Prediction: 2024 is the year that you really start clinging to your bike as a source of reality.
By way of example, take your mental state on your drive to Pantani-2024 (February 11th at 10 AM Earlysville Standard Time), gravel bike on the roof, sun in your eyes, trouble on your mind. This, being your Xth Pantani - an experience that you have chosen now not once but multiple times - it's understandable that you have some stress. You know what you're in for. You have re-elected the Pantani ride, if you catch my drift. The Pantani is no longer something that you can tell yourself that you chose to try once, a simple mistake. No. Instead, Pantani represents something dark, something which you are.
So you'll be driving, chewing on that fact along with some cheap gas station carbs, pondering the universe of content that is increasingly dominated by that which isn't real, and you'll have made some mistakes already. For one, you only pooped once before you left the house. But also, when the Hunter Biden self-fellatio autoasphyxiation suicide video came out, it just looked so real, and, let's face it, it was believable. And so you believed it, and you shared it with friends and colleagues and used it to frame your world view a little bit. This was, like, 3 weeks ago. Then, thennnnnnn, the Trump spearhunting immigrants in Texas with his cronies expose story broke, and you shared that too, smug in your political superiority, and again, this stuff went around and around as stuff tends to do now, and you felt pretty good about your contribution to the media and the larger discourse, as it were. But then both stories - at least the video evidence - were proven to be demonstrably false, fake things in a world increasingly full of them, and the sky grew a little darker for a few days there, not just for you, but for the millions of people who saw, subscribed, shared, liked, and espoused these and other falsehoods. It all had felt so real, but now, backwards.
So, wistfully, you'll park your car in the field at the Pantani ride under darkening skies, stars up there somewhere behind the blue dome that you might later need to navigate if things go poorly, air filled with fog so heavy that you're unsure what to believe.
This is where The Pantani Ride - or more succinctly, your bicycle - can help you. There is no faking Pantani.
Among friends, you pile down Markwood road, old faces and legs aboard new bikes, and it's a brand new day. A laugh or two. Someone takes a stab at the front, swings off, pretends to quit already. Sunlight begins to filter through the fog, reminiscent of the sea, and a radio plays in someone's pack - not a digital device, mind you, but an actual AM/FM radio. Bon Jovi, something off the Slippery When Wet album, and you weave and squirm your way across the rolling gravel down Wesley Chapel, around the corner and up onto Fox mountain. At one time, not so long ago, you used to listen to the radio in your car on the way to work every day, a serenade of about 8 songs, total, which the station would play in circles, three of which were Aerosmith. By today's standard, it was a bewildering paucity of content, but you were captivated. We all were. We are both embarrassed and consoled by our own curmudgeon tastes.
Lots of political signs as you go over the back side of Fox, out into the hollers, twisted metal and malformed cardboard stuffed in front of almost every house, hellbent on letting you know which side of the fence they intend to dig in. It's like this everywhere, now. On a simple bike ride, you are implored to vote this, vote that, don't vote, rock the vote, get out the vote, surpress the vote, reject the vote, embrace life, keep your laws off my body, keep your body off of my lawn, etc. You are a passive subject to various, disparate proposals to buy green, buy American, buy electric, buy local, buy, buy, buy, with nigh religious fervor. You do your best. Recently, you gave $20 to a homeless guy at a gas station. You put up your own signs. You donated to the shriners. Somehow, you are still confused.
On the climb up Simmons gap, calves burning, low on water, lower back a total mess, the fog dissipates entirely, and the central aspect of your frustration begins to take a single, defined shape: that despite your years, all that wisdom that you should objectively have gained by now, you can no longer identify what is real. You sweat and grind and curse and blow your nose into your left hand. A car creeps by. Up on the hill, a man on his porch inspects you from a safe distance. He does not wave.
Over the top and down, down, down, into Bacon Hollow, where miners once lived in ramshackle huts and plied these hills with dynamite and moonshine stills, seeking fortune or adventure or both. Luck would have it, their wagon tracks are your playground now, gravel so smooth and refined that the huge, grey, house-sized boulders on either side register in your peripheral vision as fakes. Confusion sets in. Jeremiah Bishop, or maybe a hallucination of Jeremiah Bishop passes you on his way back up, a cameo that you can high five on a route for him which is barely an adventure. Did he ride here? Does he really do those rides you watch on the internet? Are you currently a participant in a Deepfake, some new strange brew made back in the holler? All these threats, both real and imagined, ghosts of times gone by.
But there's no faking Brokenback. Like a gift, a few thousand feet is all it takes sometimes. A saddle sore you've been trying to ignore is leaking. Something bursts, maybe in your brain, and - though you could probably ride this awful truth in the 50 tooth cog - you choose to walk for a minute. Maybe it's appropriate that The Pantani Ride, itself, is a fake. It's not a real event. In a contradictory way, it's a tribute gravel ride to a disgraced roadie who notoriously shunned the pave. There are no aid stations, no maps, no timer, no way in or out of this mess but on your own, which is convenient because that's exactly what you need right now. You should have known it all along, but that bike you're pushing is a reality check, a built-in litmus test for what's real and what's not, an axis upon which the rest of our insane world can spin and burn.
Burned clean, near the top, you remount and, fuck this thing, mash your way up and over the switchbacks in a way you didn't imagine you could. Past the mailboxes and straight back down Markwood to the field, somehow it's 68 degrees and sunny when you arrive. There's a keg? Someone is smoking ribs. It's February 11th, mid-afternoon, in this very strange election year of our lord 2024, and at least you have a mechanism to navigate it.
Don't you?
Up, up, up.
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