama costume, in what was certainly one of the top 10 paranormal team costumes of all time.  The finer details - this campaign pin being just one example - carried the costume, which naturally won the day.

I sit here, banging the keys at 530 AM on a Friday morning because I can't sleep, and I contemplate the miles between that day and this day.  That would have been 2008, the end of the Bush Era, when Clinton and Obama were vying for the democratic ticket to challenge McCain.  At the time, I recall it felt like we were teetering on the very edge of democracy.  How little we knew.  If that feels to you like an entire lifetime ago at this point, you are not alone.

Back to my original point though: your fucking costume.  Pull yourself together.  Get on this.









To assist you, I put together a chart that you can use to better understand the relationship between costume quality and racing performance, various examples, and what I like to call the danger zone.  Please feel free to plot your own variables for alcohol consumption, e-bikes, etc.  This is, after all, a resource for all of us - the people.


Yes, this is also happens to be a paper towel, because genius strikes without notice sometimes.

Outside of that, I have very little to offer you in the way of real advice.  I can tell you that The Paranormal will go live at 4 PM on Saturday 10/19.  Costume check at 3 ish.  Kids race (cover your eyes, Billy) around 230ish?  All of that happening right here at the Rancho Relaxo.

Until then, do as the pros do.  Dress as Goldilocks and shred absolutely everything.

The haunted head awaits you. 
Up, up, up.

Immigration. E-bikes.

For an interesting exercise in self-reflection, try this:

The next time you start to get worked up about how e-bikes don't belong on your local trails, stop, and write down whatever you just said.  Ruminate on how much you mean it and how much it makes sense to you and how pissed off you are that e-bikes are a threat to ruin your trails.

Then, simply substitute "immigrants" for "e-bikes" and substitute "the border" for "your trails" - and imagine yourself in the Oval Office, on twitter, the color and shape of a rotting orange.

The many faces of intolerance.

Up, up, up.

Timebomb, Part 2

July, 2019

Eventually, what you realize is that the metaphor, the timebomb, doesn't blow up.  It grows up, or at least he starts to.
Rowan has a scar the color of a pearl across his hairline and one to match it right below his chin, and halfway between the two rests his huge, toothy smile.  But his balance is otherworldly now.  He's deft, fast on his feet, he dances on the pedals when he climbs the hill between my house and Shawn's.  He stands up when he climbs, I understand, because I stand up when I climb.  But where I'm a masher still at 41, he's light on the pedals like a feather, like Contador.  

I'm well aware that comparing ones child to Contador isn't healthy, for anyone, but I see what I see.

For now, we ride together.  As they say, the family that rides together stays together.  They also get chiggers together.  They run out of chain lube at the same time and sound like a nest of hungry mice together.  They fight over who gets which clif bar today, and where are my fucking gloves, etc.  It's not all sunshine and Saturdays.

"Where's mommy, "Avery demands from over my shoulder.  I'm sitting on the couch, exhausted, and she's draped across the back of it, like a bored cat looking for trouble.
"Mommy is riding, sweetie," I tell her.
"Why is Mommy riding so early?"  The swish of her tail.
"Because Mommy is doing the Hundo this year."
"What even is the Hundo?" Avery groans.
"The Hundo is part of the reason you exist."
She doesn't click that link, not yet.  For now she tolerates simple answers.  But someday when she does I hope she'll understand that what we're doing out there at this hour isn't riding bikes so much as it is becoming a more complete person, one who has been somewhere.

I try to explain the abstract to Rowan, that as a culture we are now so far removed from real, natural adversity that we have made it a recreation - something we pay for - no longer something that, like life, just happens to us.  It's a game we play so we don't forget how.  He eyes me, skeptical of my story, but I show him how to sharpen a chainsaw, or plug a tire, or clean fish while the latest bad news streams 24/7 on a television that we pretty much don't even turn on anymore, and I hope to God he doesn't need it.

When your wife becomes your riding buddy, your world changes a little.  We cover details now that we didn't get into before: Pre-race bathroom habits.  Soil color as it relates to traction.  Chaffing.  We spend two huge, dreamlike days in The Forest together, riding big miles and enjoying the freedom to love each other with no one else around, just a huge green blanket of summer leaves overhead between us and the bright blue sky.  We are afforded this, I know, because she's chosen it.  I'm proud of her, but also, selfishly, I'm in my happiest place with my favorite person, something most people never get the chance to do.

