8 seconds.

in 1989, greg lemond was pedaling for his life in the penultimate stage of the tour de france, and he was doing it alone.

lemond entered the last stage of the race, an individual time trial between himself, his will, and the clock, with a 50-second deficit to french leader laurent fignon. wearing a funny helmet, resting his elbows on funny padded handlebar extensions, and tucked into a downhill skiing position, lemond insisted on no time checks, and no data on his bike. he just needed to pedal. fignon, for his challenge, went bare-skulled, with only his spectacles and scraggly blond ponytail to challenge the wind. riding a classic bike with frequent updates on lemond's pacing progress, fignon pitched himself through downtown paris in pursuit of the diminutive american challenger.

lemond put 58 seconds on fignon to win the tour by the narrowest margin in history, by riding the second-fastest time trial in tour history. lemond rode 54.55 km/h to win by 8 seconds.

____________________

at the 39k mark, the original 3:05 pace bunny and group caught up to me. i knew i was flagging and faltering, but i didn't realize by how much until i tried to latch on. it felt like the group was flying. nevertheless, i saw the possibility of losing every goal of the day as those feet churned past, so i did what any self-respecting cyclist about to get dropped would do: i tucked in. there wasn't much wind to tuck out of, but i tucked in nevertheless, adding myself to the (very reduced) count of white bald guys chasing a 3:05 marathon time. we must all be about the same age. we must all be chasing boston. please god let this man with the sign and the bunny ears get us there. please. please...

at the last water station, a measly kilometer from the finish, the group somehow slipped past, and i lost touch, gatorade cup in hand, dream splashing to the pavement. and i looked up. and i squinted to find a big red finish arch. and there was nothing. there was only a heat-bedazzled stretch of pavement, runners going forward, and runners coming onward, and it was endless.

there was no finish line!

____________________

that morning, i knew i was ready. i didn't know what i was ready for, if it was just to complete this crazy distance, or to go under 3 hours, something achievable by only 1% of runners in the world, or to at least make boston qualifying: 3:05:00. my girls wished me well. i had friends at the start. it wasn't raining. the portapotties were endless. it was going to be a good day.

i lost justin and the pace bunny by 4k.

i was on a good day, and i was going to make the most of it. i was flying. i had to tone it down, get it back up to 4 minute kilometers. i didn't want to burn out. but it was fine. it was almost easy. at the halfway timing mat, i was slightly behind schedule but certainly in good form to bring it in for any of my goals. the body was starting to pipe up, letting me know what was working, and how much longer it could do it. we were on the cusp now. there was oxygen and carbon and sweat and fascia and tendon and system. there was pump. and flow. and the clock was ticking.

____________________

i got closer to the horizon, searching wildly for some saving grace, some completion, some end. i saw the girls. we waved. i must be close. but i still could not see that damn line! and then there were runners coming at me, and we were turning, and we were back in another corral and THERE WAS THE LINE! except, it was so far away, and there were so many other people semi-rushing toward it, and i needed to step on that last timing mat, get my seconds, be done with so many months and miles.

and then it was done.

and as soon as it was, i wondered if i should have, could have, gone harder. maybe i could have pushed just a little bit more in those last few kilometers. maybe i could have hurt more, driven something past its comfort zone. and then my legs locked up and alternated between collapsing and locking, and i lost the ability to steer my body. stumbling into and through the throng of finishers toward the medals and gatorade table (the one salvation of the finish), i knew that i had done it, and there was nothing left. i was done. there was no room to go harder.

___________________

i couldn't find the girls. we hadn't made a plan. there were no huge alpha signs designating a 'find your family with last name _______ HERE' area. there were just hundreds and thousands of faces, some weighed down with oversized medals or plain bagels or the 25th half cup of too-strong gatorade. there wasn't even any chocolate milk. all of a sudden, i got really sad. i had run so far, for so long, and all i wanted to do was be with my family, and i couldn't find them. i had semi-collapsed into a sitting position on a grassy knoll near the 1k to go mark, so i butt-scooted to the nearest tree and hauled myself to standing. walking backwards down the ridiculously small decline, i started shuffling back to the finish area. after many trips into and out of the fencing marked 'athletes only', i finally found some small plastic signs listing a few alpha ranges. and there were the girls. and then i was done.

__________________

8 seconds is a staggering margin. in my debut marathon, after months of preparation and intervals and long runs and even following a training plan for the most part, i missed the boston qualifying time by 8 seconds. it is small, so small that most people ask, 'are you SURE?' when i tell them, and others offer to help with an appeal letter. yes, i am sure. no, there is no need to appeal. i will just have to run another marathon. and i'll have to run it faster.

nicky.

nicky was wearing cargo pants that night. he came out from behind a large tent in some field that may exist only in collected, dusty, grassy memories, and he made a cowboy-in-a-duel stance while howling to the sky and grinning at anyone near enough to see it. every pocket on his person contained a bottle of unopened labatt blue. 'draw.'

