A visit from Quinn Simmons

 Because professional rider Quinn Simmons has family in the area, local riders have occasionally seen him flash by on the road or caught a familiar-looking route posted to Strava. Then, last week, we had a closer encounter.

It began on Wednesday or Thursday when a young woman arrived with a tubeless tire that wouldn't hold pressure. Steve figured out from conversation that it was Sydney, Quinn's wife. Quinn's grandparents have a place in Alton, and have apparently shopped our store before. Steve's enthusiastic welcome led to a possibility that Quinn himself might find time to stop by. He's hanging in the area before heading up to the world championships in Montreal.

Friday got off to a normal start for one of the last days of astronomical summer. Daylight still hanging just above twelve hours. The morning comes on gradually, but the middle of the day is still bright with strong sunshine. Rental bikes went out, late-summer tourists came in. Around noon, Steve settled in for a bit of lunch. About fifteen minutes into it he saw Quinn's grandparents pull into a parking space in the lot out back. He came out of the back shop as they reached the top of the stairs.

"The package is arriving," said the grandmother. At the same time, the entire Simmons family came in through the front door of the shop, having ridden in from Alton. Steve and his wife Beth welcomed them. Steve was an enthusiastic and well-informed fan. A local man, Ed, who is active with the Wolfeboro Cross Country Ski Association and who was going to travel to Montreal to watch the men's road race, happened to be in the store at the same time. Thus, a chatty and appreciative crowd filled the other side of the shop.

I had a time-sensitive job on the repair stand, and would just have been a slack-jawed yokel adding a heavy dose of awkwardness standing in the background, so I stayed in my greasy lair and enjoyed the sounds of the party. Then I had to launch a renter. Eventually the entourage filtered over to the other part of the sales floor and I got to see Quinn himself. I tried to look affable but virtuously busy. No point going over and embarrassing myself and dampening the spirits of the revelers.

Even when I raced I wasn't a well-informed fan of the sport. I wasn't even well informed about my fellow competitors. I respected the great and the near great, I just didn't keep track of them. As for the equipment they use, Quinn and the whole professional world are using tubeless tires, disc brakes, and electronic shifting on soulless carbon machines that may be lighter and more aerodynamic than any round-tubed product of a master metal fabricator, but they're sterile and vulnerable. They make sense in the racing world, but they isolate the racing world from the rest of the world by their expense.

I've said it before, mostly in jest: In the early 1970s, for $300 you could buy a bike just like the one that the winner of the Tour de France just rode, and for another $300 you could rent that rider for a one-day crit. The first part is mostly true. The second part exaggerates the low salary range for European pro riders, but for an American rider it was probably painfully close to the truth. And $300 in 1975 is equal to almost $1,900 dollars today. That seems like a lot until you price a top-tier road racing bike today and see that a piddly-ass $1,900 won't get you crap. It's a great metaphor for the wealth inequality that has surged in that same span of years. You really could buy a very respectable road bike for a few hundred (1970s) dollars. If you knew how to do your own work, you could piece together something competitive without having to buy any specific company's complete gruppo. I did, and the only things that held me back were my sporadic training and my complete lack of balls in a tight criterium. All of my bloody crashes happened in stupid ways in the outside world.

By 1979-1980, that $300 bike was a thousand dollars. I heard rumors of one amateur racer who lived in a storage unit when he wasn't on the road, living out of his car. He could afford a car? Maybe not much of a car. It's like musician economics: $10,000 instrument, $500 car. Hope you make it to the gig. A $1,200 bike in 1980 would cost about $4,500 today, still well short of the spaceships ridden in the pro ranks.

With all that separates a professional racer from a civilian now, Quinn's generosity in visiting stands out. On the one hand, cycling in the US is still such a fringe sport that a bike racer might be happy to soak up some adulation where they find it. On the other hand, he was in the final week of timing his training and honing his mind to face a pretty sadistic course against the best racers in the world. I looked at the course profile online. The spirit of Desgrange lives on in course designers everywhere. I used to think it was sad when a professional racer retired and got rid of all of their bikes. But it makes sense after putting in mind and body crushing efforts for years that a person might be happy never to throw a leg across a bike again after that. Racing at the top level is truly a great way to grind all the fun out of riding.

Modern bike technology makes a hard job easier, but only in tiny increments that get overwhelmed by the closer competition over courses that are still brutal. Racers no longer have to be smooth and accurate at shifting in friction, using levers on the downtube. Downtube shifters were preferred because the cable run was the shortest and the shifters were protected. Short cable runs meant faster response at the derailleurs. Protection meant that the controls weren't exposed to crash damage. But you had to reach down for them, and develop the precision of a classical violinist to hit the right spot consistently on the first try.

