The Bike in Balance!

Check this out: new blog on Bicycling.com. It will run weekly till the end of May.

http://bicycling.com/blogs/bikeinbalance/2012/03/09/give-a-damn/

Mag's Article in New Bicycling

In the current Bicycling. Written by me. You don't have to be happy about it if you don't want to. In fact, you shouldn't be.

http://www.bicycling.com/news/featured-stories/beaten-track?cm_mmc=Twitter-_-Bicycling-_-Content-Story-_-BeatenT

To Live and Train in L.A. #1

It ain’t no picnic. Let me say that from the start. In my best days of cycling, back in the day, back when I was a forty-year-old Category IV Heckawee superstar in rural southern Illinois, cycling was a matter of suiting up, saddling up, rolling down the street for a couple of minutes and then pedaling along essentially empty roads for hours on end. If two or three cars would pass in a thirty-minute period, we would often complain that the road had become a bit too ‘trafficky’ for our tastes, and we would seek, and easily find, quieter roads. We were happy cyclists indeed. What an inspiring time that was! Here in Los Angeles, however, a quiet road seems to be one where you can manage to pedal thirty seconds without narrowly escaping certain death from any one of the twenty-five million automobiles and trucks that cram the Los Angeles streets at all hours of the day. Sure, the city has provided bike lanes and erected numerous signs indicating the existence of bike lanes and bike routes. Sure, huge numbers of cyclists manage to ride on a daily basis here: commuters, racers, homeless people, hipster single-speeder douchebags with skinny jeans and no helmets, et cetera. But me? The great pumpkin on a cyclocross bike? I’m scared shitless every time I roll down the street.

Go ahead. Call me a pussy. I don’t care. The L.A. roads are busy and scary and while I’ve lived a rich life and am ready to meet my maker – my maker being The Pillsbury Company, of course – I don’t want to get killed while I’m riding my bicycle. Bicycles, you see, are for improving the quality of life, not for magnifying the violence attending one’s death.

Nevertheless, I have ambitions, misplaced, petty, foolish ambitions along the lines of “Gee, it would be fun to race my bike again and not have my ass completely handed to me.” Or “Gee, I would love to hang once again with a group of friends who like to ride bikes.” And so on. Some mornings, I read Velonews or Cyclingnews or CXMagazine on the internet and start sobbing because I want to get back into racing so badly. But don’t call me a pussy in this instance. Ain’t nothing wrong with a grown man sobbing about wanting to race his bicycle again.

So what can be done? Should a person risk death, on a daily basis, just to find inner satisfaction? The answer, obviously, is fuck yes!

If this were Facebook, you would have to click that you like the living fuck out of what I just wrote.

And you know what? I’m heading out for a near-death experience right now. Should be awesome. Maybe I'll see you out there and we can tell stories.

What Color Is Your Bicycle?

Waiting For The Bicycles

Rain Nontraining

Dammit! I should be racing at the Tour Down Under right now, spanking the collective tails of the pro peloton, accepting accolades in Adelaide, et cetera, and at the conclusion of the race, I should spend a week wrestling with crocodiles – to improve my scant upper-body strength, of course. But I’ve been spending the week training in Los Angeles instead, which has been brutal indeed, since LA is experiencing its biggest weeklong rain event since Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo discovered California in 1542. My way of dealing with the rain: watch the Food Network and ride the trainer. This may sound like a pussy’s way out of a manly, ride-in-the-rain world, but you wouldn’t believe the wonderful new recipe ideas I’ve gotten this week, not to mention various really smart ways to decorate the table before plating dinner for my guests because you know what? Cooking for other people is all about improving life for your friends, or at least that’s what the cooking-show ladies have been saying all week, and why not believe them? I’m sitting for a couple of hours indoors, on a trainer, in Southern California, hiding from the rain when the temperature is 55 degrees; it doesn’t take much to imagine a better life under these circumstances. Probably this very second, as the legend goes, there are people out motorpacing in Northern Wisconsin, in a windchill of 25 degrees below zero, and I guess when we hit the first cobbled stretch at the Tour of Flanders in April, those people are going to drop me. That’s cool with me, I guess: I’m setting my sights on races farther along in the calendar.

On the cross-training front, however, everything’s right on track. My new neighborhood is famous for its incredibly steep streets and for its amazingly long staircases that rise up and over the sharp hills. The dog and I have been taking forced daily, hourlong forced marches in the rain, and while I have found the 20 flights of stairs near Earl Street to be rather painful taking them two at a time, the dog has said to me, “Them stairs ain’t nothing the way you’re runnin em.” She’s right. I have to pick it up.

Anyway, the weather’s clearing tomorrow, and I’m riding outside. Thinking about dusting off the road bike and seeing what life is like on 23 cc tires: I’ve forgotten.

I’m thinking about lamb chops with a rosemary lemon sauce, too.

Happy riding.

Mag's 2010 Racing Season: The Announcement!

I’ve been in Oregon for over a week now, bikeless but at the same time oddly happy. True, my exercise regimen here has resembled the kind of midget-size political and military power Napoleon had when he was exiled to Elba. To run, I have decided, is to beat one’s joints into an irreversible trash-heap state, so instead of running, now I’m just walking. If I had to stay here for another full week, I would be crawling. A month, and I would turn into a mushroom that not even a starving animal would want to eat. Ah, the tragedy.

