Pantani Ride: good weather guarantee or your money back!

I can't put my hands on it, but a recent, independent poll of Americans aged 18 - 147, found that a majority of us reckoned 2021 was the worst year of our lives.  Not sure where I read that, but it's a sobering perspective.  Those polled, presumably, are people who lived through the the TET Offensive (1968), 9/11 (2011, duh) race riots in their own school districts (1964, 1967, but also sort of all the time now), and worse, of course, like Pandemic Chapter 1 (2020.)  But 2021...worst of all time says the modern populous.  Not good.  

For Pantani, I guess that year was probably 2004, when - broken and alone - he barricaded himself in a hotel room in Ramini and committed suicide by cocaine (or was murdered by the Italian Mob, you pick.)  Not a good year.  Or maybe it was 2003, the worst full year, when his psychological decline really accelerated, and he gained a bunch of weight, and he was ridiculed in public and generally recognized as a disgrace to his country.  Or 1999 when, while wearing the Maglia Rosa at the Giro they took that sucker right off his back, mid-race, sent him packing for home with a scarlet letter to carry: DOPER.  Or 1996 when he broke his leg and the foundations for a lifetime of addiction really got dug in permanently.  

Lotta bad years to be fingered, if you see what I'm driving at.  Hindsight may be 20/20, but it's also super judgey.  

2022 is off to an inauspicious start, right here in the moment.  The snow we got on Jan 4th hasn't actually melted yet, amid a COVID surge that is defying logical, modern disease theory, and escalating tensions with Russia, and a failure of our modern system of governance, and this, and that, and the other, and blah blah blah.  These are trying times.  

I have wondered, for a couple of years now, What Mark Robbins would think about all of this.  COVID.  Societal fray.  Potholes on Markwood road.  It stands to reason he would have had a lot to say.  Far be it for me, someone who didn't know him well enough, to declare what his take would have been, but it's fair to say we could really use that take right about now.  The Pantani Ride, in a tertiary way that I didn't expect, has become a brief, uncomfortable conversation about mental health.  We miss you, Doc.  

Long way around to my point, which is actually a guarantee: We are going to pull through this.  It'll happen sooner than you think.  And when it does, and the sun finally shines and the snow melts, and we achieve a momentary and relative peace with all these counteracting forces around us, and, while it might not be perfect, it'll be way, waaaay better than the current state of affairs if you're willing to give it a chance.  Maybe it'll even be one of those "It's 70 degrees for The Pantani Ride" days, when you're climbing up The Fox and it's the first time in months that you're full-on hot, and the daffodils are already pushing blooms through the soft black dirt around the ruins of old homestead footers out on the mountain, memorials to a lifetime of adversity overcome.  

Or it'll snow and we'll dogsled that shit. 

Either way, we will at least come together, which is a massive improvement, and probably the point anyway.  

Sunday, Feb 13th.  10 AM start from the Paranormal field.  

If you don't know how-to-Pantani-ride, just use the handy little search field at the top of this here blog and type "Pantani" and you'll be provided with a litany of trash to read while you're taking a dump on Sunday morning after coffee but before breakfast, trying to determine, for example, what bike to ride.   It's all been covered.  

Dig in, good people.  Stay grounded, but keep looking up, up, up.  

Pantani 2022 - 10 AM on Sunday, February 13th

 I have some bad news for you.  Pantani 2022 is exactly one month from 7 hours ago.  

That's right, 7 hours ago you still had a month left to peel your saggy haunches off the couch, don the bibs you used to fit into, pile your candy cane mutated posterior onto a real bike, and get your heart rate above 75 for any reason in the entire universe besides Zwift, but now you don't.  Now you have 7 hours less than that.  The window is closing on you, just like it's closing on me, closing on all of us.  

Still, there's cause for hope I guess.  At 10 AM, Sunday, February 13th, when the proverbial shotgun blasts and Richard Serton goes screaming up the road like he's been shot out of some kind of man-weapon, there's still a chance you won't stink up the scene with your lethargy.  Maybe you'll have pulled it together over these four weeks, four weeks that will fly by from this perspective, annotated mostly by your excuses.  Snowstorm.  Power outage.  Another snowstorm.  Covid scare.  Actual Covid.  Failure of the public internet.  The list of reasons you won't be riding between now and Pantani is long, long like how much time it'll take you to climb simmons in your granny gear, long like the odds of you finishing before dark, but short by comparison when you stack them up against the list of reasons you didn't ride around the holidays, or October, or whenever it was we last saw each other in costume, got drunk, and didn't really race.  And we stunk then too.  You, me, most of us.  We all stink now.  Mostly you though.  

If you want my advice, which you don't but I'll give you anyway, I suggest you find yourself a proxy.  A scab.  A stand-in.  A more prepared rider than you.  Then, go way, way out of your way to create a situation where she has to ride Pantani while you X.  And, by X, I mean manage the kid's violin recital that you've never given two shits about until now, or coach a kid's soccer team you've never even met, or attend a paint-by-numbers class you've been DYING to get into even though no one has ever heard you say it, and a spot just opened up.  ANYTHING that you think will get her to take the fall for you.  Beg if you have to.  I CANNOT BARE THE IDEA OF CRAWLING UP BROKENBACK WITH MY CHAMOIS ASSAULTING ME LIKE IT'S A THONG THIS YEAR I JUST FUCKING CAN'T DO IT.  And anyway, look, she's been riding a ton.  She's been disciplined.  She's worked hard.  She is, I'll say it, WAY faster than me.  

Please, will you ride Pantani for me?

I think she'll say yes.  Like the day out above all the singletrack in Sedona, from the saddle, when I got down on one knee and hoped, prayed, asked her to make my life a lot better, and marry me, because maybe I could see the future and I knew right then that a) I couldn't go through life without her and b) in the year 2022 this thing called Pantani was going to ruin me.   

She'll say yes, I think.  I am counting on it. 

More details forthcoming, but mark your calendars and take notice.   And, as always, PRINT the map.  

Up, up, up.