By: Nathaniel Ward Wednesday August 18, 2010

Cyclocross racers in New England and all over North America know Stage Fort Park in Gloucester, MA as one of the cornerstones of the American ‘cross season. While the race that takes place there isn’t all that old—not as old, for example, as the Cycle-Smart International—it has all the elements of a classic that has always been part of the collective memory, even if it hasn’t, quite. The historic setting by the sea; the stories of epic weather and Tim Johnson’s hyper-legendary comeback victory in the snow in 2005; Erwin Vervecken’s visit while world champion, and a thousand stories of effort and heartbreak from every category are told and re-told in parking lots and on group rides all over the continent. Gloucester is a part of our collective identity as cyclocross racers, even if we’ve never been there. I mean this in the same sense that people who have never been to Belgium wear the Belgian tricolor on their kits, name their blogs after Flemish words, and refer to their fried potatoes as “frites”. History is like that: it works its way into us, we work our way into it, sometimes without actually being there, fighting the battle, racing the race.

Stage Fort Park, though, has an older identity, a longer history. From here one could have seen, perhaps, Captain Nathaniel Bowditch on Christmas day, 1803, guiding the Putnam home in a blizzard on dead reckoning. And within living memory, one might have found the late, great poet, Charles Olson, on one of his long walks, wrapped in his cape, pipe between his teeth, becoming history, becoming Gloucester.

Olson’s life’s work consisted largely of creating a monumental poetic historiography of his hometown of Gloucester, MA called The Maximus Poems. He referred often in his work to the idea of a Polis, or Greek city-state, and crafted his poetry from the landscape, artifacts and people that were the stuff of his daily life. The view from Stage Fort Park, the routes he learned as a letter carrier in his youth, the fisherman, the drawbridge. Gloucester was his Tyre. He said famously,

“I would be an historian as Herodotus was,

looking for oneself for the evidence of,

what is said:”

Olson’s imperative was that a person should be, should go, and should do. In particular, one should come to know the place of one’s origins, one’s home and its environs. As you come to know your streets, your fields, your waters, your neighbors, they come to know you, as well. The interplay between these elements, the symbiosis of human being and inhabited environment, these were the nadir of Olson’s poetics.

My bicycle brings me into the world as it brings the world to me. To be at home, to know where I am, is to have ridden every road; to know traffic patterns; shadows at sunset, and sightlines in the rain. How long does it take for the dew to burn off in the morning? Where are the trees the thickest for sheltered, winter riding? Where does the lake-effect snow belt end in upstate New York, and which roads do I ride to dodge the January squalls? This is knowledge of the kind Olson had about Gloucester.

The geography of the cyclist is personal, spiritual, physical in nature: any road I know, any road I ride, becomes a part of my body, a part of myself. The miles work their way into my legs and change my physiology, my musculature, my metabolism. The link between rider and road, it’s tangible, and for me, being at home means being in the place I have etched into my being, one pedal stroke at a time. Even as the road pushes me, up or down, to my limits, I compel it—The Road—back, I am a piece of my landscape, it is me. Polis. Olson was to Gloucester, but the bicycle brings person to place—Me, into It, and vice versa—in any place. The temporality of this can’t be fabricated, can’t be rushed. If you walk 20 paces into the woods, you walk 20 paces out.

Olson knew Stage Fort Park. I know Settles Hill, and from there South along the escarpment, up again Wolf Hill, remembering the 19th century down rent wars of my father’s historian’s gaze—damn the landlords, stuck in the cart tracks and sniped at by their tenants. Wolf Hill moves me west again, along Pinnacle, above where Davis Phinney paperboyed his way to the top, the day the best pro’s in Europe raced a stage designed by my friend Andy in the 1990 Tour De Trump. Down again, 443 into Clarksville, Scott’s music studio in the barn there; and there the car that flipped over in front of my brother and his then wife; and my parents, both of them, when my mother was still alive and my daughter only 2 years old. They took her to Thacher Park for the afternoon and then for ice cream, and some nut rolled his car, not more than 50 feet away. One jerk of the steering wheel and I would have been worse than orphaned. Further down 443 where the guy died on the group ride a few years back, owned a taco restaurant. Wore a cheap helmet, people said. Rode bald tires. Now a roadside memorial. These places I know.

Now I ride in a landscape of red clay, tobacco fields, and someone else’s history. And yet with each day, with each ride, with each revolution of my wheels, I come to know this place as my own. Caught in a blinding rainstorm at dusk last night; those roads now mine forever. Do my neighbors back in Albany know their home so well, though they might own it, pay taxes on it? No, this is the intimate geography of the cyclist, of the citizen.