When Shimano brifters debuted in 1990, observers wondered about their vulnerability. I don't remember which of the women in the 1992 Olympic road race was featured in the television coverage, probably Inga Thompson, but she crashed and bent the right brifter. It apparently still functioned, but it demonstrated the vulnerability. Now it's all electronic, with multiple control points distributed on the handlebars. Heck, you could even have them in the saddle. Flex left glute to shift up, right glute to shift down. By 2030, racers will have a brain implant so they can shift by thinking about it. Bike shops will become authorized outpatient surgical centers to drop the wiring into the skulls of the most enthusiastic technolemmings.

"I ain't never done one of these before! You sit there and wait for the sedative to take effect while I watch this YouTube video so I know where to drill! Hey Bob! Wash your hands! I need an anesthesiologist over here!"

With all of the technology, nutrition, and logistical support, racing is still brutally hard. More is expected of the riders because these other burdens have been lifted from them. They can propel their lightweight bikes almost as fast as a responsible driver in a suburban neighborhood, but they're still doing it with a human's puny 0.25 horsepower. That's point two-five. A quarter of a horsepower. I guess the pros have managed to push that to 0.4, but that's still a tiny fraction of the average 170-200 hp of a basic family car. With the challenge of the world championship coming up, Quinn was extraordinarily kind to spend time with a few fans. We all appreciated it.

That which used to make me stronger kills me

 The best laundry days are the ones when the fire wardens warn you that the dry grass could catch fire just from a cricket rubbing its legs together. Today is such a day.

The clotheslines are hung high enough to allow bed sheets to hang clear of the dirt. Hanging a load requires some reaching and stretching upward. And that is how the subject connects to the temporary but frequent inconveniences that formerly very active people deal with when attempting to be moderately active in the face of all of the elements of life that conspire to make us sedentary subjects of contented decay.

Deprived of convenient access to the one-stop shopping of cross-country skiing, my winter conditioning consists of baking tasty things and lifting them out of the oven. Occasionally, a stab of misgiving impels me to put myself through as much as I can remember -- and endure mentally -- of my old indoor routines. Since 1982 I have had to keep up regular conditioning of my right shoulder, to reinforce the acromioclavicular joint, where the collar bone attaches to the rest of the shoulder joint. It was blown apart on a night ride when I failed to clear a cut in the road that I was jumping on my racing bike.

Of all the people I used to ride with when I was messing around with racing, the only one who doesn't have a messed-up collarbone broke his leg instead. All of them received their wounds valorously in competition. The guys who got fractures in the middle of the collarbone took off the sling and resumed training in a week. The other guy who suffered an a-c separation had real health insurance, so he had the surgery where they screw it back together like a wobbly chair, so he had minimal down time as well. I, on the other hand, unsure of my finances, wore a strap for ten weeks, which held the errant collarbone in place by compression along the humerus. The orthopedic doctor who treated me in the ER said "eight to ten weeks," but I think the eight was just to give me a ray of false hope. I went to that eight week consultation full of joy, only to find out that it had never been a strong possibility.

Do you know how scrawny your arm gets when you have it strapped in a sling for ten weeks? And then there's range of motion. When I finally got the sling off, the doctor told me I could go ahead and straighten my arm. I think he did it for the "humerus" value. My forearm, which had been held level at about ninety degrees to the upper arm, only dropped about ten degrees before I felt the tug of shortened muscle.

As a low-budget patient I didn't receive a ton of follow-up once I was released back into the alley. I was advised not to rush things. Having explored strength training for various non-biking activities, I pieced together some exercises with light weights, calculated to reinforce the joint. For sensible symmetry, and strength for a growing interest in climbing, these weight routines became a regular habit for more than 20 years. My misspent life centered on human-powered exploration of my neighborhood, on foot, by bike, and in paddle craft. 

At 64, lacking the bottomless reservoirs of youthful strength, I still feel that life is made more worthwhile by aimless exploration of mostly natural environments.

Pain after exercise is an insidious foe. In your teens and twenties you might push yourself and feel pain almost immediately afterward, which diminishes steadily as you go forward. In your thirties the onset may be immediate or slightly delayed, and the arc of it rises before it falls. By your forties, the onset is delayed by as much as a day, so you have no idea how intense it might get. This continues with the next decade. Ah, but the 60s... this is the decade of surprise. I will be surprised at how strong I feel, resuming training after a layoff. I will be further surprised by what hurts -- and how badly -- when the backlash hits a day or two later.

Yesterday afternoon, after a nice hike up the mountain behind my house, I felt pretty good. The day before, I had done my wee little workout, with the vestiges of core work and upper body strength needed to support the bike commute and keep my shoulder knitted together. About an hour after I returned to the house, a sharp pain stabbed me in the muscles of my upper chest, just a couple of ribs below the clavicle. I felt around to see if maybe I'd been shot and hadn't realized it. It's clearly on the outside of the chest cavity, but the stab of pain makes it hard to take a deep breath, and excruciating to blow a snot rocket. I really pissed something off in there.

