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.