Charles Olson reads “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 (Witheld)” 1966 Inspiration for this essay @ minute 1:50, final stanza.

By: Nathaniel Ward Wednesday June 9, 2010

Remember when you first heard about him? The first time you heard the stories—probably on the cooldown on the way back from the first ride you can remember where there were real, honest-to-God attacks flying—he sounded almost super-human. Inspiring, right? He was the first legit rider you had ever been close enough to that you could count the veins in his calf muscles as they rode away from you; the first guy that made you wonder: is that how hard pros ride? Did you hear the one about his year in Europe in the late ‘70’s? Or about racing Olympic trials back in the day, I think it was the year Andreu won. He was on 7-11 for at least a season, right? And funny stuff, too. Like the time he put milk in his bottles at Fitchburg for some extra protein and it went rancid, and he got a big ol’ mouthful of curdled nastiness. And the post-ride ritual, I heard he eats PB&J with a packet of Skittles candy sprinkled on it. And what about her? Remember when she was pro a few years ago? She could drop everybody on the ride except the best cat 1 guys in the area. I heard in her prime she was able to ride in breaks with the best cat 1-2 guys on the East coast, and she won damn near every top women’s race in the country.

I’ll never pedal as hard in my life as I did on those first group rides. I was finally faster than everything I had ever tried to outrun about myself, and still not fast enough to catch him. That’s where, paradoxically, and for the first time in my adult life, I found true humility and confidence, braided together somewhere on the border of my blurry vision; a feeling that started to articulate itself haltingly, in stages, as my heart beat in my throat, settling into clearer focus as the sun set and I pulled my arm warmers back up, left the twilight over my shoulder and headed home.

My father, the folklorist, is always fond of saying that whatever we, as a species/community/family, know about ourselves, we know through our stories, through narrative. Riding bikes in groups, with friends, at races, and alone, hours upon hours upon hours, creates a unique opportunity for the telling, re-telling and fabrication of stories, the expression of a communal narrative; think Gilgamesh on wheels. These are the stories that school and inspire us, that tell us how to behave, how to dress for conditions and style, how to fuel our bodies for the effort, and how to adapt to the stress and quick decision-making necessitated by racing.

Think about how you know what to aspire to, the relational nature of aspiration itself. We don’t, most of us, know what we like, rather we like what we know. And we aim at what we can see, however high or low. That’s why these stories, about these guys and gals, they’re important. They give us the yardstick to measure against, be beaten with: the mark to hit, the wheel to follow, the promise of next Tuesday. We need our Tuesday night heroes. These are our stories, this is our epic.

Every group ride contains hundreds of hidden stories, a river of our socio-sporting narrative running through the group, just out of sight, yet palpable. But you’ll never know unless you ask. We can all read about Lance & Levi, Contador and Basso in the mainstream cycling press, and the prevalence of ProTour level races in the U.S. such as the Tour Of California and the (former? Soon-to-be-revived?) Tour Of Missouri provides more opportunity than ever for cycling fans to get out there and cheer on the heroes and legends of our sport up close and personal.

But every one of those legends had a mentor. Every one of the superstars of our sport remembers someone from the old school who raced in hairnets and who has permanent tan lines; and we all remember someone who grew wings and flew away from the group on a Tuesday night somewhere long ago, almost buried in distant memory, and showed us what was possible, and what wasn’t. These are the riders who teach us how deep we can dig, how dramatically we can fail, and how worthwhile it always feels to come back and do it again next week. The next ride, the next race, that’s what racing is all about, isn’t it? For better and worse, there’s always another hit around the corner. These riders—men and women—are the embodiment of our collective history in cycling, and they are too easily overlooked.

In the coming weeks and months, I will be posting a series of interviews with some of my own favorite Underground Legends and Tuesday Night Heroes. I hope these interviews will give you all the chance to take a minute to reflect and remember where you were when it happened, and who it was that gave you the gift of understanding what riding a bike—hard—is all about.

By: Nathaniel Ward Tuesday May 25, 2010

Today I love being an amateur, and I love my fellow amateurs, and I have something positive to say. I qualify what follows that way because I do tend to wax a bit darkly, and once upon a time I shared some not-altogether-cheerful musings here on the nature of racing as an amateur in the deep end of the pool at national level professional races. My feelings on the subject are fairly love/hate, and I am not alone in this. If this is hard to understand, consider the following scenario:

It’s one thing to build birdhouses as a hobby, right? And heck, if you spend a lot of time building them, you might even get good at it, you might even be a whole lot better than all of your birdhouse building buddies. Maybe your joinery is particularly good, or maybe you paint really neat lines or something. But if there were, say, a trade union of birdhouse building professionals, and if you happened to crash one of their top level competitions, you just might find yourself covered in glue and sawdust with your fancy tools in one hand and your pride in the other, wondering why the hell you didn’t stay home. That’s what it feels like to be a good-but-not-outstanding amateur bike racer in a serious professional race. It’s an experience worth having, and I know some guys who live for it. But for me, and my teammates, and most of they guys I have been competing with for long enough that they feel like friends and colleagues, this is not the experience that keeps us riding our bikes. No, we keep racing for the love of the doable, winnable, maybe even the Podunk, races. The rush of the crowd and the motorbikes with TV cameras are cool, but all of that sometimes pales in comparison to the rush of a 30-rider field where you know that there are only 3 or 4 riders there who can hope to contest the race with you.

