Tour de Nez 2012

Last Sunday was the Tour de Nez in its 20th anniversary. It is often a national calendar race, though not this year. A technical course, with seven corners and a corkscrew going into the final stretch. We had a high-quality field this year, with several riders each from four great pro teams (Exergy, Primal, NOW/ Novartis and Vanderkitten), and about fifteen local racers. It was windy, hot and dry. All of that makes for kind of an unforgiving peloton – there is not much “pack fodder” to help to hold things together, and things small gaps tend to increase in the wind.
About 12 minutes into the race, Mary Maroon, a very accomplished top local rider who wins many local races, broke away from the group by herself. “It’s not my job to chase that,” I thought from the middle the pack.
After a couple of laps, three riders – Taylor Wiles from Exergy, Emily Kachorek from Primal, and Robin Farina, last year’s national road race champion, from NOW/ Novartis – jumped away from the group to bridge up to Mary, making a four rider breakaway. I was boxed in at the time, but a few seconds later I jumped away with Ruth Winder, Vanderkitten, and we worked together to bridge up to the four, making a six rider breakaway.
For about a lap the three major pros did all the work at the front. Robin warned, “You have to work or we’ll start attacking you.” I moved to the front of the group and took a pull. Neither Ruth nor Mary had pulled through by the end of that lap. Robin attacked. Ruth fell off the pace.
The four of us worked together, and Mary kept about a bike length off the back of our group. She was playing invisible. The three pros were content to ignore her. But Mary is an excellent sprinter. I didn’t feel comfortable working that much harder than she was. I dropped to the back of the group, behind Mary, and sat out my pull. The other three suddenly noticed. Someone attacked and opened up a small gap. I accelerated around Mary, around the group, and took a fast pull. We dropped Mary.
The four of us worked together for the rest of the race, eventually lapping the rest of the field.
I was bawling an hour later. And I knew that I would be – that kind of physical intensity brings stuff up. Sad things.

I am racing as well as I think I ever have, and I feel like I have plenty of head room.
“It sounds like you do,” said Uncle George on Wednesday evening, over dinner just after I finally arrived in Rochester.
My dad’s eyes sparkled. He has a lot of trouble speaking these days. His mouth is a big mess. He can smile with his whole face.
“I almost didn’t race. I mean, really, fifteen or ten minutes before it was time to warm up, I really was tempted to get back in the car and drive home. So what if it’s three and a half hours each way? But I talked myself into engaging with the hard part of the warm up, and I lined up.”
“Where was this?”
“Reno, Nevada. I drove over Donner Pass to get there. It’s the course where I rolled a tire and crashed and hurt my knee last year. [My knee has been bothering me with intermittent intensity for the entire year.]
“I was feeling so good and strong and confident. Amber Rais was a few bike lengths off the front, and I was leading the pack after her. I took that corner really aggressively, I leaned hard into it. I was flying. And then my tire rolled, and I fell down.

"So this year I had trouble convincing myself to trust my tires, to trust the course. I kept reasoning with myself not to worry, but there is that visceral fear. It is not a course where you can afford to be afraid of the corners, because it is so technical. So I didn’t do very well in the sprint, and I finished fourth.“
“Wow,” Aunt Sally said on Thursday night, just back in Rochester after a conference in San Diego. In California, standards are higher. You’ve got to win the sprint. I’ve got to trust my tires. I came home yesterday.

Adventure Stories

My grandfather has been an inspiration to me for a long time. Maybe he's the reason I race bicycles. A week ago, my uncle Tom went to Ontario to move my Grandpa down to California. Grandpa flew in on Saturday night.
He’s had an interesting life. As a young man he was a successful chemist who registered 30 or 40 patents working for the USDA, including the original patent for epoxidized oils. Then he quit and left town, taught environmental studies for a couple years, canoed from New York City to Alaska with some of his studies, and finally settled on his forest in northwest Ontario.

My mom used to take me and the rest of the family up to Ontario sometimes to visit in the summer. When I was 3, they would plunk me down in a patch of blueberries and let me eat myself blue in the face. As long as the blueberries held out – and they were prodigious – I wouldn’t move. When I was 9, I learned to paddle and steer a canoe on my own. Me and Grandpa were stronger than the Eagle Scouts.
When I was 15, my parents bought an 80-acre parcel adjacent to Grandpa’s. We spent three weeks exploring the ins and outs of the twisting Wabigoon River that knit the two properties together. Our family stayed on an old homestead under a stand of poplar just downstream from the waterfall, 100 feet from the gradually collapsing log cabin. We built a raft to cross the river, and a rope swing for jumping into it.
I spent a lot of time staring at the water flowing past, like time… The river is a rich brown the color of tea, dyed from the tannic acid in the leaves that the water passes through. The tannic acid suppresses bacteria and keeps the water clean and pure. Grandpa says that his water tastes better than water from wells or water from lakes or water from anywhere else. A leader from the Native American reservation downstream agrees, and likes to visit periodically. Grandpa’s good health and spirits were always a strong indicator that the river water is clean and safe and good to drink. But at 91 ½ years old, I guess he was ready to move to a place… where water comes out of a faucet, instead of a bucket carried in a wheelbarrow hauled up from the river ½ mile downhill.

On Monday morning, I saw him for breakfast in my Mom’s apartment on Garber Street. He likes to have his tea by 6 or 6:30 am. We discussed, amongst other things, my bicycle racing. I did pretty well on Sunday, ended up fifth place, with some good prize money. “But where is your bicycle this morning?” he asked me.
“I don’t have it today. It was just so early and I drove. I’ll bring my bike next time,” I promised. Not the biggest promise I’ve ever made him, but a real one.

After Thursday’s group ride, I came back to visit again. Lunch. Warm smile, regard. Grandpa sat on Mom’s window seat overlooking the bay. She’s on the fourth floor on a hill facing the bay, and the view is incredible. I spent the afternoon setting up my old laptop for my Mom to use and encouraging her to clean. Grandpa napped on the window seat. When he woke up, Mom pointed out the fog rolling in through the Golden Gate. It looks pretty good even through a limited pane of glass. But being out there...
“The view from Grizzly Peak this morning was amazing. The bay is so blue, and the mountains are so majestic, and then there’s all this industry in the middle of it, the cranes in Oakland, all of the tall tall buildings in the City, all stretched out below me. Every time I come up over Pinehurst and catch a view of the Bay, I feel like I’m in an adventure novel, and I am an adventuring heroine.”
Grandpa nodded his head in recognition.
“It’s amazing. I’ve lived here for – almost ten years. And the view still takes my breath every time.”
Again, Grandpa nodded. I’m pretty sure he feels the same way about the forest in Ontario. “Good morning, morning” he used to say each morning, and the Whiskey Jacks came flying out of the trees into the clearing where his cabin is. They used to eat toast or pancakes from a tin pan on top of the woodshed, or sometimes from his hand.

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.

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.

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