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.

Democracy is a drop ride.

There are a couple of really basic life lessons that you learn from Tuesday Night Worlds, and they apply today more than ever, and I'll try to spell them out here in a way that White Anxiety can understand.

1)  If you show up to a fast road ride and you get shelled, that's your fault.  Don't blame the guy at the front, drilling it, for the fact that you cannot keep up.  He has trained his ass off.  If you're unhappy with your fitness, or you're pissed off that Coal jobs haven't come back yet, then start training.

Don't blame the ride.

2)  In a similar way, don't misunderstand something very obvious about that guy at the front...he is not Hispanic.  Take Will Leet, for example.  Or Jeff Bezos.  Goldman Sachs.  The Clinton Foundation.  All of them are very, very white.  Like, among the whitest people to ever be white in a white country and a white town full of white people.  The only thing brighter than Will Leet's new chromed-out road bike is Jeff Bezos enormous, growing, very bald white head, both of which you can now see from outer space.  So if you're trying to infer in some bizarre way that your lack of performance is about race, or that you've been maligned by someone who doesn't look like you, look again. The people with all the watts, just like the people with all the money, left to right...white people.

I went and voted this morning at 7 AM, shortly after the polls opened, at the same elementary school where my kids are in first grade.  In the parking lot, the sheer volume of confederate flags, Trump T-shirts, and InfoWars inspired bumper stickers caught me by surprise.  I just didn't think that, 2 years into this administration, that I'd be wading through a crowd of Still-Angry Rednecks, in the rain, to vote my conscience beside them.

Democracy is like a breakaway with too many guys in it.  It works OK for a while, but eventually, people stop doing their part.  One guy wants to sit on, which prompts another guy to do the same, and before you know it the 10 minute lead you had on the rest of the world has been reduced to nothing as you attack each other in the name of...well, you're not sure.  But that guy wouldn't take a pull.

Adding people to the breakaway doesn't help it, and so it occurred to me that I honestly don't care if you vote today.  At this point, if you need some kind of convincing about the need for your political voice, then this probably isn't the right move for you to mark anyway.  It's just not clear to me that adding another 30 million vindictive, angry, partisan voters to what we already have here will actually improve anything.

But the minute you see Will Leet go up the road, you better jump on that train, and so will I, and maybe your friends can come too, if they want to work.

See also, Voting, and welcome back to the United States of America.