To Live and Train in L.A. #6

I was going to write something inspiring today – about how good my dumps (translation: shits) have been lately – but I guess I’ll save that for tomorrow or for the day after that or maybe not even mention it ever again (doubtful). Instead, I feel like bitching about my future on the bicycle, which is something that I have determined is not too fucking bright. For one thing, despite my diligent efforts to roll my sorry ass out the door on a bike every afternoon, despite my regimented flat spinner days mixed with my unregimented hard hammer-after-the-jackasses days, despite that my attitude about getting out there and going after it is totally spectrally positive in every conceivable way, I’m still not in much better shape than I was a couple of months ago. My progress has been so incrementally slow, in fact, that I think I should be racing cyclocross in the fall for Team Giant Sloth instead of Team Heckawee. Maybe I’m getting too old to feel any zip in my legs? Maybe two hours a days isn’t enough? Maybe I should quit lounging around late at night, composing obnoxious documents on Microsoft Word or on Final Draft and eating salted-in-the-shell peanuts and slurping various forms of overpriced grape juice? You think that’s it? That I’m training correctly on the bike but behaving incorrectly off the bike?

Wait, wait. I need a piece of cheese just to finish this document. Good cheese, too. None of this processed bullshit like they melt and pour over the nachos at Burrito King in Silver Lake (worst Mexican place in L.A., incidentally). I want ultra-fat, ultra-sinky, ultra-kickass cheese. Preferably from Wisconsin. But I’ll accept the from-France type in a pinch.

Sorry. I lost my bearing there for a long second.

So like any eggheaded bicycle freak on the comeback trail, I have a goal set for myself in the fitter, leaner wastelands of my future: cyclocross season. I want to race every weekend this coming fall. No problem, right? That means it’s six full months from now before I have to toe the line and mush my guts off into the dusty, barrier-strewn trail of Southern California Cyclocross and fight tooth, fang, and claw for a finishing position three-quarters of the way back in the pack and consequently feel proud of myself for having finished three-quarters of the way back in the pack. You have to admit, incidentally, that training your ass off for a whole year in order to put in consistently below-mediocre performances is high-fucking-larious.

Oh well. It’s all fun, don’t you think? I surely do. Check out the picture above: that’s my street. Much more entertaining to climb than to descend.

That’s my new motto, by the way: Much more entertaining to climb than to descend.

At 4:20 this afternoon, when I’m out riding, I will pause along the trailside for inspiration and I will then point my front wheel toward the nearest steep hill and starting huffing upward.