Maybe, just maybe—and this scenario is rare and highly coveted, a bit of a Unicorn, actually—you show up to race, you look around, and you know with near absolute certainty that barring a wild animal attack or untimely crash, you will win the race. A scenario like that at even the lowest level, like a local race with 150 riders present and 15 riders in the “elite” field, represents literally thousands of hours of saddle time. This, you think to yourself, must be what it feels like to be Mark Cavendish in a field sprint…only you have to carry extra bottles in your jersey pockets and the team equipment order was late so there are no spare wheels for the wheel van. But other than that: complete, total, top-of-the-totem-pole, big dog, special happy jock feelings. Even for me, and my Quaker parents discouraged all that sort of stuff.

See it takes a lot of work even just to be an average category 1 rider. Hell it takes a lot of work to be an average cat 2, for that matter. No, your local cat 2 Tuesday Night Hero doesn’t train like Lance, no matter what he tells you, and yes, I am always quick to stress the differences between amateurs and professionals, in my column here, and elsewhere. But the fact of the matter is that if you ride a bike, and think about the consequences of said bike riding, in excess of 15 hours a week—occasionally more than 20 hours a week—you’re serious about what you do, by definition. You may race like a knucklehead, and the finer points of race strategy may be lost on you; or you might be an idiot and dope to win early morning races in NYC’s Central Park, and you might be completely delusional about your talent and prospects for future success. But no doubt you care about it, and I guaran-damn-tee you that you spend more time riding, racing, fixing and cleaning bikes, and thinking about your tan lines than you do focusing on a number of other, objectively more interesting things. And you know what? I like it!

Using a word like “excellence” to describe what elite amateur bicycle racers do is probably hyperbolic, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that what I love and respect about the guys I race and train with—friends and enemies alike—is that they put in their time, and they care about being better than average, care about pursuing excellence. Life is so awfully full of average, and we settle for it all the time. Average jobs, average responsibilities, average children, average credit scores, and for the most part that’s fine. It isn’t worth worrying about everything, right? Right. But everybody needs something, at least one thing, where they aren’t willing to settle, and where they are willing to push harder, humble themselves more, sacrifice, suffer frustration, and hang in there until something resembling success materializes. Relationships are a good area in which to exercise these qualities in pursuit of excellence, and what the hell, so is bike racing. And today, my special love and respect is for the guys and gals who manage grown-up responsibilities like full time jobs, car payments, graduate school, babies, teenagers, custody battles, aging parents, sickness, stress, and sleep deprivation, and still choose to toe the line in the hardest races they can find, waiting patiently for those occasional opportunities when nobody better than you bothers to show up.

It’s easy to look around the parking lot at a race—and we all do this, don’t lie—and start quitting before you even have your numbers pinned on. That guy was in Tucson all winter, and that guy is 21 and lives at home with his parents and sleeps 14 hours a day, and that guy is a genetic freak, and on and on. Excuses are easy to come by. But you know something? If you were in Tucson all winter, and if you do live with mom and dad and sleep half the day, if you are actually a professional, or if you have any of the other trappings of the full-time training, half-time stress lifestyle, then to you I say this: you just better win. Because, me? I slept 6 hours last night, I might be working my way up to an ugly custody battle for my daughter, I didn’t train at all this winter, I have wide swaths of gray hair in my beard, and I’m overweight. So remember this as a message from me and all of my underfit, overstressed brethren and sistren of the elite amateur ranks, who are trying to juggle racing and real life: if we’re close enough to you that you can hear our labored breathing, we have already kicked your skinny ass.

By: Nathaniel Ward Sunday April 4, 2010

It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. – Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Call me Ishmael. At least when it comes to driving off depression. No, I’m not a merchant seaman, I’m a bike racer, but the effect is the same. And the ocean Melville referred to as a “vast, watery Kentucky” is a place kindred in spirit to the windswept roads—sun-drenched, rain-pelted, frost-heaved, littered with broken glass, or shining to near perfection—I take to as my own substitute for pistol and ball.

