Lance A Lot

Zulle, Ullrich, Beloki, Basso & Kloeden

Well, Lance Armstrong stepped down as Chairman of his LiveStrong charity. Last week Johan Bruyneel stepped down as Director of Team RadioShack – Nissan – Trek. Apparently a whole host of former riders and teammates dropped the dime on Lance, including George Hincapie, Levi Leipheimer, Frankie Andreu,  Jonathan Vaughters, Christian Vande Velde and Dave Zabriski. He has subsequently been dropped by Nike and most of his other sponsors.

Now, I personally lean toward Malcomb Gladwell’s view of the scandal, but am completely sympathetic to those who feel that rulz is rulz. Whatever you think of Armstrong, it is a sad day for those of us who love the sport of cycling. Contrary to what some may believe, this will not be good for the sport. Levi has already been fired for his admission. Others will probably suffer.

And this won’t make the sport one bit cleaner. Cheating has been part of the sport since the very beginning, and if you think EPO and blood doping are troubling, just wait till you see gene doping. All the cool kids will be doing it. And we should expect them to. It is not in their interest to do otherwise. And with our ever regenerating innocence we will once again express our eternal outrage that athletes would do everything possible to push their bodies past the natural laws of biology simply to become the idols our culture worships. 

Hey, I’ve got an idea – why don’t we teach our children to worship authors, artists, doctors, engineers and teachers and tell them the last thing we would ever want them to grow up to be is a professional athlete. Or we could admit to ourselves that just like investment bankers, athletes will do anything to win, regardless of the consequences.

Re-Union

I am standing on the perimeter of a large group of a people I used to know with the wife of a friend who is watching her husband, the father of her two children, lean in close to the hottest woman in the room, his arm around her shoulders. The wife’s arms are crossed, the right toe taps the floor, the corners of her mouth descend as if being dragged by gravity and one eyebrow is lifted in what could only be construed as a threat. Though more blatant than the other males at the reunion, my friend is by no means uncharacteristic in his actions. Decades on they seem hell bent to capitalize on the second chance to subdue prey they could not conquer in their youth. If only I knew then what I know now, they think. 

These thick-middled sweaty men, now husbands and fathers, little league coaches, white collar keyboard jockeys are transported back by the magic of the mirror ball and Lionel Ritchey music to their physical primes if only in their minds, and this time they will not fail. The cheerleader, though herself now a wife and mother, herself thickened and bearing the visible traces of the life since graduation, flits through the evening between hot flashes. But the attention takes her back to that earlier time too. To an epoch when she wielded the power vested in her by mere virtue of her youth. And again, if only for an hour or two, she has the magic back as the boys once again clamor and jostle for her attention.    

My friend’s wife won’t understand. She won’t care. It is not the kill the boys miss; it is the hunt. Very few conventional marriages afford the opportunity for the inner predator to assert itself, so every ten years the males of the tribe grow back their heavy brows and beat their chests again in a wretched spectacle of misplaced virility.

I am not of the hunting clan though, so I witness this rite from the periphery. I am descended from the shamanic clan, the observers, the story-tellers, the solitary madmen who howl at the moon alone in their caves out beyond the boundaries of the village. I am much more comfortable spending my time with the wives and children while the men go off to test their mettle against one another. So it is I am able to see, in the tapping of a foot or the roll of eyes, the exasperation in a wife’s expression.

Such empathy no doubt comforts The Managing Partner who knows she will likely find me far from the center of gravity, usually at the apogee of any given dance floor. She would probably prefer some sort of compromise, but she seems content. Let her dance with somebody else’s husband. Then when she’s tired of being groped by the degenerate, she knows where I am.

La Vida Vélo

I never meant to own an ‘86 Fuji. In 1986 I didn’t even own a bike. I didn’t know anything about bikes. Like many of us I left bicycles back in childhood, thinking of them as mere toys. In my case, most of the childhood bikes had been cobbled together from junk, collected at the local auction held periodically by the police to clear out their storage space. Rust was all that held most of them together. We favored Stingray-ish models with ape hangers, banana seats and sissy bars. Cards were mounted on the forks or seat stays so as to emulate the sound of a throaty unmuffled motor (or so we thought). We hardly ever actually rode the things. Mostly we idled around the courtyard practicing wheelies, skids and jumps. Our image of bikes came from a combination of Evel Knievel  and Easy Rider. What we dreamed of was motorcycles and more or less as soon as we could get them we dumped the bicycles unceremoniously like yesterday’s newspaper.

Mountain bikes came along and hybrids and somewhere in my adulthood a Specialized Crossroads showed up. A TIG-welded Cromoly frame with low gearing and a comfortable upright position. At first just to amble around the neighborhood as I pretended to “get in shape” but then later, during a long stretch of time in which I have nothing really better to do, the rides started getting longer and more frequent. I very slowly found myself wearing lycra shorts with chamois and spending hours studying maps of the rural roads nearby. Then Lance came along and like so many of my generation I had to have a road bike. At the time TIG-welded aluminum held the sweet spot for mid-range racing style bikes and I still have and love my Trek 2000 with its forgiving gearing and dependable Shimano 105 shifters. 

The years rolled by and slowly I became obsessed with bicycles. In addition to actually riding them I became a passionate fan of the sport. Though not a racer myself I never miss an opportunity to watch all the action from Europe I can squeeze out of my cable subscription and I try to get to most of the big races in my immediate vicinity. And I started to read every book and magazine I could get about bikes. I became, and remain one of those interminable bike people, excelled in tediousness only by hemp advocates and martial arts movie fans. And of course the madness culminated in the purchase of a ludicrously expensive carbon fiber trophy bike, hand-made in Waterloo, Wisconsin.  Oh brother. I had it bad.   

