Pantani 2024 is Sunday, 2/11 at 10 AM ET

 

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.  

2023 update - The Pantani Double - now offering two Pantanis for the price of none

Good and Evil.  Love and Hate.  Sunshine and Snow.  If you spend enough time contemplating your life, the weather, and your plans, you'll miss your life.  And you also might miss Pantani.  

Saturday looks like a gem of a day.  And the gravel up on the mountain is sweet bliss right now, recently brushed down the edges for good sight lines, chunder-free, and smooth as a baby's bottom.  Sunday, though, things will change.  Things are always changing, standard mountain weather deviations.  But even those things could change, just like you.  

It's the same tug of war every Spring, back and forth, up and down.  Event planning becomes, shall we say, schizophrenic.  But you can't cancel Pantani for a little rain, can you?  No, indeed.  You can only add.  

So then, owing to the weather, we'll have not one, but TWO Pantani options this weekend, one Saturday and one Sunday, both departing at 10 AM from the paranormal field.  

I hesitate to call them identical.  At least on paper, they'll be the same.  But the effect that each will have on your soul will be remarkably different, especially if you decide to have yourself a double scoop of Pantani and do both.  

Saturday will be a soothing experience, for a while anyway.  Performance Enhancing Weather.  You might blow up into a boozy mess near the Mailboxes, but at least you won't die from exposure.  

Sunday, I'm not sure.  I would estimate you should pack some snacks, dress warm, and what will be will be.  If nothing else, you'll be in good company.  

I leave it up to you.

Until then, taper down, and keep looking up, up, up.

Mona Lisa Smile

MOTHER OF GOD.  Pantani 2023 is one week from basically right now.  All the things I meant to do to be ready, I didn't do.  Not one of them.  It's tempting to raise the alarm, to fall into a fit of panic-training in an effort to be prepared in 7 days.  You know what's coming, having been up and down this road a time or two.  Fitness would be a convenient character trait on Sunday, 2/12 at 10 AM.  But I'm old enough now to heed my own advice.  At this point, if you've got it, then maybe you've got it.  But if you haven't, you won't; you can't; so don't.  I'm not saying don't show up.  Oh heavens no, your participation, slovenly as it will be, is the only thing that might eventually teach you a lesson.  But don't try to make something of yourself between now and Sunday.  You'll stir up nothing but old injuries and apathy.  Memories of times gone by.  Dust and bones.  

Multiple people sent me this photo of Paul Buschi on Pantani Sunday last year, huddled up next to the fire at Maybelle's in Dyke.  In the photo, he's dirty, wet, and cold, ready for an extrication.  Indeed, Pantani 2022, the Sunday version that went down Markwood rd into a 37 degree deluge, was more than even the mighty Paul Buschi could give.  I gave the photo a quick nod the first time, in approval.  Having bailed on my fair share of Pantani laps in the last 20 years, I thought I understood what the photo meant immediately, and I paid it little mind.  

Recently, though, someone sent it to me again, and I gave it a closer look.  Like many great works of art, the closer you look, the less certain you are.  

Buschi's not actually frowning, I noticed.  He's a little shelled, sure.  It's really shitty outside.  He's dirty, wet, cold.  But you can see something else there too.  A little upturn there at the corner of his mouth, that wild look in his eye.  Beneath the shattered exterior, beneath the rain and the headwinds and the dirt and the cold, the dream goes on.  The dream likes it.  

One of Marco Pantani's more notable exploits was his raid at Les Deux Alpes at the Tour de France in 1998.  In sheets of rain, the riders around him withered, their pink and blue jerseys, like a bad Easter, soaked and sagging down over their exposed ribs and elbows.  Pantani, on the other hand, only seemed to get stronger as the day wore on.  The worse it got, the better he was, flying up four categorized climbs into the history books, and into the yellow jersey.  At the top of podium, he was resplendent, donning a fresh, warm yellow jersey, he gave the cameras a little wink.  When he smiled, there was still dirt from the road in his teeth.