There is worry, of course.  I follow her down Dowel's draft, careful to point out from behind her all the places that the trail wants to eat you, pull you down into the forest on your left, end your day.  There are just so many obstacles.  The bees near the top of Bridge Hollow.  The way your valve stems can fill with sealant and leak all day.  The pizza at aid 5.  So many of these lessons, I got to learn as a 20-something kid out in Colorado, where the consequence of my mistakes were just so...I'm not sure. But all of the errors that I survived then, I'm determined to guide my wife around them the easy way now.  But why?

You forget, narrator, that the metaphor barely applies now.  The timebomb never blew up.  It's taken some falls, sure, but it's wearing a $300 helmet.  The people you love in your life simply have to make their own mistakes now, learn their own lessons.  You can't shortcut the hardest, most important parts of the truth.

So I try to ride behind them, watch the world roll out before them.  I see their tracks sometimes in the dirt on trails I've already taken, some of them my line and some of them...not.

The trail splits and dowels's goes left, but magic moss goes right.  Make no mistake, you're straddling your bike at one of the best places on this planet, and sure, there's one direction you'd prefer over the other.

But they get to choose.

Up, up, up.

Timebomb, Part 1

December, 2014

“How long’s a minute?” Rowan asks me over lunch.  I see that he has torn through the board games while I made sandwiches, and he’s distributed monopoly money, playing cards, chess pieces, everything, in a trail from the closet to the kitchen table.  Now he’s sitting, finally, and he clutches a little plastic hourglass in his hand and holds it forth, the stitches in his chin framing his big, toothy smile.   “What’s this?”  

We usually don’t allow him to have toys at the table, but at least he’s sitting still.  Also, we’re exhausted.  “You need to put that all back in the closet when you’re done with lunch,” my wife tells him, eyeing the latest mess.  Around us, Rowan’s imagination stretches across the floor from the front door to the back porch, so many legos and books that we can hardly walk.  

“What’s this?” he asks again, peering into the hourglass as the sand flows through the tight plastic funnel.  

“That’s an hourglass,” I tell him.  

“No,” he replies, “Not an hour.”  

He is correct.  In the broken sentences of a 3-year-old, he explains to me that it only takes a minute for the sand to traverse from one side of the little plastic tube to the other.  

“It’s still called an hourglass, though,” I tell him, though I’m not actually sure if that’s true. The minutes pass like hours and we don’t know what to do.  

After lunch, Rowan cleans up.  Then he builds a fort with the couch cushions, and he knocks over a potted plant in the front hall. “Find something else to play with,” my wife tells him.  

He attempts to ride his bike up the stairs.  

He flips the kitchen chairs on their sides to build a wall.  

He jumps from the back of the couch to the mantle and hits his head, and he howls like a wild animal. 

We give him some ice for his head, but he eats it and almost chokes.  

He turns on every sink in the house and runs around with his pants off.  

We redress him and send him outside, and he constructs a trap out of sticks on the front steps to try to capture Santa.  

“Santa already came on Sunday,” I try to reason with him.  He doesn’t come back for one year.  

“How long’s a year?” Rowan asks.  

I check my watch, and it’s only been 20 minutes since lunch.

I start to answer him, but he’s already digging for grubs in the front flowerbed, churning up last years’ bulbs with a plastic shovel.  

He tries to jam his shovel into the heat pump next to the house.  

He rides his bike into a tree on purpose.  

He rushes around back to get a garden hose, but he trips and skins his knee.

Part of his problem is simple physics.  Little boys grow fast, but it comes in fits and starts, and it’s not always proportionate. His short legs are quick, but his head and feet seem huge by comparison.  He leans forward and runs full speed through the kitchen, but his legs can’t keep up, so he falls forward and hits his face on the corner of the wall. 

“It’s like trying to parent an explosion,” my wife observes, trying to see how bad it is this time through the blood and dirt.    

Part of his problem is hard-wired.  The security guard at the entrance to the Emergency Room welcomes us back for our second trip this week: “Hi, Rowan.”

