June 2005
Allenawi

I am such a sucker.

I mean why ruin a perfectly sedentary lifestyle with routine suffering in the hope of becoming a cyclist. And even if I remotely harbour any thoughts of becoming a decent recreational cyclist, I suck at cycling. (Just as an aside, I think the term recreational cyclist is fast becoming an oxymoron - just look around at your cycling group, from the demeanor to the equipment to the talk and the walk - they are anything but recreational!). Anyway, I suck at climbing, I am an even bigger suck at sprinting and don't mention time trialling. At first I ventured innocently into cycling by trying out what I thought was fun easy riding with a mountain bike.

Well, easy it ain't and unless you have a masochistic strain somewhere in you DNA you might call it fun, otherwise it is of course painful exercise in self flagellation - the scars and a broken clavicle clearly attest to my off road bike experience. As if that is not enough, being a sucker that I am, I got seduced to the dark side by doing road riding. It is literally the dark side as evidenced by the tar and grime, your body, arms and legs doing its best to mimic the tapir (also the allegation of serious doping in the professional peloton).

You squeeze yourself into tight lycra with colours that only other roadies would think is cool. You get into a kind of irrational fashion sense that the colour of your clothing and equipment must be matched. As long as it has the name of a professional trade team, functionality comes second, comfort is a distant third. The deeper you are into the whirlpool the more things like shaving legs and other bodily hair, embrocation, chamois cream for the butt, etc, etc actually mean something to you. Your speech is peppered with things like lactate threshold, max heart rate, cadence, VO2max and other gobbledygook.

The average recreational cyclist is probably the most statistically aware individual in the recreational sport scene. I mean you'd never hear recreational footballers talking about fitness in terms of numbers do you?

Another thing that got me suckered again was all the road races - mind you, they do have some mysterious power that attracts the delusional recreational cyclist like me. What in the world was I thinking - as if the weekly self inflicted torture wasn't enough, there are now races to worry about. We are talking serious ego at stake here folks. Now you plan your riding with things like base period, intervals etc. Man you know you have been sucked too deep when you keep a training log and start to think about the viability of quitting your job so that you can get that 4 hour ride in the morning and a recovery ride in the evening.

The delusional recreational cyclist now has visions of being competive and race glory. Images of seeing yourself climbing like Simoni or Armstrong began or sprinting like Petacchi begin to appear - and very soon you'd superimpose yourself riding alongside the pro peloton with every picture you see in Cyclingnews.

Then you enter a race, probably one like the recent GP Race Speda. It would be a painful experience in all sense of the word. It would be painful for the body when a few moments into the race, your heart rate reaches the red line, you legs go noodly and your store of muscle glycogen reaches zero. From this point to the finish the only thing that is propelling the legs is the ego. At first the rest of your body protests but like a certain dictator in North Korea, the ego has the absolute and veto power. The next few kilometres has the body no choice but to comply with ego's demands. Then the body realises that argument with ego is useless, so it initiates a strike. One by one the muscle group closes shop and refuse to work. It would only by extreme good fortune that when the last muscle group shut down you'd just about roll across the finish line. What a sucker!! It is so pathetic that I even sucked at suffering. I mean, just look at my suffering face compared to say, Armstrong.

With most of the blood drained from the brain, it is no wonder that there is very little recollection of what happened contributing to almost zero write-up by the racers themselves.

If anything the races were a strong reality check for the aspiring competive albeit delusional recreational cyclist. However for someone that is so deeply mired, a reality check only serve to fan the desire to train harder, get better equipment and get better at sucking - wheels that is.

Any recollection of the suffering brings a smile instead of rationally thinking not to subject your body to such abuse again. Rational thinking has been dropped at the base of Mt. Ventoux and somehow I will scale my Ventoux, crazy it may seem. I am a sucker and I've been sucked so deep...

-Allenawi