Pedal Assist

Sunday was the fifth day of bike commuting for the week. It happened to follow a short night's sleep, and not the first such night this week.

Shop hours start later on Sundays. I like to take a longer, more peaceful ride in the extra time. But every alternate route involves steeper, taller hills. Time for some pedal assistance: drugs.

A couple of ibuprofen took the edge off.

No rail cars were out on the trail. Recreational traffic was light. It grew a bit heavier closer to town. About 30 teenage girls in running shorts and sports bras came trotting out in two closely-separated groups. I wondered what school they represented, but I wasn't going to interrupt my flow or theirs to ask a question I really didn't need answered. They were not wearing uniform colors, so no hint there.

Approaching the crossing at Center Street I was pleased to see a couple of human shields approaching the crosswalk in time to stop traffic for me so I could slip out onto the street while they went on over into the even greater path congestion on the final, and most popular, mile into the center of town. The human shields, two women in please-don't-kill-me-yellow tee shirts, were dismounting from their bikes as I rolled up into a near track stand behind them. Traffic stopped headed out of town, from our left. The car approaching from the right, inbound, also stopped. We on the path were on the verge of making our moves when we noticed the jeep approaching from the right at full speed, oblivious to the car stopped right in front of it. Impact seemed inevitable.

The low shriek of wide tires locked up on dry pavement set the sound track for the jeep's panicked slide. The driver steered to the right, missing the stopped car at the crosswalk. The jeep stopped next to the other car. The white-knuckled driver, no doubt with jelly legs and possibly unusable underwear, put his head in his hands.

"Well done, lad!" I sang out cheerfully. You can take that as sarcasm or commendation. Both are valid. The women in front of me started across the street and I swung left to join the vehicular flow on my usual route through town. A car passed me, but the jeep never did. I wonder how long it took that guy to get his legs to work again.

After a fairly uneventful day I dropped a couple more ibbies for the ride home. I'd promised the cats we would hang out together in the Cat Lounge when I got home, but I didn't feel like trudging out the highway like I always do.

Working in The Cat Lounge

With the pain reliever coursing through me and some good coffee, not to mention the fact that we close an hour and a half earlier on Sundays, I felt pretty good as long as I didn't try to hammer too hard. One thing I learned in years of more extensive ibuprofen use is that control of the pain does not replace strength lost when a muscle group is simply fried from days of hard riding. The feeling of painless powerlessness is remarkable. You should try it once, and then not do it again. It can't be good for you.

Out the path I meandered, up the pavement of Bryant Road when I got there, and onto Stoddard, reversing my route from the morning. I'd come within .01 mph of hitting 41 on the way down the steep hill on Stoddard. Now I had to climb it. It's a familiar challenge. I'm not too proud to put the bike in low low and weave. It's actually a nice rhythm that allows good views into the woods. For a good chunk of the road there are no houses.

In this undeveloped section I was puffing along when I suddenly inhaled a cloud of unnatural perfume and chemical odor. I could not tell if it was fabric softener, bug repellent, ill-chosen cologne or what. I also spotted no source whatsoever for it in the forest and undergrowth along the road. Whatever it was, it coated my sinuses and the back of my throat so I tasted it almost all the way home. Was someone hiding in the weeds with a sprayer, spritzing unsuspecting passersby? Or was it wafting down from some distant dwelling, tendrils of chemical reek wending unseen among the tree trunks? I had no ill effects beyond the annoying, persistent taste. A good hoppy beer got rid of the last of that. It's kind of creepy though.

The rest of the ride was uneventful. The cats and I had a nice late afternoon and evening until the late summer crop of small and aggressive mosquitoes gathered as the air cooled to suit them.

Lance should race again

Lance Armstrong should not have skulked off in disgrace after it finally came out that he really had been doping all those years. After his recent assertion that no one can win the Tour de France without doping, it occurred to me he should just approach Monsanto about sponsoring a cycling team. They're totally into putting chemicals where they shouldn't be. They could use the whole sport as their publicity campaign.

Too bad no one thought of that while there was still time.

Hero Villain Lance

A local athlete came home from some marathon in Colorado with yet another story about what an arrogant, antisocial pud Lance Armstrong is.

The details don't matter. It was something about using his leverage to get into a closed field AND take a preferential starting position. Our local reporter said that the race organizers and other competitors weren't happy about it, but somehow the organizers allowed it. There was grumbling. No one was apparently very disappointed when The Great Man did not hang around to socialize, yet Lance's immediate disappearance after the race offended about as much as his abrupt entry and brusque push to the front row.

One of the hotshots who used to join the Sunday morning riding group a few summers ago, when Lance was still active in or only very recently retired from the pro ranks, would launch into angry tirades about everything that was wrong with Lance any time his name was mentioned.

It occurs to me that the more he's hated, the more prickly and aloof he becomes. As a result he becomes even more hated. Not too many people like to be hated, although some will pretend it's fine with them.

Armstrong began his career with the magic blend of talent and insecurity that breeds greatness. You don't have anything to prove unless you have something to prove. The pursuit of dominance is different from the pursuit of excellence. To be a top athlete you have to win. That means you have to make the rest of the field into losers. Feathers often get ruffled. It's a rare champion who has not pissed somebody off. However, some competitors seem to do that more than others.

Personally I don't care either way. As my brother said, if everyone was doping and Lance still won then he's still the best rider. Among those who have strong opinions, that observation would surely spark a typhoon of excrement. My brother is not a Lance partisan, just a logical observer.

Professional sports are just entertainment. Pro cycling has been oozing with substance abuse since it was invented. If you think about it, the Tour de France was conceived as a publicity stunt to sell newspapers by someone who wasn't going to have to ride it. Tour riders came to hate race founder Henri Desgrange and took every chemical advantage they could get, even if it was the dubious advantages of beer and cigarettes.

Mr. Armstrong is just one among a very large number of people I will never have to deal with personally, about whom I know far more than I need to. I am not excessively aggravated by celebrity news, merely fascinated by the phenomenon. Yes, I would like to receive a little more high-fiber news from my major media outlets. I don't really care about entertainers' meltdowns. Pictures of the Sexiest Woman Alive are equivalent to pictures of the surface of Saturn in terms of the likelihood I will ever land there. But these are people. I have to think that most of them do not deserve the highest adulation or the darkest hatred that they receive because they successfully called attention to themselves. The form of the attention shapes them even if they do have massively dysfunctional personalities and would be jerks even in obscurity.

I reserve judgment because I will never have to deal directly with any of them. Even on the exceedingly rare occasions that one of the local summer celebrities appears in our shop it's very short. They come in, ask for what they want, buy it if we have it and go. It's as if they were normal.