May 11, 2004

Why are so many people better than me?

By Lionel Putz, Esq.*

For some people, my Tour of Georgia trilogy raised some questions. Who the hell is this guy? Where does he get off writing anything about cycling? Why isn't this as funny as I was hoping? As I've always said, my success in cycling was severely hindered by a lack of talent. Probably, the same holds true for my writing. Believe me, I'm trying, I just can't figure out why so many people are better than me.

So, I apologize up front. This is not the typical insulting, caustic, smart-ass humor you've come to expect from me. I'm working on that article as you read this. Instead, this article attempts to point out important lessons I've learned about myself from cycling, with the hope that it will help people understand why cycling is important to me and that I'm not just a nihilist with an agenda to just rip apart anything or anyone that passes my intellectual gun sights.

My desire to succeed as a cyclist was fueled by the fact that I discovered on a relative scale, unlike many other sports, I was pretty good at it. Growing up, I had come to the erroneous conclusion that "sports" required something I clearly lacked: hand-eye coordination.

In Little League, I was always a catcher, which seemed to work out fine. Either the guy hit the ball, or I tried to catch it. In addition, for my own protection, I, unlike the pitcher, was heavily padded in case I missed. This was fine when we were all too small to hit the ball out of the infield, but as I got older, my inability to catch foul balls without a sense of vertigo, and my record-setting pace of passed balls left me sitting on the bench. I didn't see much point to that. Then, the ultimate humiliation. I was relegated as a spot player in right field. Baseball (which I hate) probably has as many odd traditions as cycling, both borne from 100 years of history and a lack of analysis. Putting the guy with no hand-eye coordination in the outfield made no sense to me. I guess it's the lesser of evils. Everyone else is more likely to touch the ball, but hell, whenever a ball was hit in the air, I couldn't tell if it was a pop foul or a home run until it was within 20 feet of hitting me in the head. I didn't like that feeling much. As a result, I gave up on most organized team sports and have tried to avoid them to this day. I can still feel the humiliation of going to the beach with a girlfriend and ALL of her hot friends, participating in a game of volleyball in which I embarrassingly took a solid shot to the face trying to set a high ball, and realizing in a horrible, Darwinian, natural-selection sort of way, that I would never be allowed to procreate with any of these women.

Luckily, my father was a cyclist. Probably for the same reason I quit hand-eye coordination sports. He also played the French horn, a mistake I avoided. I played the drums, which was actually funny since my aforementioned lack of coordination meant I could never really get my hands and feet working together all that well, but since hard objects were not hurtling toward my head at disfiguring speeds, I was able to practice enough to play in some garage bands. Growing up, I had watched my dad ride his bike. Living near the Mexican border in San Diego, he used to go out for morning rides and then come home to call the Border Patrol to tell them where he'd spotted illegal's running through the back country. He also loved to show off all the great stuff he found just laying there on the road waiting to be picked up, which he seemed to believe made getting up at that hour reasonable, i.e., coins, baseball caps, but most importantly, porn. These were the days before the VCR, pay for view, and Spankstravision. To a teenage boy, the possibility of finding some dog-eared copy of Playboy made the whole idea of training potentially worthwhile.

So, I started training. There was so much emptiness around my hometown that within 4 minutes I was beyond civilization. It didn't take long for me to learn one of the most important lessons I discovered in life: most people completely underestimate their capabilities. Not just in cycling, but in just about everything. People usually assume they are capable of less than they really are and end up limiting their own horizons as a result. This is a powerful principle.

As I was training, I started to realize that there was a lot more capacity in my body than I'd every thought possible. I figured a nice 30 minute ride was about as far as you could go on a bike. Then I started pushing myself to see just how far I could go, and still make it home. Eventually, and pretty quickly, I was riding over three hours without a problem. Of course, it never occurred to me to try riding up steep hills, that woulda just been stupid. But I started to get this little feeling that I might be good at this.

My dad belonged to the San Diego Wheelmen. I think it was about the only real cycling club in San Diego, but my world view was so limited that I wouldn't have known any better. He'd occasionally go on group rides with them. I just figured they were a bunch of old guys that liked to talk about the stuff they found on the side of the road. We used to get the newsletter listing all the rides. Now intrigued by the sport, I saw a ride described as the "fast 50." They had a "no drop" policy, whatever that was, so I figured I'd give it a try.

I'll never forget showing up for that ride wearing gym shorts, tennis shoes, a t-shirt, and my trusty Skid Lid. The Skid Lid was the only alternative to the hairnet in those days, and there was no way my mother was going to let me do something like this without wearing the ugliest most uncool yellow helmet available (younger readers will have to just ask someone old what these helmets looked like, as there are no surviving photographs of people wearing them they will willingly show you).

These guys all looked like professionals to me; although I have to admit I only had a murky idea of what a professional looked like. My dad did subscribe to Bicycling, or something like it, but all of the articles were on how to fix your own loose ball bearing BB or install brazes for panniers (again, ask someone old). However, I'd heard of a foreign guy named Eddy Merckx who people said was really good, but I'd never heard of him winning an Olympic gold medal or anything important like that. Clearly, I was underdressed. I learned another important lesson that day. Always look better than you actually are. It's a psychological weapon used to intimidate others and cover your inadequacies. These days, when I ride, I dress with all the style of Mario Cipollini, and that's only so people won't just roll away disgusted before the group ride even starts.

