A Portrait of an Amateur: Part I

I find that even though I've been riding my road bike regularly for at least three years now, I'm still decisively an amateur. It's not like cycling takes a great amount of technical mastery or professionalism, but I seem to have the gift of perpetual and obvious amateurism. I mean, I still get nervous when I walk into a bike shop: I say the wrong words, calling a wheel a tire, and mixing up the order of the Shimano groups. And I'm a bicycle mechanic, for pete's sake.

Nevertheless, amateurism in cycling has one great benefit: epic rides. Professionals get epic rides too. But they plan ahead for them, and thereby dull their knife-sharp, life-altering effects. A pro plans for days ahead, gets on her bike, cranks out a hundred miles, eats all the right food in just the right quantities, brings just enough gear, and is home within 30min of her target time. She goes to bed pleased with a good ride. I watch her with awe. Because I, on the other hand, frequently almost die. I decide the day-of to ride far more miles than I am capable of riding, and I hobble home way past dark, either freezing or carrying 5 pounds of gear I never needed. I go to bed saying words I've promised to stop saying. But I wake up in the morning and life has a brighter hue. An epic ride. Any novice knows what this feels like.

Tuesday's ride was the most recent in a long history of such rides. For your benefit, friend, and to see one such ride through the eyes of an amateur, I place you grammatically in my shoes. It is long, so here is Part I.

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Coming home from work on Monday, an idea strikes you: tomorrow you are entirely free, why not ride to Deckers and back? There's nothing special about Deckers, besides its location 50 miles up into the mountains. And also the last time you were riding in that direction, you got passed by three kids in jeans riding single speed bicycles. They had said, "Hi." You had asked them where they were coming from, where they were going. They had said, "Deckers." And the rest of your ride had felt shamefully 'intermediate'. "So why not ride to Deckers?" you think, driving home from work on Monday. The thought, "to prove yourself to yourself," begins to form in your head, but you don't allow this thought to fully surface. "For the adventure," you say to yourself.

You know you'll have to get a reasonably early start, probably 10 or 11am, so you can make it back before dark, a little after 6pm. But instead of going to bed on time, you get distracted with one of the movies stacked below your room mate's television. You finally get to bed at 1am.

At 8am you wake up without the alarm. You look at the clock and make an agonized noise and close your eyes, thinking to get at least another half hour of sleep. You awake again, suddenly, and sit up in your bed. By the silence of the street out your window, you know it's late in the morning. Your clock says 10:43am. Not to worry, you think to yourself: it won't take long to get ready. You heat some water for instant oatmeal, but discover you only have one packet left. Hardly enough to start the day. So you make a quart of your mother's left-over Christmas tea. You make it far too sweet, like syrup, but you drink the whole quart anyway. The cabinet, you find, is distressingly empty, and realizing you need to take more food on your ride than you currently own, you jump into your car and make your way over to the grocery store. There, a fit looking gentleman with a bike helmet keeps appearing in the same aisle as you do. You smile at him and he smiles warmly back. You grab whatever looks energetic and packable; a stack of tortillas, an apple, a packet of tuna fish, a tub of cream cheese. You add up the Calories mentally, a new pre-ride ritual that makes you feel precise, scientific, like Lance Armstrong. A thousand Calories, give or take; not enough. You go to the aisle of sweet things and bump into the gentleman with the helmet agian. He smiles at you. You browse the Clif Bars and Powerbars and think about your Lenten commitment to abstain from sweets. You deliberate. This is the first time you have honored Lent, and you want to be rigorous. But it's going to be impossible to do long rides without simple sugars. Finally you grab three bars and walk to the checkout line, picturing Jesus entering Jerusalem on a rickety Schwinn, munching on a brown energy bar.

Back in your car, you put in a CD for the five-minute drive home. You choose carefully, knowing that the song you listen to will probably be stuck in your head for the next six hours on your bicycle. It's a sad country song about Richard Manuel and Rick Danko.

