Poetry

The thing about poetry being good for reading when in the hospital… when you can only get a few minutes’ time between visitors and doctors and nurses and many others whose names you don’t, won’t know, between meals confirmed by your name and room number, or later after normal hours when you’re alone and bored and aware of things going on in the next bed, in the hallway, elsewhere, but not wanting that to be your world, that poetry’s short and digestible nature helped amidst all that, where you can read a poem or two and be elsewhere… It just sounded better. Better than the absolute truth, which stretches itself into an Ouroboros with these kinds of things.

When it was just the two of us, we talked about food, which seemed cruel, but it perked him up. I also told him that she’d suggested I bring the chicken, which gave both of us a good laugh as we mused over potential antics and the chaos it’d cause in the hospital. We named the IV hanger, too, though I didn’t tell him that the name we settled on was the middle name of my grandfather, who, I remembered later, was the last person I’d seen in that same hospital, now over 15 years past. That visit had been for the same sort of thing.

For whatever reason, I asked him if he’d ever met the small, elderly man who teaches aikido at the Y. He hadn’t, so I told him about the teacher, who, at the time we met, was 81 and had been practicing various martial arts for 55 years. I told him about how the teacher and I had eventually talked about bikes and riding and that I’d learned that the teacher rode a 25 year-old Specialized 15 miles every week, including “lots of good hills”—and this was all before much of the news that’s now old news took on different contexts—but the teacher had added, with a smirk, “Lance retired because he heard I was coming”.

He got a kick out of the story.

In a few years, he’ll be 81 as well.

When it came time to leave, the embrace said more than we could articulate. At the elevator, an older man with an unfamiliar accent, bouquet of lilies and a rolling suitcase waited for the elevator with me. It turned out we were both heading for the same exit, so I ended up holding the door for him a couple times as we navigated the multiple floors and buildings with equal confusion. I got the impression he was leaving after having been there for a while and I wondered how many people left there on their own. We found the main exit and politely bid each other farewell. As I was walking out, I overheard a woman say “…oh, and that Oriental drove you that time, right? He was such a nice one…” and watched a kid with sizeable plugs and Buddy Holly glasses pass by the valet booth and go out of his way to spit into the street, not onto the sidewalk in front of him. It was minutiae. It meant something. At least something enough to remember, now, after time has passed, and provide some sort of cliché, infuriating reminder that “life goes on” despite everything else, despite the whole rest of the memory, which isn’t short or digestible.

Outside

An expanse of a dead grass spread out behind him with a small, characterless oak providing a patch of irregular shade as he did pigeon and down dog and warrior.

The rest of us had either already left unceremoniously or gathered around the van, taking turns behind one of the two front doors, our bare asses exposed to the suburbia behind us. The van and the uselessness of its sliding doors served, in a way, as a small reminder of life-other-than-riding. Gear and bottles littered the interior, mixing with toys and sippy cups.

Standing around the van, we congratulated each other for a solid effort—the unspoken agreement was that we had all gathered with a seemingly perfect unison of comparable fitness. No rotations skipped, no KOMs, no such thing as a bad day on the pedals. We were all happy clones.

Of course, we all knew better. We all knew who’d taken stronger pulls or skipped a rotation or surged or slowed or who was ahead or behind us when we’d felt good or bad or both. We all knew of the flat and the “party foul” comment regarding riding on patched tubes. We all knew of the sprint to the unofficial line and the clear results of the day. All unspoken. Facts unacknowledged in the name of tact and etiquette and lessons handed down to us by our mentors, spoken directly or quietly reinforced with a non-invite to the next ride or letting us sit out front longer. If we had been pressed for the hows and whys, few of us could explain how we knew what we knew, but we knew, and in that knowing we were on the inside, right or wrong.

It had been a good, hard day for all of us. That was enough.

But somehow, in Sauce’s act of excusing himself from the group for a post-ride yoga session, he moved outside the acknowledgements and cloning. Perhaps some of us thought to ourselves “he’s still learning” or pondered whether yoga was the key to his neophyte strength. Simply, that he was there in that suburban field contorting himself into poses with shorthanded names, it was outside the lexicon, outside the slipstream.