I have come to understand that I do this, riding and racing bicycles, because I have to. Not in some melodramatic sense where I might, for effect, claim to not know who I am without a bicycle between my legs. Quite the contrary: I know exactly who I am, and I don’t function so well without the bicycle.

So I ride. I ride to find balance, I ride to release endorphins; I ride to sleep, and I ride to eat in a somewhat regulated fashion; I ride to manage my time and because it’s more mature than punching the wall; I ride to maintain friendships and to function as part of a team. I ride alone, I ride fast; I ride with people I love, slowly; I ride when I want to, and I ride when I don’t want to at all. It’s just better this way.

Over the years I’ve spent a certain amount of time composing sophisticated and convincing sounding justifications for why I race and train as obsessively as I do. Typically I land on the following undeniable set of facts: before I started riding bikes I weighed 240lbs, smoked cigarettes and was pretty depressed. Now I’m sorta skinny, don’t smoke, and am less depressed, though infamously prone toward existential angst and a good, old-fashioned wobbler now and again. My point is that on my bike I have become a better human. A better dad, a better housekeeper, a better partner of a relationship, a better friend, son, brother, teacher…man. I believe this, I really do. But until this past winter I didn’t realize just how true it was, and how closely the mercury of my soul is now linked with bike racing, for good or ill. Why do I do it? Because I can’t not do it.

Now that’s sort of cliché, right? We all have some sort of superego constructed around our hobbies and passions, and it’s fun to believe, and to crow about, the fact that me-me-beautiful-me just wouldn’t be—couldn’t be!—the same without bike racing or knitting or tiddlywinks or whatever. Most of the time, for most of us, this is a pose, but a harmless one with some useful byproducts like social identification and goal setting. And, more than likely, I’m no different, not as much of a snowflake as I would like to think I am. What I know is that it’s been a long winter, “a damp, drizzly November in my soul” if ever there was one, and now the sun shines nearly every day. Nearly everything of value in life has a tax on it, I suppose. So if the tax levied against me for the privilege of functioning like a normal human is that I have to ride bikes, well, like I said: I ride.

By: Nathaniel Ward Monday November 16, 2009

Sometimes the best thing about bike racing is…not racing. Week in, week out, for most of the year, March through December, I like many of you am more or less in a constant state of bike race preparation or recovery. I get so used to it I don’t even notice that all or most of my spare time and thoughts get directed toward my readiness or unreadiness to pack/travel/race that weekend. How did I heal from that last crash? Do I have enough glue to re-glue that tire I patched? I need to re-cable my bike after that mudfest yesterday; it’s going to rain Wednesday so that means intervals on the trainer or else do them Thursday. Can I do them Thursday or will that trash my race legs for Saturday?

Even when we talk about taking a break, many of us who take our bike racing (too) seriously tend to contextualize our break-taking as simply an extension of our training and recovery program. While this is understandable, and necessary for someone attempting to achieve at the highest levels of the sport and make a living racing their bike, most of us aren’t realistically in that category of people. For us then, it makes sense to take a break from being athletes sometimes and to focus on the other, more sustainable elements of our lives like family, career, school, and a million other things we let go in the service of our two-wheeled ambitions. And if we’re lucky, that time can recharge our batteries a bit and remind us of all the things we love about racing. (See what I did there? All roads lead to racing.) Lots of times the races I enjoy the most and do best in are races that follow a layoff. It’s true; usually when I’m peaking I’m so immersed in racing and training that it isn’t really fun. There’s something to be said for knowing what you’re missing.

I heard Andre Agassi being interviewed about his new biography on the radio last week and he shared something with the interviewer that might sound shocking, but didn’t surprise me all that much. He said he hated tennis, had always more or less hated tennis and basically saw excelling at it as his only means of escape: the only way out is through. Lucky for him he was world class, and sadly most of us are not. But his sentiments ring true to me. Just about everyone I know who has ever ridden a 25+ hour week in 30 degree weather, or put in marathon base training sessions on an indoor trainer wants to quit. Yes we love bike racing, we live for it, that’s the problem: it blocks out the frigging sun. The trouble is, we can’t quit before we find out how good we really are/could be. And most of us, unlike Agassi or Lance Armstrong, don’t show enough talent early enough in life to find ourselves whisked away into situations where we can focus exclusively on the development of our talent. So we keep at it, and we wonder, and we sacrifice having a normal life, and our families/spouses/significant others/friends put up with it. But deep down, no matter how much fun we’re having, we all want it to be over.

