To Live and Train in L.A. #2

When life gives you lemons?

My immediate goal in life – and this is a serious-shit situation – is to eliminate my natural cyclist’s tendency to complain about my fitness, my weight, my equipment, my available training roads and trails, my time available for training, my basically everything. True enough, before I got into cycling as a way of life, I used to be naturally grumpy, naturally prone to finding the worst in everything, but once I started hanging around with dedicated cyclists, my bitch-about-shit qualities matured into an Olympic-level activity. Much of the bitching in cycling stems from people making excuses for not performing well in a race: I’ve had a cold all week, I had to work extra hours and couldn’t train the way I normally would, I was having problems with my shifters, the cleat on my left shoe is coming loose. That sort of thing. I’ve never actually heard anybody say, “You know what? I’m a total pussy and I just didn’t feel like trying very hard on the racecourse today.” Then again, I guess I have heard that. I have said that, in fact, on a number of occasions, because I guess, deep down, when it comes to bike racing, I’m a pussy. You’ll still be my Facebook friend anyway?

Shitfire.

So yeah, I don’t think L.A. is a perfect place to ride bikes, but I don’t have any alternative, so I’m going to get it done in the space I can find. Funny item: A few weeks ago, I posted some nonsense on Mag’s Sentence about how I was going to race in the Tour de France this summer. Honest to God, somebody read that and got in touch with me and said, “Mag, you’ve got an awful lot on your plate professionally this spring. You honestly think you have time to prepare for the Tour de France?” Obviously, this sweet person is not a cycling fan. The Tour de France? I fucking wish. Then again, I don’t really wish. The Tour de France would hurt more than this old boy wants to hurt. I still want a little hurt in my life, though, and I’ve got this crazy dream of racing cyclocross every weekend next fall, from mid-September till Christmas. I don’t want to race to win, because I couldn’t win anyway. I want to race because this would be an entertaining pasttime and also a terrific excuse to avoid eating cheese and drinking heavily and watching the NFL every Sunday in the fall.

But cross season is a long time away. This means I can wait a few months before getting serious, right? Wrong. I’ve dialed in a couple of excellent bike-path routes, places where a person can spin in the little ring for a couple of hours a day, and for the next six weeks, that’s all I’m going to do on the bike: flat paths, little ring, high rpm spinning, no aggression, two hours a day, six days a week. If you think about a plan like that, you will know that if I actually follow through with it for the full six weeks, I will likely end up babbling and in need of a drool cup. But I don’t give a shit: Maybe I’ll get my spin back and by April be ready to go on the Tuesday/Thursday morning group racer ride that meets near my house and the racers won’t laugh at me when I pedal up to the parking lot.

Meantime, I’m gone spinning, and I’m not bitching about a goddam thing.

A Case Of The Ass

Fellow Cyclists and Cycling Enthusiasts:

Perhaps I need a better picture than the one above to illustrate the problem I have down below, and by ‘down below,’ I mean my moral epicenter, the heart of my stern, as it were, the entrance to my Mines of Moria (and please cover your earballs if you find this line of inquiry offensive): Yes, my anus hurts. Not my ass. My anus. I do not mean this in a figurative way, either.

Since I was a boy I’ve had periodic bouts with a disease called celiac, which is an intolerance to gluten, the symptoms of which are lovely things like long-term depression, unpredictable weight gain and weight loss, and, most severely in me, painful digestive troubles. True enough, I could eliminate all these problems entirely by being smart – something rather alien to me – and dispensing with gluten in my life: no more bread, pasta, bagels, schnitzel, pancakes, Tombstone Pizza, and so on. I have eliminated the most profound source of gluten from my diet, Miller High Life, the absence of which has created a sort of long-term depression of its own. But I haven’t eliminated the other fun forms of gluten, namely pasta and bread, my two favorite foods in the world besides nachos (gluten-free!).