Muscle memory is not always your friend. I can't point to a single moment in my exercise session in which I said, "Oops, I shouldn't have done that." I flowed through the familiar movements with what seemed like reasonable amounts of weight. Nothing, really.

The pain fluctuates, but has not gone away. Some pains suggest their remedy when you explore them by careful movement or exploratory pressure. Not this little bastard. Every time I think I've found the key stretch or the right massage, it ripostes with another accurate thrust.

Trainee David has a tee shirt from the Marine Corps that says, "Pain is weakness leaving your body." As inspiring as that may seem to a youngster feeling only rising strength, I can think of numerous instances in which it is not true, including combat wounds. I asked if the recruiters showed them splatter flicks, like the scare movies in driver education classes, just to prepare them for the realities of armed conflict. If you don't get a deep look at your own internal anatomy, you still might have to function while looking at your buddy's. The more hardened you can get to that, the better, if warrior is really your calling. Life is pain, and ultimately weakness does not leave your body. You figure out how to work with it.

Agony and endorphins

Since my last post, I have started a couple of entries, only to be dragged away for long enough to lose the thread of them.

As this strange winter began, we seemed to be getting a reasonable amount of snow for cross-country skiing. Way back in 1980, when I was dedicated to training, I heard about cross-country skiing as a winter sport that integrated well with competitive cycling. I now know more about how that works -- and doesn't work -- but that isn't the topic today. The point is, I've valued snow and the things you can do on it for many years, rather than wishing it away or going out pedaling in it when there are far older and better established ways to use it as a transportation and recreation medium.

Then the weather broke. I don't mean the weather broke in the classic sense of a sustained period of one type giving way to another. I mean it really seems to have broken into chunks of April and January, shaken together and dumped out in a cycle of warm wet followed by cold dry.

The transformed snow pack, combined with a few scheduling issues, threw me from the regular rhythm of the bike commute into a relatively sedentary lifestyle. Drive. Work. Drive. Do domestic tasks. When I did manage to get out to poke around the woods for anything, it was at very low intensity.

The deeply cold air is very dry. Heat that air inside a house and it becomes even more dry. I wake up in the middle of the night with absolutely no moisture in my mouth, even if I was not sprawled on my back, snoring. I keep a bottle of water by the bed, and drink most of it by morning. Even so, dehydration sneaks in, because I seldom sense thirst. And so, for the first time in my life, I had to pass a kidney stone.

Dietary factors contributed, I'm sure, even though I try to eat a fairly plant-based menu. I like meals that are made from scratch but easy to prepare. Ideally, they spin off leftovers I can carry for grab-and-go lunches. As I writhed in agony on the couch on Friday night, I researched factors that contribute to kidney stone production, and found a few of my regular items on the suspect list: nuts, green leafy vegetables, wheat bran…any and all of these, combined with inadequate hydration and sedentariness, could have played a part in the waves of pain that ramped up steadily as my little rock made its way through the ureter.

Worse than the pain is the unknown, especially for someone with no health insurance.  Even though health insurance is a deceptive product that is actually one of the reasons all medical things are ridiculously expensive in the United States, it is the accepted norm when you present yourself for care. And it was Friday night going into a holiday weekend. Not only would I be unable to get anything but emergency care, I had to be at work the next day, and the next day, and the holiday Monday.

If all I had to face was the mind-blowing agony of the stone's passage, I could deal with it. I thought I was going to puke or pass out or both, as it reached its crescendo, but then it was over, and the aftermath was bliss. But if I had an infection or had developed some weird chronic condition in which this was the new normal, I would have to consider suicide, because I am too poor to indulge in long-term illness and decline. As soon as I can no longer take care of myself, I have to go. And I don't want to go. But the reality of a market-based approach to human value is that you have no value when you are not creating cash flow.

The middle of a winter night, racked with pain, is a perfect time to swirl down a dark whirlpool of mortal anxiety.

This time, I got through the pain and a day of fasting and water, facing a light tourist load because they all thought the weather had ruined the skiing. I have no signs of infection, and will return to the forest to forage until some other crisis comes along. Whatever I can do with diet and exercise, I will do. When the thing comes along that is finally too serious for that…I'm not looking forward to it, but there's no good alternative. Something takes you out eventually. It irks me to know that I could easily go down from something that would have been treatable, but since we ration care on the basis of ability to pay, someone has to be left out.

The bliss that followed the pain reminded me of the same peace that follows a good workout or a serious bike crash. That's how it ties to the theme of this blog. And the blog is about the life of a person, not about obsessive compulsive cycling.