Shannon fills out paperwork at the front desk, and I try to manage our son who is still on the hunt for trouble.  It required five stitches to sew his chin last week, and I’m guessing it will take at least five more in his forehead this time.  I chase him through the waiting room, “Perhaps now would be an OK time not to jump on the couch, Rowan.” 

When we return home, Rowan is finally asleep in the back seat, fresh stitches in his forehead.  I carry him through the darkness.  He’s limp and warm in my arms, momentarily defused. At the threshold of his room, I trip on some kind of trap he built earlier in the day, and I almost drop him. 

My wife takes a knee to inspect the trap, like a Vietnam War film.  This time, it appears he used pillows, scissors, a Godzilla action figure, and he wrapped it all together with leftover Christmas ribbon. 

Shannon clears the trap, a professional by now, but still none of this is making sense to her.  

“Why does he keep doing this?” She whispers as we tuck him in, but her voice is tense, bewildered.

“He’s dynamite,” I tell my wife.  “This is how he learns.”

Grains of powder in an hourglass of crash and burns.  

Undeterred

Jack walks through the puddles, not around them.  It has rained 72 inches here in Virginia since his 3^rdbirthday, more than the foggy coast of Seattle, more than the jungles of Borneo.  Of those 300 days, 200 of them have yielded measurable rainfall, and one of them, a baby sister.  

A boy in a climate like this tends to keep moving.    

“Untle Dave,” Jack chirps, unable to pronounce his c’s yet, “I tan yell outside.” He pulls on his red boots and hops in the wagon, and we roll out of his backyard and down the trail.  

The pitter-patter of rain has faded, and the sun is out for a few minutes, and I explain the plan to him, “We’ll just gather some rocks, haul them in the wagon, and we'll press them into the trail down below where it's muddy.  It'll be like armor, but rock, and for the trail."

Smiling back, Jack explains the plan to me.  I have a hard time understanding him, but I hear some phrases like “Build a worm house” and “Swim in the forest.”  

We carefully step the wagon down the trail through the roots, green and slippery this year where usually they are baked dry by the sun.  Jack bails from the wagon with glee, then he holds my hand and leads me up the old logging road, now more like a stream of water flowing against us.  He stops to stare at the rush and gush of it all.  The road-river pushes up and over the toes of his little red boots.  

I have never seen it rain like this, months upon months of downpours and gloom.  The trail here has been gutted by storms, a deep red rut running down the center and then veering hard left, downhill, into climate we don’t yet understand.  I wonder, as we stand and stare at the flooding, what a young boy makes of this.  Is it still climate change if you were born after it already happened?  

Jack giggles, and I turn to look at him, and he’s peeing, straight down into the torrent, and it’s washing back over his feet.    

41

I turned 41 on Wednesday.  When you turn 41, a lot of people ask you basically the same thing: how do you feel?  Old?  Sore?  Are you falling apart yet?

Answer is: sort of, yes.  I mean, things hurt about the same amount as they hurt before, they just hurt longer now.  It's livable, but damn.  I rode Death Star 6 days ago.

And it's Friday, lunchtime, and my legs still kinda hurt a little.
That's what 41 is I guess.

41 is having turned 40 about two weeks ago, and then bang, Wednesday, you turned 41 too.  And about 5 days from now, you have to turn 42 also, so get ready and good luck with that.

41 is realizing that all the best things you got for your birthday, and pretty much life itself, you found in the woods.

41 is realizing that the component upgrade that will really make you psyched to ride your bike is already sitting in your spare parts bin, you've just got to find an hour to bolt it on.  And then it takes you a month to find that hour.

41 is one poorly timed handstand by your daughter at the exact moment you were bending over to pick up an Easter egg, and it puts you right on the floor.  FAST.

41 is ruminating over beers at dinner why all of the best people in your life you met through bikes?

It's a great mystery, 41 is.

I'll let you know how 42 is next week.

Up, up, up.

Points

My grandfather called them points instead of arrowheads.  The first time he took me point hunting, I was very young.  It’s one of my first memories, walking beside him through the pine forest near my house – the Paranormal course today -  after a summer storm.  The loblollies spread bright green overhead like a screen against the dark blue sky, and ferns the color of lime peels pushed up from below, from our bright red Virginia clay.  After a hard rain, the clay gets shoved around, layers upon layers of soil re-shuffled. It leaves the little rocks exposed. 

