Blather on Bicycling

. . .where men roll, and men plunder.

Here’s the dream: I’m out on a lonely open road in Australia, the unfiltered sun penetrating my skin on a hot spring day in November.

The thought was so realistically vivid I could almost feel the sun’s warmth. Yet, even after arriving in Australia I found it took a couple weeks for this reality to come to fruition. Allow me to fast-forward to the present:

• Pile the family into the RV, drive toward warmth, hop on a 14 hour flight from Los Angeles to Sydney.
• Get off the plane, rent a car, get in to drive, find out I am sitting in the passenger seat.
• Assimilate with Australians by slamming coffee from the ubiquitous coffee shops. Get local schedule the first day.
• Drive to the Australia capital, Canberra.
• Take trip to beach, get greeted by dolphins.
• Drive through the edge of the outback. Pass fresh rotting cows, rotting sheep, and lots of rotting roos beside the road.
• Get dropped in a fast group ride, dropped in hot crit, get on first Aussie scoreboard in the hill climb, start hanging in crits and bunch ride.
• Find an apartment.
• Settle in.

So to elaborate a bit more on the cycling, there are group rides every day of the week here, and some are really, really fast, much harder than most races I’ve been in this year. Case in point: the Hour of Power. I headed out around 5:30am to catch up with this ride. (About all the rides start at 6 am here, which would be fine if I was on my home schedule still, but I’m not). So in the twilight of the morning in a somewhat misty and cool day I’m on a overpass waiting with a few others for the bunch to roll up the road. Out of the darkness I started seeing a bunch appearing that was moving at a shockingly alarming rate. I had already experienced the awesome force of group riding here a couple other times previously, but this was 6 in the morning. Certainly they wouldn’t be going full gas (err petrol) this early. It was apparent they weren’t messing around as we rolled down an on-ramp and sprinted like hell just to catch on to the end of the group.

My recollection of what transpired after that is rather foggy due to the. . .uh. . .fog, convergent eyesight, low light, and I can’t remember what else. We were a rather big bunch, maybe 40 deep, and guys were joining the group and getting shelled from the group like it was a giant bar fight. We caught and rolled by an even-deeper peleton (presumably a different group ride) in a tunnel, so basically we had both lanes of traffic dedicated to cyclists. After about 20-25 minutes of this (not sure how long), just about when I was ready to blow, the group eased up and soft pedaled through a suburb. Then, with no apparent warning, the flag went down again, but this dig had us going through a minefield of fresh chipseal debris and then into a suburb or step hills where I finally popped. Fortunately, it was the top of the hour and the ride ended right there, because I had no idea where I was. This allowed me to follow some guys back to a coffee shop for the customary apres ride beverage and then an easy ride back home. A full day’s work, and I got back just in time for the family to be waking up.

And that is just the Tuesday ride. I’ve experienced the awesome force of the Wednesday night crits a couple times, on a short race course built just for cyclists, at the base of the mountain bike park. The concourse includes a building for shade, registration, concessions, bathrooms, and fresh water. I’ve experienced the raw power of the Bakery Bunch training ride on Saturdays, which caught me out during my introduction to group riding here. The next time I was attentive to where the attacking started and survived the ride back to the bakery shop. It starts with about 120 people and finishes with about 25 riding up to the cafe just in time for breakfast.  I haven’t gotten out to Friday’s Hour of Terror yet. I wonder if that is a hard ride?

So my dream hadn’t come true yet because I was riding at odd times, the weather was not always warm, I was traveling, and finding it difficult to get out on the open roads.

Then, the dream came true. I found myself out on a lonely road on a hot day with the sun penetrating my jersey so severely that it gave me a sunburn on my back. It truly was an awesome ride in Australia! In what was a dream that started over a decade ago–albeit not involving bike and still not being about the bike–had now became a reality. I always knew it would, but getting here proved to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever accomplished, much harder than a doctoral degree, buying a house, bike training through winter, surviving boarding school, dating girls, coaching a sport, starting a career, being an athletic director, and getting tenure as a professor. I’m here though, and making the most of it. . .