At your apartment, you pack the food into your backpack which also carries your water. Your backpack is an abomination, you know; road cyclists don't carry things in backpacks; they put bottles onto their frames and stuff tools and spare clothes and snacks into their back jersey pockets. But you don't want to wear a lumpy jersey for 6hrs today, so you put everything you need into this small backpack. You also put in your phone, your wallet, mittens, a beanie, a long-sleeve shirt, and a windbreaker. You pull your bike down from the wall and get it ready by pumping up the tires, lubing and rubbing down your chain, tightening odd screws. Finally you look everything over. This is the most important step, you have learned, looking everything over. You're always forgetting something essential. You consider the synthetic jersey you picked out. It smells a little sour from too few washings. You pull it off and instead throw on a cotton t-shirt, something your friends have warned against. "But cotton just feels so nice," you think to yourself. "And I'm not going to get any weather today." Besides, when you wipe your nose, a synthetic jersey feels like plastic wrap. Another warning your friends give you is to wear sunglasses, to protect your eyes from wind, flying things, and UV radiation. Despite your aversion to this techno piece of equipment, you know your friends are right. In fact, you have finally ordered a pair. But these haven't arrived yet, so you steal your room mate's shades. "For the last time," you tell yourself.

At last, feeling prepared, you walk out the door with your bike over your shoulder. It's noon. On the landing you realize you forgot your pump. You jump back inside and put your tiny bike pump into your backpack. Back outside you realize, as late as it is, that you ought to bring your bike lights, just in case you need them. You grab these, put them in your backpack, and return to your bicycle. Walking your bike down the sidewalk to the street, you begin to feel that familiar shakiness you always get before long rides. Is it fear? Is it pleasure? You hop onto your bike in one smooth motion, like the pros, but end up swerving ridiculously, trying to get your cleats into your pedals. Then you sprint out into the traffic. The whir of the chain as it snakes through the derailleur has always been a pleasing noise to you, and you feel the ruffling of the air moving through your helmet as you pace up to speed with the cars. A good day. The sun is bright; the air is freakishly warm and windless for winter, and the mountains you will climb loom to the west like a row of clouds.

It doesn't take long to get out of traffic. You move onto the back roads that cyclists always take to get to the West Side. You pass other cyclists, coming home and wave your whole arm at them. They lift their fingers from their handlebars in a subdued gesture. The back streets of the West Side are beautiful, especially as you approach the town at the foot of the mountains. They get progressively more steep and narrow, like those of some villa along the coast of the Mediterranean. You wind through them with the energy and happiness that always accompany the beginnings of your rides. Your mind wanders over many things: the chores you need to catch up on, a friend's predicament, your new feeling of income security. Involuntarily your mind begins to focus on the beginning of an uncomfortableness above your saddle. Then with clarity, you realize that you forgot to lotion up that part of you that contacts your saddle. This is another one of those warnings that you have long received from your experienced cycling friends: always use chamois cream on your ass before long rides. This had seemed utterly useless, even comical to you, like the practice of male road bikers shaving their legs. Until recently. Recently, in the dry Colorado winter, you had been experiencing seriously distracting saddle chafing. So reluctantly you'd taken to applying ample quantities of lotion before long rides, which had eliminated the diaper rash. But this morning you forgot. And now you are beginning to feel an irritation developing in the most uncomfortable of places. Quickly, you think of a solution that will save you the now-impossible 45min round-trip home. Passing a construction site, you pedal up to a Port-A-Jon, lean your bike against it, and step inside, making sure to lock the door. You pull the little cylinder of chapstick out of your backpack and roll up a quarter-inch of the stuff, slicing it off with your finger and smearing it on your palms. Feeling brilliant, then ridiculous, you pull down your cycling shorts and hesitantly apply the lip balm to your ass. You finish the business, pull up your shorts, step back outside, and smile at the man in a construction helmet who is watching you. Back on your bike, you begin to feel a blooming menthol coolness where you applied your chapstick. "This is not an altogether unpleasant solution," you say to yourself, and file the idea into the back of your head.