There are certain people that manage to ride like that.  When things turn bad, they only get better.  Adversity as an aphrodisiac.  Tragedy is their triumph.  Pantani, at times, managed to revel in that.  It's like he needed the drama to be his best.  It drove him to the brink.  

I've seen Paul Buschi crash exactly once.  We were at Giro D'Ville, maybe like 2009 or so.  We were racing down what was basically a dry creekbed into Buena Vista, rock-strewn and exposed, and in places it was actually full of water.  He passed me on a wide spot in trail, on one of those 5" travel Yeti 26ers, a teal blur against a background of pink rhododendron and iridescent green ferns.  Those yetis back then were rugged machines, built low to the ground like tanks, and fast as fuck.  I think he was going about 40 miles per hour.  He crashed seconds later, already about 1/4 mile ahead.  I think he caught a pedal on a rock and somersaulted downstream, end over end, his feet somewhere above and in front of his helmet.  It remains one of the worst crashes I've ever seen.  When the dust cleared, he was fine.  I mean, he was a little dinged up.  Some dirt up his nose.  A little blood.  He took his shirt off to check is collarbone, and it was basically the same level of broken and misshapen that it always was, ever since he took a chopper ride out of the North Fork in West Virginia years before.  Another legend in the Book of Buschi.  

As he saddled back up to ride down the trail into Buena Vista, we noticed something.  Around 100 tiny, blue butterflies had converged on our spot, every single one of them finding a resting place on Buschi's driveside pedal.  You couldn't see a even a piece of the SPD, only a shifting mass of sky blue insects as they skittered about and fluttered for a perch.  At first, my brain grasped for a rational explanation.  That if he'd nailed that pedal on a rock hard enough, there might have been a lingering vibration there which attracted all of the butterflies.  Or maybe the friction had created a heated surface, a nice spot in the sun that a single butterfly had found, and the rest has simply joined.  I was grasping at straws.  What I was witnessing was pure greatness.  Paul Buschi is an extraterrestrial.  Things happen to riders like Buschi, or Pantani, that would kill the rest of us, and they keep right on going.  Paul saddled up and rode down the trail and out into Buena Vista, and the butterflies trailed him all the way down.  

That's why Lance Arnstrong hated racing Pantani.  Why Buschi's record time down Whetstone, or Torry, or all his other exploits, will never be outdone.  And really, it's why you should still show up for Pantani 2023 on Sunday, even if you'll never be like them.  

Because you might beat the dreamer - maybe for a single day - but you'll never, ever beat the dream.

Up, up, up.

PANTANI 2023 is Sunday, 2/12 at 10 AM

Where do things go?  The time, for example, but mostly the little things, like your knees or the combination to your bike lock.  Who rode to victory in the '15 edition of Paris-Roubaix.  When you tested positive for Covid for the first time.  I've been warned about this, and I've waited for it for some years, and now here it is: these are the things we begin to forget.  

I would be remiss, I think, to invite you to Pantani 2023, which will be SUNDAY, February 12th at 10 AM ET, if I didn't first explain my lack of attendance at the 2022 edition.  I tried, I promise you.  On Thursday night, the week before Pantani '22, I even led a night ride on the mountain, up Mission home and Simmons, down Wyatt, back up brokenback, and back.  Basically the best (worst?) 20 miles of the route.  I felt like hell.  Not good.

My repeated Covid tests on Friday came up negative, and Saturday AM too.  But that was back when those rapid tests were accurate maybe like, 1 in 147 times, and you actually needed a PCR test to confirm the shit was in you.  So as most of you beautiful people were lining up in the field on Markwood rd on Saturday morning, resplendent in your new kits and under 65-degree blue skies, I stood for a proper PCR test administered at the local pop-up testing facility, looming over a midget with a swab who, based upon the angle of attack, could really dig in there, knuckles deep into my sinuses, and prove my excuse for not riding Pantani was legit.  

