Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Flight of Fancy

Amelia Earhart sold her airplane to buy a fast bright yellow car sometime in her late 20s, so she could drive across country from California to Boston to help her mother, who was sick. It was the beginning of a few long hard flightless years of poverty for her.
After she was whisked out of her burgeoning career in social work to fly across the Atlantic as the first female (passenger) to do that, she got famous and spent the rest of her life not just setting records but lecturing endlessly around the country, in the name of equality for women and airplanes for everyone. She pioneered feminism and the passenger airplane industry.
Maybe it's a little ironic to listen to her extensive biography while driving across the country, my act of active rebellion against airplanes.
I wanted to travel with a little more continuity, on the ground, to see the world I was traversing end to end. I wanted to manage my own luggage, my own security, my own destinations.
Flying in an airplane can feel a little like going through a worm hole, teleporting from one place to another. You hand over your ticket, your luggage, your money to someone else, and sit down and wait until you are in the destination airport. It's as if the San Francisco airport is connected directly to JFK (or perhaps Denver) with just a wait of a couple of hours of waiting time in between.
I've heard that it takes about the same amount of fuel, gas, petroleum, to fly across the country non-stop in a full 747 as it does to drive across the country in a small car with 2 people in it. So it's not like there's a big fuel advantage one way or another. But it's easy to forget, when flying, about the petroleum being burned on our behalf, about the enormity of the journey.
When i was in my early 20s, i swore to myself that i would never be sponsored by petroleum or automobiles. I guess at this age i would add airlines into the picture as well. Racing bicycles for oil is antithetical to the reason i started racing in the first place. But traveling all over the place, flying, driving, whatever, supports the industry as much as advertising.
My big trip is strengthening my resolve to go home and really invest in the local racing scene, in competition with the local racers I meet each week. Traveling is physically exhausting and expensive, drawing energy away from the endeavor to train and race. And yet maybe I had to travel to regain the sense of perspective and appreciation for what I have at home.

And that's liberation. Freedom.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Flight

Today is the eleventh day of the big cross country road trip. I've spent 50 hours driving across country from California to Ithaca, NY to Northampton, Massachussetts, plus about 5 hours of driving around locally to get to the races.

I've listened to 16 hours of Susan Butler's biography of Amelia Earhart on CD, studied German and French, taken in Reno, Salt Lake City, Rawlins Wyoming, Boulder Colorado, Omaha Nebraska, and Penitentiary Glen Reservation in Ohio, listening to the radio stations to get a flavor for the culture as well as looking out the windows. I've seen meteor showers, sunrises and sunsets, the continental divide, industrial pastoral cornfields, the Mississippi River, mountains, planes, sunshine, and night, plus my father and my brother Dylan.

This afternoon will be my fourth big UCI race of the trip. Admittedly eight weeks of lost training due to knee injury in August and September took a big toll against the hope for a big breakthrough early this season. I'm hoping to find my legs somewhere along the road - one of these truck stops... Maybe today...

So what possessed me to make the journey?

When i was 19, the famous coaches told me that I'd someday be a world class legend. When I was 25, I went hungry for grocery money and ended up in the hospital. I didn't dare to race seriously again until last year, when I was 33. Some part of me still wants to redeem the legend... I'm not young any more, but possibly I am not quite too old.

I've always found a kind of comfort in motion and being on the run. It's where I feel the most like myself, somehow, like the birds at home, Lulu and Mary and Lucy. They are creatures of light and sound and atmosphere and air.

When i started at 19, racing was some kind of rebellion; now it is the thing that brings me closer to my family, especially my father, and gives me the time and attention and patience to be with him. Training, racing, traveling, are my refuge and the thing that let me be myself so I can be fully present with him. I am used to thinking of flight as some kind of dysfunctional issue, "She's just running away from her problems." But sometimes flight is the best solution.

Flying, after all, is what racing bicycles is all about.