ornoth_cycling | Fame & Glory

Some interesting stuff that shouldn’t wait for the release of my 2011 PMC ride report.

First and most importantly is that the PMC home page features a photo of me putting the hammer down during last weekend’s Pan-Mass Challenge. I was absolutely floored, because in a field of 5,200 riders it’s rare enough to have one’s picture taken, much less selected for inclusion in the post-ride photo montage!

On top of that, there are so many things about that photo that blow me away. It’s actually a good picture of me, wearing this year’s event jersey. And the jersey’s properly zipped up, a pro move that I teased my buddy Noah about a couple weeks ago. It’s a picture of intensity, with a pained grimace on the guy behind me. I’m down in the drops, leading a paceline, both of which are somewhat rare events. I didn’t even think I’d seen any event photographers on the course! If you look carefully, you’ll notice that it’s the biggest photo in the whole collage, and I’m given more prominent placement and a larger picture than Lance Armstrong and Senator John Kerry! And damn if I don’t have nice legs, too!

So yeah, when my buddy Dave Long pointed that out, I pretty much flipped my shit. Huge moment of pride, excitement, and amusement. Hopefully I’ll be able to obtain the original.

Next items are a couple of new purchases.

The first is a replacement rim for my rear wheel. Two days before the PMC, I found cracks in the rim of the Ksyrium SL that I run. So at the last second, I went to Back Bay Bikes and one of the mechanics let me borrow one of his (personal) wheels to ride the PMC with. I guess that deserves a paragraph in and of itself.

But a few days ago I got my rebuilt Ksyrium back. You might remember that I had a warranty replacement of that wheel two years ago. While they would have done a second replacement, the wheel was two months out of warranty, so I had to foot the bill to repair it. But now she’s back and hopefully will last. I wish I knew why I’m so tough on rear wheels, tho; I’ve destroyed two Ultegra and two Ksyrium SL rear wheels.

I also received the new Shimano cycling sandals I’d ordered. I’ve used two identical pairs of sandals since I started riding back in 2000, and I wore them into the ground because they don’t make that model anymore. However, one of them literally fell apart after this year’s Climb to the Clouds, so I ordered a pair of Shimano’s current model: SH-SD66.

Any time you change anything related to the contact points between you and the bike—hands, shoes, or seat—you risk screwing things up. I’ve only taken a couple rides, but so far they feel good. The most noticeable change is that the soles are stiffer, which is good, since I could feel exactly where the cleat was on my old sandals. Of course, it remains to be seen whether that stiffness is permanent or just a factor of the shoes being new, but I’m hopeful enough to retire the old ones and order a second pair to keep in rotation.

Final item is an interesting article about what it takes to be a pro cyclist, and how integral suffering is to cycling, whether one be a pro or just a neighborhood speedster. You might be interested in the whole article, but here are a couple choice citations that resonated with me:

Everything about cycling is contained in that gesture, including its reigning truism: to race bicycles is to drink greedily from a bottomless chalice of agony. The sport and its heroes are only knowable, and then just barely, once you come to understand that suffering is cycling’s currency. And what that currency buys is the occasional—the very, very occasional—moment of exquisite glory.

The first thing you notice about professional cyclists is that, with few exceptions, they appear to live their internal lives in a heavily padlocked tomb of mental anguish. They are at once astonishingly young and improbably ancient, a result of the fact that they are paid for their agony. They are modern-day ascetics, working in the open-air monastery of the mountains of Europe, with helmets as tonsures, spandex as robes.

There is thus a detachment in their manner that suggests the real world—our world—exists to them only as storybook legend, trapped as they are in another realm, with no corollaries, no points of contact, no common ground. They experience their lives through the tiny aperture of cycling; the aperture is so small because the light is so fierce. They have felt and done things on the farthest shore of the possible.

The reward for being the best isn’t that one takes *less* pain; rather that one is able to absorb *more*. The nature of this process is revealed at the precise instant that we come to know ourselves completely: we learn how far we can push ourselves, and the true mettle of our character. But that knowledge isn’t properly intelligible, nor is it transferable. To mangle Laurie Anderson’s aphorism, writing about cycling’s meta-state is like dancing about architecture. It is a private knowledge, forged in pain’s stables, and belongs to men who are not served by articulating it.

There’s no outward sign that [the cyclist] is one of the best athletes on earth. If you came across him shopping for a Billy bookcase at IKEA, you’d assume he had just returned from an island survival challenge, which he lost. Badly.

Fame & Glory

Anoth Photo from the PMC Gallery