It was not.  4 days later, my PCR results came back and I was negative.  I did not have Covid when I skipped Pantani '22, despite my best efforts to have it.   My hall pass was null and void.  

So, I tried to go out and ride Pantani two weeks later, but I failed.  Ice and rain and whatever, so I pulled the plug near Fox mountain and came home.  O for 2.  

Again, I tried sometime near the end of May, trying to pull some semblance of fitness together for Il Giro.  But I started late, ran out of time, and again, failed.  0 for 3.

It got worse.  While training for the SM100, Hiser and I went out and gave it a shot in July or so.  I think it was like 90 degrees when we set out.  Again, failure was our fate.  We ran out of water going back up brokenback, tucked tail, and came back down to civilization before finishing the last climb.  0 for 4 at this point, and it's starting to feel like it might not happen for me in '22.  It had been 18 months since I'd successfully ridden a Pantani loop, and, what the fuck, Bryan Lewis can ride this thing in like 2 hours.  What have I become?

Hope springs eternal, of course, and sometime around early August, Andy and I set out to complete a lap, and we finally did it.  Near the top of Simmons, we saw a Bobcat, the first one I've seen in Virginia in a very long time.  He was a sleek little sucker, sharp, fit, with the kind of dark fur that renders near-invisibility in the forest up there.  So was the Bobcat.  And I was finally coming around.  

So I rode it again a week later. It was sweet, sweet Pantani success.  For a loop that I've ridden probably 50 times in my lifetime to that point, just being  2 for 2 felt like a hot streak in Vegas.  Ante up, bitches.  And watch out SM100, I'm ready.  

But leading up to SM100, two things happened.  

1) SM100 was cancelled, as many of you know.

2) I got Covid.  Like, for realsies, this time.  

But the morning of September 4th, I woke up OK, my Covid test was finally coming up negative, and I figured, what the hell, why not.  So I went out and rode the SM100 loop anyway.  In a year of sucking at pretty much everything, canceling, bailing, and otherwise not being able to do the things I reckoned I should be capable of doing, it seemed appropriate to push through this one.  I rode the '22 SM100 in something like 12 hours, alongside a handful of other like-minded individuals who, like me, just weren't willing to let it go.  On the way up Narrowback the first time, someone behind me - a veteran - said "you never know when it might be your last one."  

For the record, the Shenandoah Mountain 100 is still the best 100 on this planet.  

Which brings me to where we are: PANTANI 2023.  Il Pantani 2023 will be Sunday, February 12th at 10 AM ET.  I'll try to log back in here over the coming weeks and provide some additional commentary, instruction, and institutional lore that might serve to motivate you to turn up and get down.  (Rob Issem, send me some keg photos.)  

But given recent history and the lessons learned from 2022, don't be afraid to count on yourself.  

Up, up, up. 

Weather UPDATE - Pantani Double

Good and Evil.  Love and Hate.  Sunshine and Snow.  This weekend appears to have equal amounts of both in store for us.  

It's the same tug of war every Spring, back and forth, up and down.  Event planning becomes, shall we say, schizophrenic.  But you can't cancel Pantani for a little snow, can you?  No, indeed.  You can only add.  

So then, owing to the weather, we'll have not one, but TWO Pantani options this weekend, one Saturday and one Sunday, both departing at 10 AM from the paranormal field.  

I hesitate to call them identical.  At least on paper, they'll be the same.  But the effect that each will have on your soul will be remarkably different, especially if you decide to have yourself a double scoop of Pantani and do both.  

Saturday will be a soothing experience, for a while anyway.  Performance Enhancing Weather.  You might blow up into a boozy mess near the Mailboxes, but at least you won't die from exposure.  

Sunday, I'm not sure.  I would estimate you should pack some snacks, dress warm, and what will be will be.  If nothing else, you'll be in good company.  

I leave it up to you.

Until then, taper down, and keep looking up, up, up.

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.