Yeah I raced once this past weekend, but it was 10 minutes from home so I feel like that almost doesn’t count. I did spend enough time at home to become thoroughly stir crazy and to give my apartment its most thorough cleaning for many moons. Now at least the next time I stumble in the door late on a Sunday night carrying 6 wheelbags, a hockey duffel and a bike on my shoulder I won’t have to walk into a dump. I also kicked around my neighborhood for long enough to remember that I’m not in love with the city I live in, which makes traveling to races every weekend an attractive prospect. So yeah, I’m sending out resumes again this week.

I’m pretty psyched to race next weekend. The season is drawing to a close and while I’ve had my ups and downs and frustrations, all in all I’ve been having fun. It’s a masochistic, stress-inducing, nail-biting kid of fun though, and honestly I’ll be glad when it’s over. But like I said, the only way out is through, so I’ll be training hard tomorrow morning. Whitey will be fly fishing.

By: Nathaniel Ward Friday October 30, 2009

My girlfriend likes to entertain herself with a little running joke. Every time I have to spend money on anything bike or bike racing related she quips, “I thought you were sponsored.” Ha ha.

I had to buy some cables the other day at the local brick & mortar because I completely trashed my bike again in Maine last weekend. So on my wee Tuesday pre-work spin I headed down to the shop and ordered up a handful of cables and housing to stock my toolbox with for the next mudfest. Now I’m not exactly a skinflint, in fact I have been accused of being a little too free and easy with my finances, but I am also immensely fortunate in that I have had the privilege in the last few years of being supported by some great companies and a truly fantastic bike shop. As a result, I don’t have to buy a lot of stuff, and when I do, I get it cheap. Lucky me. And guess what? Cables are friggin’ expensive! Holy crap, I nearly had a heart attack when I signed the receipt. Who knew the damned things are 7 bucks a pop nowadays? I just threw my expense/profit spreadsheet off for a month.

If you’re wondering how it is that I can ride bikes 300 days a year and not know the price of a cable, or if you’re rolling your eyes at the mention of an expense/profit spreadsheet for racing, well, that’s my point. I’m spoiled rotten. But I’m not the only one. “Elite” riders all over the place are infamous for taking their sponsors for granted, wanting everything for free and doing little in return. Little that is, except for getting totally awesome results every weekend that are way better than all of those un-sponsored riders. Hehe. Oops.

The reality is that most of us who are fortunate enough to have someone else even partially underwrite our racing lifestyle/hobby/addiction/avocation will never attract enough attention to ourselves on the merits of our results alone to justify the outlay of sponsorship dollars. During Cyclocross season it gets a little bit easier to be Kind Of a Big Deal due to the increasing number of UCI races and the spectator friendly nature of the discipline. The photographers have an easy time of it and the sponsors actually get some reasonably good exposure to their target audience. This exposure, however, is hard won, and it only partly makes up for the rest of the year, when anyone who has invested their money in semi-professional-elite amateur-fulltime-expensive bike racing has to satisfy themselves with blurry images on Facebook of their athletes proudly flashing the team colors around industrial parks and roadside parking lots out behind the 12th acre of nowhere. We American bike racers really do put the “semi” in semi-professional.

Ok, so it’s no secret to anyone reading this that I am a human governed most immediately by my emotions. I can throw a wobbler with the best of them, I have been known to cry after bad races, and sometimes I’m a needy little cuss, just ask Joe.

But these days, as I meditate on how it is that I am going to salvage this ‘cross season that looks increasingly to bystanders like a hippopotamus drowning in a mud bog (“My lord how ever are you going to save that poor beast?”), I am trying to remind myself to be humble, and grateful for the opportunity to pursue my goals and simply do what I love to do. And not for nothing but people who sign the checks to support bike racing teams are, in large part, the people who keep grassroots racing alive in North America. So to my fellow self-obsessed, well-supported athletes I say: hug your sponsor today.

Seriously, if you’re fortunate enough to be a sponsored athlete, remember that the best way you can show it is to represent your sponsors well both on and off the bike. This means try to refrain from giving cars the finger when wearing the logos of people who spend their hard-earned money paying your race entry fees. It means say nice things about your sponsors’ products, even if they are only partially true. Help out your teammates at races, work the pit for club riders once in awhile, and if you have a benefactor or three who still actively race themselves, then for god’s sake take an interest in the master’s race or the B race or the C race or the women’s race or whatever race they’re in. And above all, just don’t be an asshole on someone else’s nickel.

By: Nathaniel Ward Wednesday October 14, 2009

I should know better by now, but I did it again. After taking a mid-July break and spending August training hard and racing close to home in races that I wasn’t emotionally invested in, I capped the road season with the Green Mountain Stage Race and Univest, theoretically giving myself all the form I would need to sail right into a successful ‘cross season. Ok, so far so good. But my results the last few weeks have been anything but stellar, in fact they have been arguably worse than my results from this time last year, which weren’t great, either. So what did I do wrong? I got greedy.

