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.