So what does a cyclist do in a ten-day period off the bike? He plots out an ambitious training program, sets a plan for the upcoming season, and decides on a number of equipment purchases to make this training program a success. Fuck yeah! I’m going to buy a new Trek Madone and a shiny new Radio Shack uniform and a bunch of Nike undergarments, and I’m going to race in the goddam Tour de France this summer. No shit. I think this is a reasonable season goal, not only from a financial and physical standpoint but from a mental standpoint because that’s key, having your mind in the game before your put your ass in the saddle. So I’ve been studying the Tour’s route fairly carefully and targeting a few stages for stage wins, which is embarrassing because I would prefer to compete for victory in the general classification, but at this point I’m going to be realistic: take a few wins in the first week of the tour, enjoy a few moments of glory, and hey, if opportunity presents itself, I might go for the whole shebang. Why not?

See you in France this summer!

Allez, my friends.

Performance-enhancing Testicles

Numbness, Numb Nuts

Bike Maintenance Tip

Thank you, Lance Armstrong

Blown

Awakening the Giant Sleeping Baby

That's a street sign in Bakersfield, California, in case you didn't know. I certainly didn't know till I stood there and took the picture. Never have listened to Merle much, either, which according to a number of writer friends of mine is proof that I've lived a spiritually depraved and musically deprived life. I sometimes tell them, "You ever listen to Paul Hindemith?" They're like, "Who?" Like I shouldn't have brought it up. The important thing, and I'm finally learning this in later life, is that people really enjoy their Merle Haggard music and that's cool; and I really enjoy my Paul Hindemith music and that's not really cool; and there's nothing I'll ever be able to do about it but smile and have cool people think I'm an idiot for liking music they don't want to understand.

Anyway, I took that picture a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago now, maybe six weeks, when I was on my way with my buddy Seth to his family cabin in the Sierras. Seth, incidentally, is originally from Bakersfield and consequently holds Merle in the same esteem as people like me from Wisconsin hold, say, Bart Starr, or maybe Brett Favre before Brett left us for a stadium full of fat Norwegian women in Minneapolis. We were just going to the Sierras for the day. Seth had to make sure the place was ready for the winter. And I went along as a tourist, because I wanted to see some things in California I hadn't seen before. We had bikes with us, too.

Which brings up something else. My friends in California, even if they ride bikes like Seth does (and he's pretty strong), have a natural aversion to Spandex, to bib shorts, jerseys, arm warmers, leg warmers, and all the necessary clothing accouterments to the cycling life, except helmets. They see people in Spandex and they say, "I'm not gonna wear that shit." I say, "Ever listen to Paul Hindemith?"

What I lost when I moved to California is my identity. When I lived in Carbondale, Illinois, I had been a cyclist, first and foremost, which I full well understand was a misplaced form of identity. I should have thought of myself as a professor and a writer because those things were my official profession, but to be a professor and a writer in Carbondale - for me - was a constant humiliation, working in the kind of department where I'd teach books and my colleagues would tell my students that those books I was teaching were bad, not to mention that somewhere in there I wrote and published a book that detailed widespread heavy drinking in the English department, and consequently I was reduced to Turd Status after that. One definite aspect of Turd Status, especially at a university in a small town where people are bored shitless and can't think of anything else to do with their lives but to ponder university matters, is that once a person has been assigned Turd Status, this status is irrevocable. True enough, maybe folks could have read my account of widespread drinking in the department and instead of telling me I should seek work elsewhere they might have thought, Damn, there are a lot of terrible drunks around here; maybe we should do something about it? But they didn't. Therefore, I was a cyclist. My best friends were cyclists. We rode all day together and at night, we would get together and have fellowship and watch ball games and play music. We were people comfortable in Spandex. We wore sandals with sox. We were dorks, by California standards, but we were happy. And as far as I know, my cycling friends in Carbondale - the Heckawee - are still happy. The people from the English department? I wouldn't know. They were never my friends anyway. I haven't heard a word from any of them since I left.

But Seth is my good buddy, one of the best friends I've had. And he thinks Spandex is stupid. And his thoughts about Paul Hindemith? I wouldn't even want to ask him. But the guy likes to ride bikes. And he's a writer, too, a really good one. So when we took bikes up to the Sierras that day, either something was right with this picture or something was horribly wrong.

The family cabin sits at 7200 feet, in a Sequoia Grove, with some of the best-looking mountain bike trails probably in the world (which is why the location must remain secret), and to make this short tale even shorter, Seth and I went for a ride up there and couldn't hardly breathe because we live at sea level and the air is just way too thin in the mountains. We suffered. We had to take breaks every fifteen minutes. We thought we were going to die. Since I had come to California, I had done absolutely everything to put aside my life as a cyclist. I had come here to be a writer, not a cyclist, but until that day, in the high mountains, I had been miserable in California. You see, to suffer in the thin mountain air, to roll on perfect trails, can life possibly get any better than this? And why had I let that all go?

The point is, cycling is not really the meaning of life but without cycling, at least for me, life has no meaning. I love it. It's me. It's who I am. It's why I want to get up in the morning each day, not because I don't want to work and to be productive professionally (I want to do all that) but because the reward I can have for my efforts is I can ride my bike. I want to train again and race again and keep on training and racing till I'm unable to prop myself upright on my bike.

Whew, that felt good to say.

I know. I shouldn't have mentioned all this. You were more interested in Merle.

Way Too Fast

Totally

What If I Can't Keep Up?

Advice for the New Guy