Following Univest I continued training in an effort to get just a little more form out of my tired legs and a Central Nervous System that was begging for mercy. At the end of that week, on 9/20, I raced and won a small, local ‘cross race, and I felt really good. Actually, I felt really good, but I wasn’t satisfied, I wanted more.

Like many of us who court failure and disappointment as a hobby, I sometimes find myself engineering said failure behind my own back, interesting really, but that’s another article. I know better than to flog myself with more training after having a good race, really I do. But the ego is a mighty beast and requires much in the way of care and feeding. What if I only felt good in that little race because I rode alone the whole time? Nobody was pushing me, so I was probably faking it, and besides it was a small field. More accelerators, more 3×15 sweet-spot intervals. More. And would you believe I was tired when I got to Vermont the following week for my first UCI races of the season? Yes, you would. But did that stop me? Heck no!

Sure I took it “easier” the week before Gloucester, but I wanted to be just a little faster, just a bit. So despite encroaching teaching responsibilities and life stress, and despite my sleepy body asking me to settle down for a bit, I forced myself into another round of workouts. And guess what? I was tired at Gloucester, too. The first day in the mud was fun, but drained me completely of any energy I had left. The second day, when it was dry and beautiful, I wanted to go to sleep during the race. I thought about work, I thought about my girlfriend, I thought about being tired and writing about it in my column here, and I thought about how cool the draw-bridge in Gloucester is. I didn’t finish the race.

So I went home and rested, right? Well, mostly right. Last week was a real exercise in jihad for me, as my productive and self-destructive selves warred for control of my soul. Mostly I didn’t ride bikes, but I did do one workout, and one run, and a few easy spins and…it was still just a little too much. Providence was better, but still not good. I’m racing like a goon, and I deserve it.

This week? Not a damn thing. It’s Wednesday and I don’t even have wheels on my bike yet. Yesterday I re-glued a tire but I haven’t even emptied out my duffel from the weekend, haven’t done my laundry. Instead I have been meeting deadlines, preparing lesson plans, getting enough sleep and stroking my CNS like it was a kitten. Today I’ll ride a mellow 2 hours, tomorrow 1 hour, Friday openers. And how will I feel in Toronto? Hard to say, but I can tell I’m getting twitchy already, and showing up at ‘cross races excited and wanting to go hard is more than half the battle. I don’t have enough energy in my body or my brain to get pumped for training during the week and then stay pumped to throttle myself for an hour both days on the weekend. So for now I’m working on life, and I’ll let the races come to me. See you out there.

By: Nathaniel Ward Monday September 28, 2009

It’s fall. I was born in the fall and I’m sure that makes me biased, but I always feel more alive and more in transition at this time of year than any other. I always enjoyed my fall semester classes the most, ideas welling up and the mind coming alive at a time of year when the world at large is going to sleep. Flowers bloom in the fall, apples ripen and there is new life replacing old everywhere in nature. I took a walk in the woods today and was amazed at how much new growth there is so late in the year. As one season passes into another and the light wanes, smaller, sturdier embodiments of life replace the larger and more noticeable. Trees shed their leaves, but Fall Orchids bloom in Pine Barrens.

Cyclocross is beautiful. In this, the dying of the year, those of us for whom ‘cross is a passion are renewed with an abundance of energy that defies both the loss of daylight hours and the accumulated fatigue of six months worth of road and mountain bike racing. We remind ourselves that we’re alive, and we return to the dirt, to the earth, and to the elements for our life-renewing, neo-pagan ritual of shared struggle and community. It’s only as contrived as the rest of 21st century life.

Cross isn’t crazy; it’s not a spectacle, and it is increasingly not even a fringe activity within the larger world of bike racing. It is a perfectly serious sport, but—almost—so what? The thing that can never change about cyclocross, no matter how popular or mainstreamed it may get, and the reason I don’t worry about its “purity” being lost, is the mindset it takes to race. Why? Because it usually hurts more, and often makes less objective sense than just about any other activity I can think of. And isn’t that the perfect distillation of sport? We — most of us who live such comfortable lives that we can make lifestyle choices like bike racing — exist in day-to-day spheres of experience that don’t ask us where our limits are, how much we can endure, or what we’re made of. It’s important to know those things about ourselves, and ‘cross enables us find out by putting us in an arbitrary, artificial stress situation and demanding that we divine meaning from it, profound or not. Physiology being what it is, and considering the extent to which the chemistry of the human brain is altered by exercise, the contrivance of the circumstances falls away and what we’re left with is the very real emotions. For the individual, this experience is pure and unalterable, and exists on its own continuum independently of equipment fads, fashion trends or sponsorship dollars.