What does celiac have to do with my current anus woes? Some forms of gluten fuck me up more than others – oddly enough, cheap, low-quality, processed-flour products don’t faze me one iota – but this last week, owing to a spirited stock-up session at Costco, I have found myself in possession of numerous loaves of excellent, high-quality La Brea bread. First, it tastes great. Second, it really tastes great. Third, I’ve been eating La Brea toast breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Happy times, right? I don’t know the exactly chemical formulation of La Brea bread, but there is clearly some significant, possibly world-threatening quantities of gluten in that stuff. I would count myself lucky if I had simply gotten a bout of good old explosive diarrhea from this bread. Instead – and I apologize for being clinical – I can’t seem to get a clean pinch. That’s right. I can’t finish the job! And I’m feeling rather raw, shall we say. Now, this would be horrible enough for a person whose chief recreational activity is playing bridge with little old ladies in Massachusetts, but for a cyclist on a nine-month epic quest to return to regular cyclocross racing, for a man who needs to place his anus on a thin strip of Italian saddle leather for a minimum of two hours a day? To have Unclean Pinch Syndrome?

Needless to say, I went out for a ride yesterday afternoon on the L.A. River Trail, heading west along the 5 toward Griffith Park, and the anus pain and misery were so horrific, so searingly unbearable, that I literally rolled my bike down the embankment to the raging river and placed my ass in the water for relief.

I was not relieved.

A homeless guy saw me in the water and said, “Something wrong?"

He was shell-shocked-looking after being outside all last week in the El Nino rains, and if anybody were expert in things going wrong, it had to have been him. But he kept his distance from me and waited for my response.

I said, “My anus hurts.”

He stared downriver and shook his head.

“Whose doesn’t?” he said. And he walked away.

I called after him: “You want six loaves of La Brea bread? Come on over to my place.” But he didn’t hear me.

The moral of this story is simple.

Oatmeal.

Ponder that.

And have a nice ride today.

Respectfully submitted,

Mike ‘Raw Anus” Magnuson

Just A Stem Away

You might not believe this, but I’m sitting here and looking at this fuzzy picture of my cyclocross stem and, hell, I’m getting all weepy. That stem is at least 800 miles from me right now, possibly pining away for me as much as I’m pining away for it. Well, probably not. Bikes don’t pine when they’re separated from their owners; they rust; and their owners get fat.

So yeah, I’m out of town for a ten-day stretch, which is a good thing professionally because I’m not out of town on vacation – well, that’s not entirely true: I’m doing some teaching in Oregon (teaching creative writing) and as any non-teacher will tell you, teaching creative writing is a form of vacation from reality. Anyway, owing to travel and to the rainy location where I’m holed up and to the daily schedule at the place where I’m teaching, it wasn’t reasonable to bring a bike. To boot, there aren’t facilities hereabouts with stuff like quality Spinning bikes or bike rentals that aren’t of the beach-cruiser-for-50-bucks-an-hour variety. For a normal person, a non-biker, this would be no biggie. But for cyclists, who are the heroin addicts of exercise freaks, the prospect of ten days without a top tube between the legs is almost unthinkable. In my case, since I had wandered away from serious cycling and now have finally gotten into a great routine with at least two hours at a day on the bike, this 10 day break is literally too much for me to bear.

What are my choices? Buy a case of bourbon and get fucked up? Hang out in the hotel bar and say stupid shit to people? Order pizza three times a day? These seem like wonderful alternatives to what I have been doing. Running. Or really trotting. Or stumbling forward. I’ve been heading outside at six in the morning and trying something my father used to do, when he first started running several million years ago, which is walk to the next light pole and then run to the next light pole and so on. Oddly, I like this, even though the pain is horrific and I’m pleased nobody is around to see.

Nevertheless, my goal for this spring is to find a way to jog a few miles without stopping and when I can do that, I’m going to sign up for a fun run or whatever. Might be nice to join up with the millions of people who run instead of the hundreds of freaks who ride bikes.

Maybe I should just fetch that case of bourbon.

Advice for the New Guy