Not good enough: Race #3

I am not good enough. That’s a statement that screams for context. Good enough at what? To do or be what? What is good enough?

I want to be a bike racer. Not pro. I do not want to ride the Tour de France. I just want to be a guy racing his bike in small races only attended by the friends and family of racers. Races where the prize for winning is pride and maybe a gift certificate to Taco Time. Being that kind of racer is harder than you’d think.

The start of a bike race

I did two races last year. In both those races, I was dropped from the pack within three laps. You’re no longer racing when you slide off the back of the bunch. You’re on a solo ride. You could argue that it’s still racing because you’re still technically on a race track with other racers. But it doesn’t feel like racing. It feels like losing.

This winter, I decided I was going to do better. I was going to train hard and become a racer. I bought myself some training software, hooked my bike up to an indoor trainer, and got to work. I woke up at 4:20 AM, four times a week, and rode that bike in my garage for roughly an hour each day. I did what the machine told me to do. I did steady rides. I did cadence drills. I did intervals so hard that I lost myself in guttural prayers, desperate to survive. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. From January until May.

I lined up for my first race this year on my birthday. The start line was full of people telling nervous jokes, waiting for the race to be set in motion. Then the whistle blew. Shoes clattered into clips and gears clicked and chains whined. We leaned into the corners and accelerated out of them. I passed people and was passed by people in the constant swarm of motion that is a peloton. We barreled around the track at twenty-something-miles-an-hour. One lap. Two. Three. I was doing it. I was racing. The pack accelerated on the fifth lap, but I stayed with them. My heart was beating a steady drum roll and my lungs were burning, but I stayed with them.

Racing! 

I was, for a moment, a racer.

The pace increased again on the sixth lap. I fought to stay on. But slowly, slowly I drifted backwards. I dug deeper, willed my legs to spin me back into the comfort of the draft, but they could not.

There is a moment when drifting out the back of the group that is hard to understand if you’ve never drafted at speed before. The mass of cyclists punch a hole in the air. A hole that shelters you, almost pulls you along. But if you get too far behind the bunch, that hole collapses. The elastic pull of the draft snaps and is replaced by a roiling wall of air pushing you backward, fighting you. And the pack drifts away from you like a loosed balloon: within sight and yet irretrievable.

Drifting away

 Alone. It is quiet behind the pack. No whir of chains. No clacking of gears. Just the drumming of your heart and the chugging of your lungs. Why did I do all that training? All those early mornings. All that work. And here I was. Alone. Again.

I rode past the start/finish line and shrugged at my wife in defeat. I decided to soft pedal a lap more and then quit. It was time to go home.

“Don’t stop.”

Small words. But they kept me going. I didn’t stop. I accelerated. I started passing other people who dropped off the back. We were the discarded fragments of the peloton, the shrapnel strewn across the road. The pack surged toward us from behind, the hum of tires growing loud. I saw one of the dropped riders accelerate and merge back into the pack. I followed his lead. In moments, I was back in the draft. Back with the group. I was a lap down, but I wasn’t alone. I finished with the pack, felt the rush of the final sprint, and saw the victor and his teammates celebrate. Even being a lap down, it was thrilling.

In the grand scheme of things, it does not matter that I am a bad bike racer. It is a silly hobby, riding in circles on my bike with other people. But I find that it is useful to me to try. Losing can be a great teacher. I’m learning about racing. About how to read the pack. About how to corner and draft and when to accelerate. And I’m learning about myself. That I can do harder things than I thought I could. That I can be disciplined about training, making myself exercise hard before the sun has risen.

Most importantly, though, I’m learning about the value of small words spoken at the right time. How we can say something in passing that lifts another person, allows them to keep going, to keep fighting whatever fight they’re in.

When I say that I am not good enough, I do not want you to read that as a negative statement. It is a fact. But it can change. I am better than I was.

I am not good enough. Yet.

P.S. I have done two races this year. The first one is recounted above. The second one is similar, but instead of my wife offering encouragement after I got dropped, Fowler told me that, “if it was easy, everyone would do it.” The effect was similar.