So, me? I’m a better person when I’m racing cyclocross. I’m more relaxed, more in touch with my strengths and limitations as a human being, and more in tune with the world around me. I like re-calibrating my body to the world it lives in, even while that world is slowing itself down for the winter. There’s something perfect about it.

By: Nathaniel Ward Monday September 14, 2009

The morning of a big race: I slept 5 hours last night and have ridden my bike—easily, at recovery pace—for exactly 1 hour and 50 minutes since the previous weekend’s races. I have been on my feet constantly: teaching classes, doing laundry, making dinner, taking my daughter to and from school, grocery shopping, gluing tires and re-building my bike between races. My teammates’ lips are shivering, we have no jackets (we all forgot them, we have a lot on our collective minds), we have no trainers to warm up on; we’re two riders short, fielding a squad of 4 in a 6 man team time trial and we have no staff to take our imaginary jackets at the start line; no spare bikes, no follow car, no feeders. You might say we don’t belong here, and you might be right. But that would be missing the point. This is American bike racing we’re talking about here.

Pro-Am is a funny concept, and in the world of North American bike racing it is a term that wears a lot of different hats. There are a lot of races that have a pro ½ field, and there are a few races—like Univest and the Tour of The Battenkill—that run a truly top level professional race and allow a few amateur teams the opportunity to try to perform on that stage. In the former case, the word “pro” should really be taken with a grain of salt as there are often no professional riders in attendance at these races, or maybe just one or two, so it’s sort of a misnomer/reservation: if pros do show up, we have a field for them. In reality, most of the time the ½ race is the race for people who are not professionals but choose to ride bikes a lot. I think that the enormous difference between the level of racing—and the level of stress—at a local ½ race as compared to a professional race is lost on a lot of folks who don’t compete in these races. But they are vastly different things, and for those of us amateurs who try to dip our toes into the pond of large scale international racing, the experience can be incredibly daunting, and not for all of the reasons one might think.

One of the great privileges of being able to race on a reasonably well supported team is having the opportunity to travel quite a bit and experience racing at different levels of seriousness and severity. Local ½ races are generally fun and occasionally exciting, but not really all that serious. Races like Univest and Battenkill are very exciting, quite freaking serious to the people whose livelihoods depend on them, and not actually a lot of fun while they’re going on. You know that feeling you get when you’re riding your bike in the city and you get squeezed into the curb by a bus or passing truck? That feeling of heightened awareness, anxiety, fear, nervous excitement and expectation of impending disaster? Big, international pro-am races feel like that, but faster and for 4 to 6 hours. Not really the same thing as getting psyched about making the break in your local industrial park criterium and getting to give it some stick with Jonny Whatshisface regional pro. The funny thing is, for me, both of these experiences seem a little hollow without the other for counterpoint.

And sure, big races are fast and it’s hard to hang in. And yes, it can be exciting/intimidating/cool or even disappointing to find yourself riding around next to legendary pros you have been reading about in cycling magazines since before you shaved your legs. But those adjustments are surprisingly easy to make. Getting dropped feels like getting dropped, it doesn’t change a whole lot no matter who is up front pulling. The stuff that’s hard to get used to is the preparation and follow up. UCI forms, rider bio forms, arranging for feeds, arranging for drivers, trying to bum feeds off better supported teams, making sure one of your squad can get to the race a day early (I mentioned we all have jobs, right?) in order to register the team and pick up numbers, getting directions to the hotel and the next stage, and a never ending list of logistical hassles like that. Cold and wet, ready for a shower and a nap? Don’t leave before the results are up because if your number gets pulled for random doping control and you’re not there you’re in big trouble. And sometimes, after spending all week calling and emailing teammates, booking hotels, making arrangements, and doing all of this at the expense of actually riding your bike, you get to the race, you overlook some detail or UCI regulation you should have remembered and an official or a promoter, or maybe a super-cool Euro pro looks at you and shakes their head. They don’t always say it out loud, but you know what they’re thinking: Amateurs. Yes, we are.

Fun is a pretty elastic word. I went on a water slide with my daughter the other week on her birthday and it was awesome. We laughed and shrieked and didn’t experience any real pain or discomfort. Sometimes I take my ‘cross bike into the woods and just roll for hours; no powertap, no heart rate monitor, no group ride, no headphones, just me, the pine needles and the deer. That is a lot of fun. When I find myself sitting in a single-file line of riders hurtling along at 50k an hour or more, in the pouring rain, trying so hard I’m drooling, well, it’s satisfying to endure, and it’s validating, and it offers a unique sort of enjoyment, but I wouldn’t call it fun. No, what’s fun about road racing is finding out what you have in you, what you’re made of and what your relationship to the pain will be when it comes, which it will. Or maybe a better way to think about it is that the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts, and while the whole is awesome and is what I often find myself thinking about when I’m falling asleep at night, some of those parts involve varying levels of discomfort and disappointment.