Pinning It

We turned and the piano keys of the past 195k went into discordant chaos as the road crumbled into a construction war zone, a single lane coned off across an ugly, uneven plane of backfilled gravel, pot holes and dirt with occasional chunks of cement and exposed pipes. True to form, Smiles pinned it and we all swore in our heads as we tunneled into the simplicity of hypoxic desperation in holding a wheel. The cacophony of rocks hitting frames and cranks mixed with uncontrolled grunts and gasps, failing, though, to drown out the blaring reality that Smiles’ sweat was flying back in volume, showering all of us with uncomfortable choices of either closing our gasping mouths or burying our heads, losing sight of all but the blurred, rutted insanity that flew beneath our wheels. And though it all only lasted a moment, it was the best moment of the entire year.

Rods and Saddle

The Car Ride

It’d been a moving target of a plan, but, eventually, it came to pass and I found myself as the fourth in a languid summer night’s game of front-yard badminton. Knowing only her, she’d introduced me to the other two, a father and his son, and after hands were shaken she added “He rides his bike a lot.” The father said “Oh” and the son stared at me silently. I looked across the street to where I’d parked my car, having driven the half-mile to her house. I wondered why I hadn’t ridden.

The game was surprisingly balanced in skill and beer consumption. No shuttlecock jokes were made and only once was an out-of-bounds call worth questioning. After each match, we switched sides and partners and shotgunned beers under the street lights. The son chain smoked, letting the cigarette hang from the corner of his mouth as he played and talked.

After a few matches, we sat down on the slope by the house and the son asked his dad if he could borrow the car. The father declined with a conscientiously vague “You know the agreement.” Not content, the son pushed harder and, between the volleys of queries and rejections, small details emerged as to what the “agreement” entailed. Away for school, trouble, expelled, struggles. The hostess and I exchanged looks and she tried to alleviate the building tension with an offering of more beers to be shotgunned. The son agreed to one on the condition that his father do one as well. We watched as they both downed their beers. After lighting another cigarette and belching out the smoke along with the post-chug air, the son made his final argument, promising it was a quick trip to a friend’s place, he’d be back in 20 minutes and, besides, his mother would never know. It was apparent he’d made many promises before with different people and with different details.

Keys in hand, the son promised, again, that he was sober, “Not even buzzed… I mean, I was at school, remember?” His reference to his former school was proof enough for his father, and it was true that he’d likely built up a tolerance far beyond any of ours. I didn’t feel any effects as it was, in spite of our efforts, and I was the least-practiced of the group.

An hour later, the father’s cell phone died in the midst of trying to contact and then track down his son. His anger and embarrassment was evident, and, perhaps as a way of beating himself up over having trusted his son, or perhaps in retaliation for him having betrayed that trust, the father told us the history that, he believed, he should’ve remembered before giving his son the keys. It was uncomfortable. Our hostess found a way to graciously diffuse and console and we talked about other things, about her gardening efforts, about mutual friends of theirs and of business decisions. He relaxed a bit. I offered to give him a ride to his place.

In the car, we didn’t say much. We were still strangers. It wasn’t long of a drive, a few miles at most, and the father seemed intent to sit with his thoughts. As I turned onto his street, he asked if I liked riding my bike a lot.

“Yes, I do. Very much so.” I replied.

“Do you remember when you first learned how to ride on your own?”

“I do, yeah.”

He paused, then said “I remember when my son learned to ride his bike on his own. I taught him. I was there. I wonder if he remembers.”

It hadn’t been a question and I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I said nothing and we were silent for the last few blocks before we arrived. The father thanked me as he got out and I replied that it was no problem and offered a trite-sounding “Good luck.” The father nodded and closed the car door. As I watched him walk up to his house, I recalled my memories of when I learned how to ride. I decided that it was likely that the son remembered.

