picture-12 Skyline Road in Portland, Oregon.
It’s snowing.
I think this at precisely the same moment that Tina says it:
“Dude, it’s snowing.”
The flakes are soft and small and intermittent. Hesitant, aware of their imminent demise. There will be no sticking this time around. The effect is calming.
Inside my chest there is a heart. It’s a bloody hunk of machinery. A dogged and relentless worker. Pint after pint after pint it circulates blood throughout my body day in and day out.
At this moment, that seems miraculous. Particularly because I cannot help but be convinced that the bloody little lump will explode suddenly, without warning. Like… now.
But it doesn’t. It just thrashes and carries on with its incessant beating. Bam bam bam bam. It’s in my ears and in my fingertips.
This hill will never end.
Tina Brubaker is here running interference. She is my bastion of hope and optimism. On most other days, when I have been off the back and attended to by some well-meaning boy, I could not get over the sting of it. Unintended patronization. I’d rather suffer alone. Let me suffer alone.
Today is different. Brubaker is different. She says, “I have been there. We all have been there. This is how you get stronger.” and I believe her in a way that I do not believe other people when they tell me this.
“How are you feeling?”
“My legs are killing me.”
“How is your mental state right now? On a scale of 1 to 5?”
“Three. I’m definitely a three.”
“That’s good!” she says. And she really means it.
She’s right.
She reminds me to remember who I’m riding with. How can I forget? At the front of this knock-down-dragout is a girl made exclusively out of legs and lungs. A girl who can climb at the front of a pro peloton. Later she’ll come gliding down the hill looking fresh and happy. She turns around when she’s past me and starts another ascent. She’s keeping warm instead of waiting in the cold at the top.
She looks as though she might actually be having fun and I repress the urge to hate her guts.
Teammate. Teammate. That’s your teammate. A biological anomaly. Freak of nature. Pro. Teammate.
This is only half true. I’m on the development squad, so we’re teammates by name and color, but we don’t ride in the same races. She goes head to head with the nation’s best and I roll around in local races, trying not to get dropped. Night and day.
Remember who you’re riding with. Teammates. Freaks of nature. Legs with Lungs.
Old Germantown Road winds slowly, but steeply up a residential hillside. As a writer, I try to open myself to every situation, to take in details and make mental notes. When I’m climbing, my mental pen runs dry. Nothing is stored or analyzed. Thoughts come in lists and disappear as quickly as they arrive.
- This road. It’s so narrow.
- I am going to drink a hot cup of tea when I get home.
- If I get home.
- I am going to lose 20 pounds tomorrow.
- No, I’m going to lose 20 pounds tonight.
- If I can’t climb this hill, it’s going to be hard to complete a 300k brevet.
- I better keep climbing.
Earlier on Skyline Boulevard the road exploded like a roller coaster and our train responded. Just as the pace ticked up, Miranda Duff came around me and patted her own ass, which is a universal signal that means “Get on my wheel and don’t let go, honey.”
We whipped and zinged over the dips and rises, picking up a couple of older gentleman along the way. It was all I could do to fold into the drops and hang on for the ride, Miranda’s wheel providing just enough draft to let me play the game.
You can’t ride this fast by yourself. At least not for very long. Which is why we do it – ride in groups that is. For the speed and the challenge.
Racers are often misunderstood and sometimes reviled for our intensity and our perceived aggression. Take it how you will, but we’re just doing what most people are doing. Trying to see how good we can be. Pressing for another level.
In the process we log miles and absorb countryside and see the world from a sliver of a saddle.
We climb hills with tiny girls and make lists while our hearts process blood at impressive rates.
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