I joke to my friends a lot that bike racing is an exercise in managing one’s relationship to disappointment. I don’t think this is a bad thing, actually I think it’s something mainstream middle class existence is sorely lacking and I think it helps to explain, in part, the popularity of a sport based around voluntary extreme discomfort for little or no reward among people who, for the most part, live quite comfortable lives otherwise. It could be the puritanical tendencies I owe to my namesake, Hawthorne, but I find all of this to be soul cleansing and highly worthwhile. I even find it fun.

So lucky me, I got to spend my birthday at Univest, riding alone, cold and wet with my bum poking out of my newly ripped shorts, through the wilds of Pennsylvania last weekend. The best part—the really soul cleansing part—was when I hit the finishing circuits about 15 minutes early in front of the field (there was no sag wagon, so I had to ride in after my crash and I took the sweet 60k Cyclosportif shortcut). I didn’t want to ride on the course anymore, but I didn’t know my way through the neighborhood that lead back to staging, so I didn’t have much of a choice, and anyway at that point I was too demoralized to care a whole lot. Little kids rang cowbells, mom’s clapped, dad’s said “all right, buddy!” and I heard a couple of people speculate that I was winning the race, though I sure didn’t look like it, riding in the small ring looking sad with my numbers ripped and dirty. After a couple of miles of this, as I was approaching the left hand turn that would spit me out on the finishing straight to humbly roll the gauntlet of thousands of assembled fans, I heard something from the sidelines that genuinely made me laugh out loud, and snapped me out of my self-pity. “Hey! Are you a professional?”

Nope.

By: Nathaniel Ward Wednesday September 2, 2009

At least we’re honest. Not always nice, not always good, not always happy, but honest, us bike racers. The bike beats the honesty into us: we get what we pay for, so to speak.

This week, life looms large and time consuming. Among other things, this has left me pressed for time to write this article and get out on my bike to train. My daughter is starting a new school that apparently requires more paperwork to attend than what I remember of applying to grad school, plus it was her birthday last week; I’m starting a part-time adjunct gig next week (about 16 hours after I’ll get home from the Green Mountain Stage Race); and I have a messy apartment, a car that needs an oil change and a stack of end-of-Summer bills all clamoring for my attention like little cartoon weevils. All of these things will get done, and all of them — particularly the ones related to my awesome kid — will provide me with a genuine feeling of satisfaction. You see, I like my life, I like the stuff in it, and no matter how much I sometimes wonder what could have happened if I started racing bikes when I was 18 instead of 27, I actually have the relationship to bike racing that I want, and the joy that I get out of bike racing and training is not about any aspiration to become a full-time pro. It’s about the privilege, stress-inducing though it is, of being able to race at a relatively high level as an amateur, and to have that be only one set of pieces of a somewhat balanced life.

So yes, all of these commitments will reward my efforts, but some more than others. After all, a resume cover letter well written doesn’t guarantee a job, and anyone who tells you parenthood isn’t occasionally thankless is flatly lying. Where bike racing keeps me honest is by giving me back exactly what I put into it, and that direct correlation between input and output is something I think people are hurting for in daily life. I know I am. And that’s what keeps me coming back to this beautiful sport, and it’s what keeps me training, usually alone, as hard and as often as I can manage.

With cyclocross season looming large and exciting, I find myself with some of my annual transition jitters and I have been hearing a certain amount of this from my peers, as well. Though I am committed to racing on the road and I care about it, ‘cross season is where I really feel at home as an athlete. Every year around this time, the same questions begin to run through my head: Have I really done enough work? Is my high-end fitness where I want it to be? Did I really rest enough in July to carry my current form into September and try to keep building? Will I crack before nationals? The funny part is that if I’m totally gut-level honest with myself, I have yet to be surprised by the answers to any of these questions—I know what I’ve been up to.

And that’s the beauty of it. The difference between a season of raising the bar for myself and pushing for better results than last year, as opposed to a season spent showing up just to participate is no mystery, and it isn’t determined by some set of variables that are beyond my control. So this fall, I’m trying to remember to be grateful for the opportunity to push myself, to work hard and feel rewarded, and simply to be able to do something that I get so much satisfaction out of, in so many ways. This is after all a profoundly privileged circumstance we find ourselves in, caring about riding bikes well.

And along the way, I’m reminding myself to enjoy it, and to remember that there is a quality of play to every bike ride, no matter how structured. Play keeps me honest, too.