That first time, and right away he showed me a point, a big one, quartz, washed clean and white by the rain.  I scooped it up from right beside a huge loblolly pine in a clearing, an easy find. In hindsight, I’ve come to suspect that my grandfather planted it there so I wouldn’t go home empty-handed.  

He knelt beside me, held it between his thumb and forefinger at arm’s length, and he dropped his bottom jaw as low as he could to exaggerate his admiration.  Then he drew it in close, right up against our faces, and he spoke seriously, “This is an artifact.  Do you understand that?  The last person to touch this was a wild Indian.”  

Later, I became that wild Indian, or at least I tried.  I practiced with a little compound bow in my yard, arrows making a loud thwack against the pie plate that I pinned to a haybale.  I learned to feel the wind switch directions, to draw back when the wind gusts and shoot when the wind subsides, like a wave.  I lost almost every arrow in my quiver chasing grey squirrels. I painted my face.  

One October, I bought a 3-pack of metal broadheads, sharp enough to shave the hairs growing dark from my forearms.  They were bright silver, a dangerous mix of aluminum and steel, and I threaded them into the tips of the straightest arrows I had remaining.  My dad eyed them suspiciously, but he nodded his head, and he pulled me into the bathroom by my elbow and turned off the light.  From his pocket, he brandished a small flashlight, opened his mouth, and pointed the little beam of light at the back of his throat. Behind his tongue and above his tonsils rested a long, jagged scar the color of a pearl.  He confided in me that, a few weeks before, he’d been in a rush to go hunting, running up a flight of stairs with an arrow in his hand, and he had tripped.  

“Just a target point,” he explained.  “A broadhead would have come through the back of my neck.”

A month ago, I found a point with my daughter.  We were strolling through a stand of jack pines near the bottom of the twin lakes trail at Blue Ridge School, doing trailwork together again, right where it spoons the edge of a dry wash that had flooded the week before.  It was misty, overcast, grey: poor light for arrowhead hunting.  But as I raked the flooded debris away from a low spot in the trail, I kept an eye downward out of habit, searching the edges for the white speck of a point.  And there it rested, my daughter’s first, washed down from the mountain and cradled in the corner of a grove of beach trees.  She cupped the little treasure in both hands, the way she holds warm water to wash her face, smiling, and the clean point glimmered white like her toothy grin.   

It shocked me when my grandfather’s voice - my dad’s voice - spilled out of me when I spoke to my daughter there, and I told her everything I could remember.

That the Monacans used quartz because they could make a sturdy, sharp point without too much work. 

That they used to paddle up these creeks and rivers in canoes, the Rivanna, the Mechums, the Moormans, long before those rivers ever had those names.  

That they shot deer mostly, but also sometimes elk – elk! – and they floated their kills back downstream.

Her face was bewildered as she listened, like she didn’t recognize me.  I spat up facts about these things that no longer exist until she interrupted me, “Daddy?”  

But I couldn’t hold it in, all these things that I forgot I knew came spilling out from some kind of wound in my mouth, like blood.  

That the Monacans would trade quartz points with the Iroquois to the North in exchange for flints, churts, and warmer furs.  

That the Monacans and the Iroquois were all gone.  

That we’re standing on stolen land.  

Avery pleaded again, “Daddy!” 

I stopped, and it was absolutely quiet, just a grey mist falling through the dark pine trees. Avery didn’t follow up with a question.  She took my hand and we walked back down the wash to our car as the daylight faded.    

But lately when Avery walks in the forest to do trail work with me, she sings, and I see that she’s looking down.  

Your Noggin

When I first heard there was some big Trek announcement happening on 3.19, my first theory was that Trek was releasing a semi-aquatic Mer-bike.  It was just the sort of winter we were having - storm after storm after storm...just an insane amount of water.  Every trail around here had at least 3 inches of water flowing down it.  I thought - and I stand by this idea - that a submersible bike capable of just riding the Rivanna (the river itself, not the trail) would be a hot ticket in this climate we had seemingly wandered into while the EPA was blackout drunk.  

That was 3 weeks ago.  Turns out the announcement was, in fact...

Helmets.

It seemed a little anti-climactic at first, but I think that's just because I was expecting a Mer-Bike.  And it hurts to be wrong sometimes.  But looking at the reality of it now, I'm pretty into it for a couple of reasons.

