Draining the Dregs of the Summer Cup

When the cool of the pond makes you drop down on it
When the smell of the lawn makes you flop down on it
When the teenage car gets the cop down on it
That time is here for one more year

And that summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life

- Jonathan Richman

Riding in my new surroundings of Western Massachusetts has been extremely rewarding. Even with starting my new job and being out of town five of the thirteeen days we’ve been based out here, I’ve managed to squeeze in just over 145 miles of riding, and I have to say, nearly every one has been more beautiful than the last. It seems we’ve got the best of New England right outside our new door. Well, all right!

I’m also becoming a little more proficient on the hills, which is a relief. I’ve found some long, steady climbs on which to build my strength and technique. I no longer hate the idea of serious hills quite so much. I still have a long way to go before I can scurry up them with confidence and pleasure.

All this pleasurably strenuous riding is bittersweet, though: Tomorrow is September 1. Just as last year, I feel like I’m hitting my stride just as autumn and the rigors of the work world kick in. I find myself worrying whether my new job will allow me to ride as much as I have in the year since I got back on the bike. So far, when I’m high in the hills on a beautiful day (like today – high 70s and clear blue skies), I’ve managed to force the question to the back of my mind and focus on the satisfying work at hand. But there’s no denying the larger point. I once wrote a song about this time of year, and one of the lines is, “Summer’s not gone, but it’s gone too far.”

I hate that feeling. I’m not one of those “eternal sunshine creates a desert” people. I like the desert; I lived there and loved it. There’s no such thing as too much sun and sweet, warm weather, green trees, lake-swimming and campfires.

Yet “bittersweet” means there’s also a nice side to it, right? On the long, flat section of my ride today, from about 50% to about 80% of the way through my route, I was inspired to really look around me and use my senses to squeeze the drops of beauty out of one of the last classic summer days this year.

I noticed the way the snakey sound of the bearings in my hubs bounced off the walls of the long barns I rode by, classic brick-red paint faded by years of sun, set against a perfect backdrop of shimmering river or fields stretching out for miles.

I noticed the lift in my spirits as the small mountain range near my house hovered into view, like great whales drifting on an ocean of tree tops.

I savored the sweetness of the cool, earthy breeze emanating from the forests along the road on a warm day, how the trees almost seemed to want to help me along by offering a little refreshment.

Friends, don’t miss the dregs of that lovely summer cup; it’s playing right now, on a long stretch of road near you. Get out there and notice and savor; roll it around on your tongue. We’re not kids anymore, and summer doesn’t last forever like it used to.

Climb West, Young Man

Friends, friends, friends -- I'm still here! After packing the house frantically for 10 days, moving frantically across state, and then vacating our new home for a family gathering in a neighboring state, I've returned home (such as it is, with boxes everywhere) and plan to make more regular contributions again. Sorry for the absence!

We're now living in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, an area renowned for its culture, beauty and quality of life. I start a new job next week, about which I'm excited.

The cycling here is quite different, folks. I'm not very good at making allowances, but I supposed some have to be made for the amount of stress I've endured in the last few months, between finals, graduation, job searching, interviewing (77 miles away), apartment searching (77 miles away), moving (doing it ourselves, no professionals involved), and so on and so forth. All of that in three months. So, I reckon there's some effect on my energy, endurance and strength. I feel pretty off much of the time these days.

Even with that said, riding is different out here. As soon as I could, I bought the regional bike map from the redoubtable people at Rubel Bike Maps, and to my dismay, noted that roads I’d ridden since I’ve gotten here (three rides total) that I considered quite hilly don’t even get the Rubel symbol for a small hill. Hills that, on their Eastern Mass map, would have gotten an unmistakeable middle-intensity notation are completely unmarked on the Western Mass map. In our fine state, the terrain heaves more and more as one moves west toward the Berkshires, Massachusetts’ most notable mountain range, running all along our western border.

Now, like a lot of cyclists, I don’t like hills.

I don’t mind them, but I certainly don’t gravitate toward them. I can zip along faster than average on the flats – I think I have a closet time-trialist hidden inside me. A clandestine roleur, if you will. But when I hit the first long hill, those suprisingly fit riders I’ve been keeping pace with suddenly fade into the distance, along with my morale and my energy. I've done climbing repeats, not as much as I should have this season, mind you, but most weeks. And this is where I've ended up: I'm slogging on the hills. Really slogging.

Looks like I’ve got to change. I came home from a 28-mile ride – a distance I would have tossed off almost as an afterthought back in the Boston area – wearier than I expected. Which made me cranky, of course; I was at one riding level two weeks ago (before the move west), and now, magically, I’ve been demoted half a notch. The folks out here who’ve been riding this terrain all along are naturally way ahead of me.

Of course, it’s all relative: Send an experienced rider from around here out to Boulder, say, and set her against a woman who rides the same number of hours per week, and see what happens there. Same deal.

Anyway, I can see that my next project as a rider is to befriend the incline. Part of me bemoans the idea, and part of me is excited at a new challenge. Stay tuned for further exploits of a budding climber.

Beauty and the Bike

The desire to have a beautiful bike is something shared by everyone. This desire comes with childhood; some cultivate it, others repress it, but it's always there.... Beautiful bikes have a special virtue, cast a secret spell: they make you want to do more.