The Shapes of (Some) Things

Geometry numbers of the road bikes ridden by the WorldTour teams. The more frequent the number, the larger the font size

It should be noted that these are the result of an arm-chair survey of the geometries listed for the bikes claimed to be ridden by the ProTeams for the 2012 season. All numbers were derived from manufacturer’s sites, entered into a spreadsheet and looked at for more time than one should probably admit. Trail was least-commonly listed. It should be assumed that nobody measures the same, as demonstrated by the pouring of a pint. If you are not inspired by a specific model of road bike ridden for the 2012 WorldTour, yet feel that the averaged glory of all road bikes ridden by all riders could yet capture what it is you think was, or wasn’t, the best year of racing-not-yet-raced, below you will find the average number (in millimeters) for each of the geometry aspects that were considered:

Top tube length: 574.44
Seat tube length: 553.29
Seat tube angle: 73.03°
Head tube angle: 73.26°
Head tube length: 181.28
BB drop: 67.50
Chainstay length: 406.89
Wheelbase: 999.19
Fork rake: 43.79
Standover: 811.11
Trail: 55.86 (note: the calculated trail vis-à-vis the avg. geometries would be 57)

Kickers and Whoopers

Duck chuckled. “He’s a whooper. I love whoopers… they keep doing it, y’know, after getting older. They don’t even know they do it.”

We were straddling our bikes in the common area of a trail system. Through the trees, we could see the rhythmic air-time of a rider’s progress down a series of jumps. Each time he caught air, he’d whoop. Duck was watching and reminiscing.

He started telling me the history of the trail system around us. About how a bit ago the land was bought by a community organization who tore out all the trails. Though, later, members of that same organization realized that in the effort to build a place for their own community, they had displaced another… so they opened the land back up and another trail system emerged. As Duck explained all of this, we’d hear an occasional whoop echo through the otherwise-quiet woods.

After a few runs of our own, and as we pushed our bikes back up the central path, we stopped to chat up an older man, probably in his late-60s, who was fiddling with the seatpost clamp of his relatively new full-suspension bike. The sweat suit, bucket hat, white hair and bike were all incongruent in the best possible way. We offered a multitool after he admitted he’d rounded off his 5. Duck later commented that he suspected the guy was a member of the group that’d bought the property and torn out the trails. Since the rebuilding effort, he told me, several members of the group had taken an interest in riding, exploring the trails that snaked through their land. He thanked us and took up conversation with another rider, dropping names of and excitedly talking about who’d been racing that past weekend.

At the top, back in the common area, we met a father and his son, plus a friend of the son’s. We realized that the son was the whooper. The father appeared to be out of his element, but that he was there riding with his kid, that eclipsed any other impression. After their run, he ask his son how it went and the son talked of hitting a lip just right, the sensations of smoothness and perfection, but how, later, a little was lost in a transition and the tumbling effects that resulted. He wanted to try it again and again and again until it all flowed together in harmony. The perfect run. The kid was a romantic.

We all made another run and as we were pushing our bikes back up, Duck asked the son and his friend if they’d attempted the bigger gaps further down. They said they hadn’t yet, citing a feeling of timing being off or not-quite-there-yet, which Duck reinforced with his own impressions. A bit further up, we asked the dad how he liked his bike and somehow that discussion evolved into a discussion about the show and so we talked about that a little bit, mostly the demo. The father asked if we’d heard about another event, one that was open to the public… he and his son were attending. It sounded like a better gig.

As we talked, we heard an alarmed holler followed by the rattling of a bike set off tumbling. All of us turned in the direction of the ruckus. We could see an older man, the bucket hat guy, stand up and brush himself off, then awkwardly navigate some brush and branches to retrieve his bike. He rode out the rest of he run. After he’d pushed his bike back up to where we were, Duck asked if he was alright. “Oh, sure sure. Just took it a little hot.” The father, son and friend said farewell and rode off for another run. Duck inquired whether the older guy had considered exchanging the bucket hat for a helmet. He said he’d considered it before, but thought it not necessary. He rode off for another run.

Standing there again, straddling our bikes in the common area, I decided that I’d nickname the older guy Bucket, easy cliches about bucket lists be damned. Duck made a comment about the fading light and we agreed to head back. As we pedaled out, we could hear another series of whoops behind us.