1) Enduro bikes - and shit, all bikes really at this point - are just really stupidly fast now.  Like, fast enough to be potentially lethal to the consumer, even without cars getting involved.   35 MPH and one tree, and if you do the math about what that impact will do to your brain, and then you start to consider just how many trails we're pushing 35 mph on these days, and yeah.

I've contemplated this a few times, some of it right here at the bottom of the bike internet.

Progressive trail construction, also, has likely contributed to the speeds we're going, but in a general sense most of us are in new territory when it comes to riding downhill on trails on a regular basis.   So a company like Trek that makes both bikes and helmets, and it financially and socially invested in not killing its customers, was due to step up the helmet game to hopefully offset the speeds they've enabled (and we have greedily gobbled up.)  Long way around to my point, but better protection was long overdue, and if it works this is a really good idea.

2) It's green, so I assume we can smoke it.

Can't wait to don one of these things and test out the limits of that "unconditional" warranty.

Keep 'em coming, Trek.

Up, up, up.

You can't drive your tractor in here.

It's just that time of year.

On Sunday, I was riding my mountain bike on the road for less than a mile, just connecting between one trail and another out here in Earlysville.  Beautiful day, just a taste of spring...and I'm sure there were cyclists out pretty much all over the county.  A car driving the other way, in the other lane, swerved into my lane, horned the absolute shit out of me, not close enough to hit me - just trying to scare me.  And he rolled past - a white guy in a black car - hollering.

I was not surprised.

With the nice weather, people are getting back on their bikes and riding - some of them not super well - on our lovely county roads.  Plenty of motorists dread this, the return of cyclists to their roads.  They are prepared to defend their territory insofar as defending it means honking, screaming, and generally behaving like a tyrannical 3 year-old in a 3/4 ton pickup truck.

I rolled on, not really bothered by this, the annual flux of intolerance between otherwise like-minded, rural Caucasian males, him and I.  He'll settle down and so will I.

But before I turned off onto the next trail, I passed a little white cottage on the right, close enough to the road that I could see the interaction.  A little girl, maybe kindergarten or so, was piloting a battery powered, pink, toy tractor - one of those sit-on top toys that Grandparents buy their grandkids for Christmas - and she was trying to drive it through the side door and into the house.  Her mom, arms crossed, was insisting she not do that.

You can't drive your tractor in here, the lady yelled.  

What it all means, I'm not sure.

Ride safe out there, people.

Seeing Things

Saturday, February 1, 2003, and I was on my way to Sedona, AZ to go riding for the first time.  There were seven of us, quite a crew, and we had departed from Boulder right after work on Friday, the night before.  We'd driven - two Fords, an Explorer for people and my Ranger for bikes - as far as we could, nearly run out of gas, and stopped at a hotel very late.  We woke up early, the way that seven mountain bikers jammed into a tiny hotel room tend to wake up stoked, and resumed the trip SouthWest.

Sometime after dawn, I found myself squinting against the glare of the desert sunlight smeared across the dirty windshield of my truck, like the sky had gone bewilderingly, sandy brown. The huge green interstate signs crept by at 80 miles an hour, validating that we were still somewhere short of Albuquerque on I-40 Westbound. I was driving while Shaine peered through his thick glasses at the roadmap in his right hand and nervously turned the radio dial with his left. The Emergency Broadcast Signal had chirped across the radio station twice so far, shrill and loud, panicked. Finally, a shaky young man’s voice came through the truck’s speakers, and he stammered out the bad news: Space Shuttle Columbia had broken up while re-entering the atmosphere, 80,000 feet directly overhead, along with the jarring reality that we were on the Western edge of the debris field, and if we saw  anything, we were to call it in and not touch it. 

The radio went quiet, just the suck of desert wind outside, and Shaine ducked forward hard, craned his muscled neck low beneath the dashboard to watch the sky.  We traded stories about The Challenger disaster, 17 years before, and where we were and how it affected us.  I can still recall how Ms. Blackard, tears dripping black and blue mascara down to her chin, hustled us down the hall from our 3rd grade classroom across the evenly-spaced, square, black and white tiles. How her voice echoed through the empty hall behind us so shrill and tense that I almost didn’t recognize it. How I had tiptoed across the white tiles only, for luck, suspicious that somehow my little shoes might make a difference. Mr. Burnette’s classroom was big enough for every kid in school to have a seat on the thin, tan rug atop rubber cement stains and playground mulch pulverized so deep that it never quite vacuumed out. But, more importantly, Mr. Burnette had a big box television up high on a wobbly metal cart on which he rolled out the hard truth and awkwardly perched it before us. I couldn’t watch. 

