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.