I thought I would harness the supposed therapeutic properties of writing and try starting a blog! Can't promise consistent posting but I thought I'd give it a try.
The past couple of years I've been training pretty hard for a sport called bike racing, and the 2016 season is kicking off this weekend with the velocity stage race in Edmonton! Me and my coach Jack VanDyk have been working well together for a few years to try to achieve glory in the local race scene. I've have managed to claw my way up to Cat 2 and even win a race last season which was sweet.
To be honest I get pretty nervous about racing. Memories of bike racing over the past few years are filled with a whole spectrum of emotions. Exhausted satisfaction, the thrill of rolling a breakaway and not getting caught, the endorphin high which seems to mute everything around like being underwater and it feels real good to just chill. I can't remember too many of the lows but I'm pretty sure there is a fair bit of searing pain and even boredom in there too.
I read a book by Time Krabbe, The Rider, which I think sums up my thoughts on bike racing fairly well. Here is a badass quote:
Fourty-three nineteen. My gear lever feels like a scab on a wound. During our reconnaissance ride I was using forty-three twenty here. Now I’m sticking to the nineteen, a matter of willpower. My twenty was still as clean as a whistle. Shifting is a kind of painkiller, and therefore the same as giving up. After all, if I wanted to kill my pain, why not choose the most effective method? Road racing is all about generating pain.
Honestly that sounds awful. Why would anyone do this? I think it's interesting how over the past however many thousand training sessions, only a few sessions in particular really stand out in my memory and yet I can recall every small detail of most races I have been in including who I was riding with, the weather on that day, and recount a fairly detailed play by play of how the race went down. Kinda like a series of of concentrated moments with a weeks worth of energy crammed into 3 hours. I also have found a passion for all of the training and preparation, the feeling of satisfaction of crushing a workout you didn't think you could do with already fatigued legs, the sensation of personal self improvement and finding strength I didn't know I had.
Sometimes I find myself overwhelmed with life stress (e.g. girl problems! exam stress! actually lets be honest really just girl problems) Lets see it in pie chart format:
Bike racing makes all that seem pretty darn inconsequential. Like who cares about girl problems when you can't feel your legs and Evan Bayer is just rode off the front of the peloton into a headwind? Cycling burns all the life stress away and makes these stresses seem minimal in comparison.
Anyways, those are my thoughts. Despite all of the positive aspects of bike racing sometimes I do think it would be great to live a more well rounded existence like working on myself spiritually as well as physically. As someone who has never really been raised with religion in my life I always find it fascinating meeting people for whom faith and spirituality is a big deal. There's a cool non-denominational church in my neighborhood that I've thought about attending, but that's a topic for another blog post!
Anyways, those are my thoughts. Despite all of the positive aspects of bike racing sometimes I do think it would be great to live a more well rounded existence like working on myself spiritually as well as physically. As someone who has never really been raised with religion in my life I always find it fascinating meeting people for whom faith and spirituality is a big deal. There's a cool non-denominational church in my neighborhood that I've thought about attending, but that's a topic for another blog post!