Years later, in New Mexico, the kid came back over the radio and read the phone number to call if, perchance, we happened across any wreckage, and without irony, Shaine scribbled it down on a gas station receipt.

We rode in Sedona, Phoenix, Tucson, all over Arizona that week.  We saw roadrunners, javelinas, lizards of all kinds.  We shredded brand new single track, ate the best Mexican food of our lives.  But we never saw any wreckage from the shuttle, and for the most part, we didn't talk about it.  We found something else, however.  

I kept the receipt for a long time, Shaine’s shaky cursive so bad that I couldn’t read the number, black pen on white paper, and it always smelled like regular unleaded, even years later. But underlined, there was one legible word, Shuttle.

It was the beginning of something.

Post-Truth World

A few of you have checked in this week, trying to get the scoop on how Il Pantani shook out at the front.  I can only report that the scoop is still empty, and it's Sunday, a week later.  

There was rumor for a while that Logan Jones-Wilkins won it in a sprint.  Thomas Bouber even had shady, cell phone video to support this rumor - that video showing Logan first, then B-Slow, then Jeremiah in 3rd.  The evidence looked puzzlingly slow, but I don't know much about sprinting after doing Pantani in 2:45 anyway, so I just figured they were smoked and called it Logan's race, won.

Come to find out that Logan only claims third place.  Wadsworth purports to have been 4th, a minute back, and saw nothing.  And Strava might have indicated that Petrylak or Noah rolled in 5th, all of them well under 3 hours.  I hung on for less than 30 seconds of that, so I have no way of knowing what happened on the pointy end of the race.  So I texted B-slow to get the skinny, and so far no reply.  Jeremiah took a shower at my mom's house, then fled to California. So how exactly the finish went, no one seems to know.

Funny thing is, it doesn't matter.  Set aside, for a moment, the fact that racing bikes at a thing like Il Pantani is really just about having fun, and consider first that we're living in a post-truth world, folks, right before it actually falls apart.  Your podium placement at a gravel non-event in some backwoods corner of Greene County means so little now.  Truth is whatever your instagram says it is.  

If it matters to you, Thomas Bouber went home with the Maillot Pistachio, and - if he can get his biceps into it - I think he'll rip the sleeves clean off.  I kept the knitted shorts, because I've raced in them for 4 years running now, and at some point when it comes to bike shorts it's like a common law marriage.  You're bound by habit mostly, but also, you can't get them off.    

Lemme know if you know something I don't know.  Or not.

What a strange time to be alive.  

Up, up, up.

Pantani Lurks, 2/10/19 at 10 AM

Il Pantani will go live, hot, fast, and heavy...this Sunday 2/10 at 10 AM.  2019.

Shortly after, it slows waaay down.

The year of the Pig is upon us.

Whatever this weather pattern we are currently experiencing actually is - human driven ecosystem collapse maybe, or just a natural part of the end of days  - it will come to a decisive end by Sunday.  Pretty good chance we will be rolling west on frozen gravel when we hit Wesley Chapel.



And really, would you have it any other way?  Pantani at 74 degrees just feels, I don't know, inauthentic.  Like if Pantani went up Ventoux at 650 watts, got to the top, and it wasn't windy or exposed or terrible, and then some asshole from Texas tried to gift him the stage.

There are no gifts, people.  Weather included.

Parking, start line, and the finest porta-shovel known to man will all be at the Paranormal field, which is off of Markwood Rd right across from the Claymont subdivision.  There are no facilities there, no water, just a shovel and some TP and a semi-imposing lack of dignity.  If you need an actual shitter, like a real genuine emergency, I want you to know that the top drawer of Shawn's bedroom dresser is always, ALWAYS, open to you, and I really mean that.  Bombs away.