But just as I had gradually become engulfed in Euro race culture over time, I have since begun a transition to a more practical; you might say a more sensible, approach to cycling. I have begun to wean myself from the influence of the magazines with their advertisements and annual Why You Need a New Bike articles. I have tried to stop feeling anxiety when the skinny kid with the shaved legs blows by me. I have resolved to obey the laws when practicable (which is not always the case!) and to ride safely rather than in the barnstorming style of yesteryear. Perhaps most importantly, I have given up caring about my stats. I still set goals for the number of miles I ride in a given calendar year, in order to motivate me when I would rather lie on the sofa watching television. But I have stopped worrying about average MPH, high speeds and all that nonsense.

I still love to watch racing, and still think Jens Voigt rocks; I still love to get spandexed up and indulge my inner racer but I no longer fantasize that every ride is a chance to improve my times. I no longer believe in “junk” miles. I try to enjoy being on a bike just for fun; running down to the farmers market on the weekend or just around the neighborhood to blow the stink off me. And that's where the Fuji comes in.

As I've read and thought more about what is really important to me I have concluded that what I long for is real, lasting value in life. Real long-term relationships, deep interactions with art and culture, daily contact with well made, durable items crafted with pride for lasting utility and beauty. And nothing really symbolizes that longing for permanence, for dependability like a bike that has been around for 26 years. So, off to Craigslist I went and in fairly short order found a very typical Bike Boom bike for a very reasonable price.   

Maybe I have just been co-opted by the new fashion, simply replacing the old. Maybe I’m just preparing for early retirement to the bikey utopia that is Portland, Oregon.Whatever the case, I seem to be enjoying the ride more than ever, looking forward to the day, hopefully in very old age, when my corpse is found lying in a ditch with a smile on my face.  

Juglans regia

Small batch Nocino from Zürich, Switzerland

You can’t have any of this. You can’t buy it, and I’m not going to give you any. Sure, you might be able to buy that overpriced stuff from Napa. Or you might be able to find some Nocello and tell yourself that it’s close enough. It’s very good and it does come from Emilia-Romagna, but it’s not real Nocino. It has hazelnuts and vanilla, and that just isn't proper Nocino.

This particular Nocino was made lovingly by hand by a friend of mine in Switzerland and it is precious. So you can't have any of it. But you can make some for yourself if you want. Here’s a recipe. Not THE recipe, mind you – that too is not something I’m going to give you, and you couldn't get the ingredients if you wanted to anyway – but this will probably produce something palatable, and if you do it right, you won't go blind.   

All you need is about 30 green walnuts (preferably collected on St. John the Babtist Day – right around June 24), a fifth of your favorite neutral alcoholic beverage (think grappa, vodka, or grain alcohol), some sugar and spice, and lots of time. It takes a month or two to soak the walnuts and then ideally a year in the bottle before the sweet, black elixir reaches its final maturity. For your edification, here's a video of the process featuring the strangest Italian accent I've ever heard.

If you ever find yourself in Brisighella, make sure to stop by the Terra di Brisighella and pick up a couple of bottles. The olive oil and Grappa there are also quite good.

Sowing the Seeds of Fitness

The days are getting shorter and the long low shadows stretch across Beech Drive in the afternoon, slivers of sunlight slashing the tarmac as I try to get in a ride after work. Seasonal adjustment disorder is peering through the increasingly bare trees, as hungry as the whitetails creeping out to the roadside to pluck the last of the summer grass, waiting to catch me in the dark and plunge me into despair. Or, you know, I’ll just have to set up the trainer in the basement. Either way, it’s depressing. So what’s a cyclist to do when winter descends? Well…

As Grant Says…

In yesterday’s post I reported on a visit with Grant Petersen, founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works who is on a tour promoting his new book Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike. One of the first things you notice about Grant is that he’s pretty buff for a guy so closely associated with cycling. When you think of bikey guys you typically think of emaciated twinks with spindly arms and no upper body strength. But not Grant. For a 58 year old man, he is the picture of fitness. He maintains in his book that cycling, while good for you, is lousy all-around exercise. In fact, that’s the title of Chapter 31. And he’s right. We’ve all seen that fat guy on a bike at every century but who still manages to carry an extra fifty pounds or more. Obviously cycling alone won’t make you thin unless you have the 5 or 6 hours a day that pro racers have to ride. So what’s his secret? Burpees. Sort of a squat thrust with a push-up and a hop thrown in. To wit:

I love Jenny. Her schmaltzy lounge-lizard patter and AM radio voice conveys a level of ironic sarcasm not seen since the heyday of Richard Cheese. 

Grant suggests other stuff like controlling your diet (yeah, right!), kettle bells, yoga/pilates and cross training, but burpees are the one that clinches the deal. Plus, upon request he willingly demonstrated how to do one in the parking lot of College Park Bicycles. Try a few. They take almost no time and are surprisingly effective.

Brave New World

The Sausage Factory has the day off in honor of Cristoforo Colombo. I don’t celebrate the holiday myself. When I want to commemorate the extermination of the indigenous population of America, I honor Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro. And if it’s exploration and discovery I’m celebrating, I recognize the birthday of Carl Franz. In any case, happy holiday. And may every day include the discovery of new lands and peoples and may you not enslave them and commit genocide.