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.