10 AM, the proverbial gun will go off, so don't be late.  After that, it's hard to say.  Being that Pantani is a non-event sort of event, there's no actual course markings, road closures, or any of that.  It's just a group ride, except for those of you who it's not, and chances are pretty good you know who you are.

Here's the route.  Again, interpret this as a suggestion for glory, not instructions to hand your team car driver.  I hope that you know that I hope that you know what I mean, and we'll have to leave it at that for now.

A semi-description of how the ride typically unfolds can be found here.
Additional misinformation can be found here.
In fact, there are gobs of information mashed into various corners of the internet, some of it true.  Very little of it is actually helpful, and none of it is current save this: Sunday, 2/10/19 at 10 AM. All you need to know.

If you still want to know what it's like, don't ask people like this.  

B-Slow, for example, sent me a text yesterday confirming his intent to ride 35 mm tires.  No idea what bike he will actually be strapping those things onto, but it doesn't matter to people like you and me. He's on a different playing field, basically playing a different sport.  Whatever he does, don't do it.

Qwadsworth, too, has confirmed his attendance, for the first time in, shit, a decade?  I'm not sure.  But assuming he shows up with something attached to a lauf fork, I don't recommend you emulate his behavior either.

Dave Flatten has won every Pantani that I would classify as having taken place in HORRID conditions.  What does that mean for Sunday?  Mightn't Jeremiah Bishop show up and pay Flatten back for that cheeky finish sprint 4 years ago?  Then there is Petrylak, Serton, Chris Michaels, others...greatness, left to right.  It's a hard thing to predict who will make it back first.  Logan Jones Wilkins, if Strava doesn't lie, has been crushing hundreds of miles of gravel per week.  But does he even know who Marco Pantani is?

These and other questions, to be answered Sunday, not sooner.

The rest of us, what can we even do?

I, for one, will be preparing my outfit.
 

See it in person on Sunday.

Up, up, up.

Your Bike Is Bored With You

Your bike is bored with you.
And let's face it: who can blame her?

This was inevitable.  When you went out and bought yourself the hottest, carbon deluxe, triple extra bling bike that money can buy, the one with the electronic shifting, aerodynamic ass molding, suspension from outer fucking space, with the custom paint job and, dare I speculate, a 50T cog, you were setting yourself up for failure.

There's nothing - NOTHING - that you can throw at this bike that it won't shrug off, unimpressed.  You can ride it down the red loop at Walnut Creek as fast as you can, feeling pretty rad, jubilant even,  and step off at the bottom and see the bike yawn.

Hill Repeats?  Boring.
Shuttle runs?  Lame.
TNW?  Geeks.

This is where your ol' pal Pantani comes in.  Because like it or not, Pantani is outside of your ability.  Too hard, Too steep, Too Fast, Too Early in the Season, Too much gravel, too much pavement, too many fast assholes at the front, too much drafting, too long to go that hard, too many bros with mustaches, too much...everthing.  For you.

But your bike was made for this.

Entertain the ol' lady for once, eh?

2/10 at 10 AM.

Up, up, up.

Hindsight

Last week, Marco Pantani would have turned 49 if he were still with us.  Mac Miller, yesterday, would have turned 27.


It's hard for me to watch that NPR Tiny Desk show that Mac Miller put on in the weeks immediately preceding his death and not think, at least a little, about Marco Pantani.

You might think that's a stretch, and you're right and you're not right.
And, I don't guess it helps anyone or anything for me to go pointing out all the ways that I find the two of them, Marco and Mac, strangely similar - both in life and in death.  Young men who'd made it big, ostensibly who should have been in their prime, and yet...they just...weren't.  There was a sadness in their finals days, both of them, like maybe they knew what was coming in that way that a lot of people who fight addiction know that their time is getting short.  It makes me sad in a way that I can't adequately describe.

Pantani left us with that day on the Courchevel, and a handful of others - real, genuine greatness despite his flaws.  Mac Miller left us the same thing, but in the form of music.  It's all right there if you want to see it.  For all for of its imperfections, one thing YouTube does pretty well is capture the essence of a person, even when that person is long gone.

So I'll skip the long list of similarities that would otherwise be easy (and empty) to write.  But I will say this - we should have seen it coming.  And you can almost always say that, in hindsight, about the brilliant people who inhabit this world only for a little while, the ones who were never, under any circumstances, going to stay for long.