- Paul Fournel, The Need for the Bike

Finding the Body-bike-road Continuum

In the last couple of days, while riding my regular workouts – distance, climbing repeats, etc. – I’ve discovered a kind of consciousness arising in me that I am very, very interested in. When it happens, the word animal arises in my mind spontaneously. I watch the athletes on the Olympic broadcasts and see something similar sometimes – a blend of power and looseness, a total absorption in their activity at that moment.

On Sunday, I was just starting the final third of my long ride for the week. It had been a good morning; I’d gotten out early, picked a good route, ridden within myself and was feeling up. I’d made the decision before I left to hold a little back until the final third, and then, if I felt strong, to unwind the engine a bit and treat the last stretch more like a time trial – just to see how it worked. A few miles into that, I was flying down a pretty, winding country road, and something just came over me. I hate to sound corny, but it really was like the bike, the road and my body became one thing.

I’ve had breakthroughs in cycling fitness, and leaps in my technique, too, but this is only the second time that I have experienced the entire feeling of being on the bike in a very different way. I felt like I was a gazelle or a leopard, leaping down the road in a feral, fluid blur. (Not that I was going super-fast – the feeling involved more than just speed.)

I guess it’s popular to call that the zone these days, and perhaps that’s what it is. All I know is, my day-to-day mind falls away unexpectedly; it stops thinking about the very long list of annoying details awaiting my attention, or interpersonal struggles, or questions about the future. It’s like I become entirely body all of a sudden – or maybe more like my mind deserts its habitual post (churning away just behind my forehead) and, like some fluid special effect in a wizard movie, just floods my muscles and bones and nerve endings. It didn’t last long; a few minutes, probably. Same thing yesterday on my climbing repeats.

I tell you, it’s really quite a feeling. I want more of it.

I’ve been meditating for 15 years. Some mornings I get into a good place, and body and mind also join together at those times, along with – if I’m lucky -- spirit. But this is different – it’s even different from the feeling I get from yoga, which I’ve been doing even longer. One stated goal of yoga is roughly the same: To synch up body, mind and spirit. But this feeling on the bike is different from both of those practices. It’s like I’m achieving that state, but in a highly active way, body working hard, moving fast. It usually comes when I find that place where only the muscles I need are doing the work; the rest of me is relaxed. (Very yoga, by the way.) This is something I’ve been focusing on lately in my cycling, because I’ve heard it’s a great way to improve performance and endurance. I never imagined it would leap me across a gap I didn’t even know was there. I sure hope I can continue to cultivate that state, because, simply put, it’s really addictive.

Improving TV Coverage of Cycling

So, what do you know? The Olympics are here, and NBC is actually broadcasting some of the cycling. Hip-hooray! It’s wonderful to finally see pro cyclists in some detail on the television screen, after following most of the international racing season on my Mac. On TV, there’s no jumpy “slide-show” video, no tinny audio, no tedious hours of poor commentating.

However.

Even the Olympic coverage is annoyingly scant. And though NBC did go to the considerable trouble of creating a complicated Web site that lists exactly when every half hour of cycling would be broadcast, so far the schedule has been completely unreliable. It’ll get you watching on the right day of the week, but that’s it.

My wife and I have been discussing what it would take to get better TV coverage of cycling in the United States. What’s available now really just outright stinks. In order to watch the Giro D’Italia, I had to subscribe to an Italian-language cable station for the month of June – and I don’t speak Italian. (See a fun report on that experience here). The Giro is the second most popular bike race on the planet.

If I’d wanted to watch the Tour de France on TV, I’d have had to pay for a month of a new level of cable subscription-- $48.00 extra. I just finished grad school and am about to start a job in what I refer to as a “personally rewarding field.” (Translation: I’m a mental health counselor.) I watched the wrap-ups on the Web, streamed some of the free but mind-numbing live broadcasting from Eurosport, and tuned in to the excellent Daily Tour podcasts from the FredCast. But it just wasn't the same.

Why is it that I can watch bowling or poker any week I might want to, but not the three most important cycling races in the world, which have tens of millions of viewers elsewhere? Races that dominate European TV for weeks, and that sponsors spend gajillions of dollars on?

A first response might be, “Broadcasters have to sense a much bigger market in the U.S. than they do now. Money talks, and cycling just doesn’t have the same audience as baseball or even poker.” But I question that answer. Are Europeans genetically more inclined to cycling than we are? Their mania had to start somewhere! Early journalists knew that stage races made a terrific story, and conveyed that story in such a way that it sank deep into the local psyche. Did poker have a huge audience in the U.S. before channels started broadcasting it right and left? It all starts somewhere.

I remember reading somewhere that Americans have more recreational bikes per capita than nearly any other nation (don’t count China; that’s mainly commuting). That means we love to get on our bikes, right? On a given Saturday, I wager I’ll see way more people on the local bike trail than I will if I trundle down to the all the nearby bowling alleys that evening and count up folks rolling frames. How hard would it be to cultivate in those people an appreciation of a few of the finer points of racing, so that they would get hooked after watching some tastefully condensed coverage of a major road race?

The Tour of California is garnering more viewers and sponsors every year, and there’s even talk of it being respected as highly as some of the more prestigious European races. And then there are the countless classics themselves, in France, Belgium, beautiful places with storied terrain that make terrific videography.

Maybe this is all idealism, and it really couldn't happen that way. But I ask you, doesn't it seem entirely possible?