We started riding. I was sure I was dead meat. I actually had no idea how far 50 miles really was. This was before the invention of the bike computer. Hell, in retrospect, I don't even know if these guys knew how far 50 miles was, but they had me intimidated. Then I learned about one of the greatest phenomena in the world: the draft. I'd never been on a pack ride. I didn't realize that if I rode behind four guys, it was like I wasn't even pedaling. I felt like a god. I was sure I could go all day like this. Of course, I had no idea I was supposed to take a "pull." The only "pulling" I'd done was with that dog-eared Playboy I'd found while training. No, I was plenty happy right where I was. I remember we stopped about 35 miles out for food, for some reason. I was starting to think these guys weren't serious enough about this ride. What the hell were we stopping for bananas for? I never stopped when I rode. I didn't eat anything when I rode by myself. Therefore, I ate nothing. I hadn't brought any money. Hell, it would have fallen out of my gym shorts anyway. All I had was one bottle of water. By the way, we'd gone 35 miles and I hadn't drunk any of it either.

So these guys finally get back on their fancy rigs and we roll off to finish the last 15 miles. I was already thinking about asking one of the guys at the front after the ride if he knew of any harder group rides I could do, "you know, with some 'serious' cyclists." Next thing I know, we are heading south on Pacific Coast Highway north of La Jolla. I sorta recognize this place. I'd been up here with my parents before. Looking up, I notice a gigantic hill is coming up in front of us. I figure, there must be some way around this thing, 'cause there was no way we were gonna try to ride up that. It was like a mountain. Then I noticed there didn't look to be any turnoffs before the mountain. We pass the parking lot entrance to the beach and turned right at the bottom. I couldn't have been more relieved. I was thinking "alright, there's some kinda beach boardwalk we're gonna use until this levels out. I learned another important lesson that day: there was no boardwalk. Instead, there was an even steeper road on the other side of the parking lot.

Shock set in. How long was this thing? What if I had to stop? Worse, what if I had to walk? The group started to string out. Clearly, we had just gotten to "the ride." These guys were now pounding on each other to be the first one to the top. I was alone at the back, the sound of my breathing so loud in my ears that I couldn't hear anything else. I shifted into my lowest gear and tried to stand up and pedal. I quickly tired and sat back down. I was just going to have to try as hard as I could to catch back up. I tried to find a rhythm, I guess. I had no idea what that meant at the time. I tried to stay upright and moving forward. There were hikers all around the sides of the road, so I didn't want to humiliate myself in front of anyone.

Suddenly, in front of me, I started to see guys from the group. It looked like I was catching them, or they were slowing down. Either way, I didn't care. I felt the same way I did when I'd gotten lost in Kmart and had to have my mother paged over the intercom to come and claim me. I was no longer alone. That was all that mattered. The next thing I knew, I was behind one of the guys from the group. Then I learned another important lesson: there is no draft on hills.

All of that effortless energy was a memory I could not reconstruct. I was captured completely in this moment, this pain, this doubt, and this predicament. I came up along the guy from the group, and he looked like I felt. It was as though he couldn't see me, locked in his own world of pain. My rhythm carried me past him as we went around a hairpin corner. Looking ahead, I saw what I'd never expected, more guys strung out right in front of me. Some riding in small groups, some riding alone. I could feel they were getting closer. My fear abated and my hubris emerged. I wanted to catch up with these guys. I didn't want to be a joke. I didn't want to sit on the bench. I shifted to a higher gear. I actually felt better. I felt a rush of adrenaline as I started to surge forward. The pain didn't mean I was going to die, it was just an artifact of the hard effort. Suddenly, I realized it wouldn't get any worse.

I caught some guys, but the better guys were already waiting patiently at the top. I knew they were at an entirely different ability level than I was, but I wanted to get there. It didn't take me long to find all those guys ahead of me. Soon I was in junior races when a guy from Nevada named Greg LeMond showed up and lapped the field solo. I realized my natural talent wasn't going to get me where he was.

I used my best asset, my head. I became obsessed with training techniques, preparation, my equipment, etc. I got better, but I was never the best. The other evening I was talking with Jonathan Vaughters. We have so much in common. He was telling how he had started going to the Olympic Training Center when he was 16 so that he could optimize his cadence while other guys were out looking for porn on the side of the road. He wanted every advantage. He used his head. Probably the most important lesson both of us learned from cycling. Some guys just have natural ability and little interest in exploring the limits of that talent by analyzing it intellectually in order to optimize it. Others may lack the talent, but intellectualize riding in the same way they would tackle a trigonometry problem. Probably the same reason the best baseball coaches are the guys who sat on the bench looking for every advantage, and thinking about the game.

So, do I think the most talented rider in the world has won the last five Tours de France? Not necessarily. Do I believe the most driven and well-prepared athlete in the world (not just cyclist) has? Probably. I think Jan Ullrich has a world of talent. At his best, he may be untouchable. But I've only seen him at his best on a few random occasions. Most particularly, the Olympics. On the other hand, I've seen Lance Armstrong show up at the Tour de France for five straight years for, 21 days in July, having done everything he can to prepare himself to be the best in the world and he has delivered. You have to use your best asset to accomplish that feat, your head.

Lionel

Lionel Putz assists team TIAA-CREF with... well, it beats the hell out of us actually. He is, of course a pseudonym, his identity concealed to protect the guilty. Especially from Bob Roll.