Reach out to them, folks.  Help them dig in.

There are only two ways out, and they're both up, up, up.

False Positive

Well would you look at little Virginia having himself a proper winter like a big boy!

Most years, when it comes to snow, the Commonwealth underperforms.  Not this year.  At least, not so far.  One thing that we as Virginians are really good at in the snow?  Driving around in it.  Not actually the skills and experience needed to drive in the snow, but just making the decision to drive in the snow.  We are awesome at making the decision to go out anyway.  And crashing our cars, it turns out.  But snow itself?  Not so much.

Americans as a whole, we are highly prone to the false positive, the things we think are true about ourselves but really are not.  Take, for example, our (in)ability to drive in the snow.  To (not actually) hold our own democratic elections.  Triathlon (in general.)  We think we can do all of these things, but in reality...

Add this to the long list of things that we think we can do but we can't.  

I'm not trying to drag you down here.  No, indeed, the false positive is a wonderful thing, essential even.  So many of life's greatest adventures happen only because we overreach...and then we just have to figure it out.  Looking at a good map will do this to you.  In fact, some of the best worst days, especially on a bike, were driven by the false positive, and they happened when some guy just like you looked at a map very much like this one and said to himself, yeah, I can do that in a day.

Without the False Positive,  for example, Pantani 2010 never would have happened.  I woke up that morning with more than a foot of snow on the ground, and rumors were flying around that there were two county snowplows plus a front-end loader stuck up on Simmons gap somewhere.  You'd have been better off with a dogsled than a bicycle that day, and I pretty much assumed no one would show.  Then, right around 10 AM, The Rooster, Jimmy McMillan, and an assortment of really hard Richmonders pulled into my yard in a monster truck with studded tires.  And away we went.  

And wouldn't you know it - it was awesome.

If it turns out that the best days are actually the worst days, or the worst days are actually the best days, or some kind of combination of the two...then without our own poor judgement and lack of genuine self-awareness, who would ever ride up brokenback on a road bike in the first place?

Don't answer that.

These, and other great riddles of life itself, to be addressed in the coming weeks as the clock ticks down to Pantani2019.  So go ahead and delete your weather app.  The forecast only calls for one thing, and it's up, up, up.

Pantani 2019: February 10th at 10 AM

MOTHER OF GOD.

The Pantani ride is Sunday, February 10th at 10 AM.
That's a scant 30 days from this very moment if you don't count Saturdays, which I don't, because on Saturdays I don't work, I don't drive a car, I don't fucking ride in a car, I don't handle money, I don't turn on the oven, and I sure as shit don't fucking roll.
Which leaves me only 30 days to "train" for Pantani, and by train I really just mean try to put enough miles in between my ass and the saddle to make at least the first 2 hours of the whole experience tolerable.  After that, not so much.

And, let's face it...turning 40 and riding Pantani as a 40 year-old probably means that very early in the ride, I'll start questioning the relative morality of the whole thing.  Why, indeed, do we insist on doing this to ourselves, every year, in February, with nigh-zero training, at maximum threshold for 4+ hours.  What difference does it make in the grand scheme of things?  Am I even here or is human life actually just a simulation?  What exactly does cheap whiskey produce at lactate threshold that makes my legs feel like this?    And so on.  Deep, existential shit that you only find at the bottom of the emotional hole that you dig for yourself on Pantani Sunday.  Hopefully I'm on the other side of Fox mountain before it happens.

The rest of you, I'm honestly not sure.  Every year we roll down Markwood Road at the start, all 100+ of us in recent years, and I look around at all of you derelicts and I think to myself, who ARE these people.  Like, literally, many of you I don't even recognize.  But you pile out of the woods for this thing, for whatever reason, and for that I...thank you?  Is that accurate?  Do you thank me?  I don't think so.  Realistically, we should give each other a loud, resounding, Fuck You given the circumstances.  But we never do that, do we?

Anyway, it'll go live on Feb 10th, Sunday, at 10 AM from the Paranormal Field, whatever it is, and what will be will be.  Go ahead and jot that down on your calendar.  Remember to dress fancy, pack whiskey, and try not to think too hard about what it is you're about to do to yourself.

More details to follow, so stay tuned.

Up, up, up.