the man's enthusiasm and curiosity had always been contagious. i learned more from him on guts alone than i ever would from a text book or a conversation with a well-meaning, over-intentioned instructor. he led from beside, and sometimes from behind, but he was a companion with whom you could learn a lesson, any lesson, the hard way, and still feel like you had come out on top. when it was rock climbing, he went all-in. when it was cameras, he spent paper like it was tissue, and learned faster and better than anyone else how to process and print his own film. he read books that didn't come easy to him. he made acquaintances and awed them with his prowess in black and white and every zone in between. the whole time, i learned and listened and listened and yearned. there was always a frame to be exposed. there was always a point of interest. no one was uninteresting. curiosity could make anything cool enough. and perhaps his greatest gift of all: when you were the object of his curiosity, you felt like you were something worth knowing. few people in the world can make everyone they meet, let alone a few people they know and love, feel just this way. and inevitably, you would see yourself anew, and get fascinated by the potential only picked up by nicky's light meter, and then you could maybe start to risk being better. 

being flamboyant had come naturally to me for some time. although i was naturally shy, i had learned that being 'a good kid' meant getting myself largely ignored, so i built up a persona of some kind of artsyness, and every now and again, it would come out. by the time high school rolled around, i had lost much of my flamboyance, opting instead to fly only on stage, or on trip, or when i just couldn't help it anymore. turns out, nicky taught me how to be a little more quiet. it was always his fantasy to be discovered, doing his own hardcore thing in his own hardcore way, by accident, in secret, by one person (probably a really hot girl) who would recognize, and subsequently admire, just what it took and who he was to be doing what he was doing, unbeknownst to anyone. i wanted to tell everyone. i never felt like anything i was doing was good enough or loud enough to get noticed, i still don't, and i wasn't tall or good-looking or long-haired or guitar-playing enough to be cool, in secret or out loud. and when people said, 'hey nick!', i learned to stop looking up, because they were always addressing him. flamboyance was over, so i saved it for the stage, or for words, for places where it could roam and jingle and not look as ridiculous as it was. 

nicky taught me to be quiet. he taught me to contain my desires, to use them to drive my actions. he taught me to expose film, to shoot two frames in the quest for one good one, to print the hell out of that one until i got a good enough print, and to crop before i shot. he taught me about zones, about grain, about focus, about what is important and what to let go. the sharp end of a lens. the reason to push two stops. how many fruit gummies one should not eat in the middle of the night when it's minus forty in algonquin park. and even when we were walking down carlaw, wondering how the hell we would ever 'make it', ever get paid to do what we thought we were genius at (he was the only photo genius), when we were shooting completely different things and chasing different realities, he was leading from beside. we were complementing each other, tempering the drive with two different heats. 

that night ended up with nicky happy and asleep in a big green tent, and me happy and sleepless in a big blue suburban. it was the end of an era, and i missed so much of it so terribly, and couldn't wait for the next one to begin in earnest. i find myself hearing nicky in my head these days, exposing my shots, meeting new people, maintaining curiosity. there will always be something fascinating. thanks, nicky.

100.

it had been a long time since i held a girl in my arms long enough and close enough to feel her sobs wrack through my ribcage and press against my beating heart while hers beat faster and harder.

 

usually, the pain is a scraped knee or bruised shin or scary tumble from the two-wheeler. this pain was different. and in this pain, i saw so many more such embraces, embraces that will never keep her from growing up, from learning something the hard way, from my failings and shortcomings and hopes and fears. she cried like the little girl she is, a little shocked and confused by something that hurts but not on the outside. and i held her like the father i am, a little inept and confused by how far we've come and how much this one moment could teach us both and why it had been so long since i held this crying little girl and how many more times i would do this same thing in years to come.

 

it all came down to big brown eyes flooded with the tears of a lesson learned the hard way.

 

the main problem was figuring what lesson there was to be learned. was it the lesson that she is loved, no matter what she does or does not do? was it the lesson that not everyone wins? was it the lesson that she always wins if she tries her best? was it the lesson that some things will only happen for her if she wants them badly enough and makes them happen? was it the lesson that her dada's arms will always be big enough to hold her? was it the lesson that racing is just racing, and having a family to support her is worth more than any spot on an elementary track team? maybe it was the lesson that she, as a seasoned 8-year-old 5k racer, has a different engine that is not well suited to the limits imposed by a single 100m dash with other giggling second graders...

 

i love that child more than myself and then some. i know she needs to learn things. i know that some of these things will hurt, and that she will be better for it. and i know that she is already amazing and a better human being than i will ever be. and it really cracks me up when she makes my faces on her mother's features. but when she hurts, when she falls apart in her school hoodie and soaks my shoulder with big, sad girl tears, it rips me apart and turns me upside down. i don't know what to teach her. i just want to hold her, help her up, give her something to eat, and go on. but this moment is important, so important, and it cannot be bypassed.

 

so we hugged, and she cried, and then we talked. there were snacks. the little sister took it upon herself to break down as well because she was also having a hard day and didn't want to miss out on the teary action. and then it was time to go swimming, and then talk to mama over pre-dinner frozen yogurt, to re-learn all of these lessons. dinner took so long that the little one was asleep while the big one stayed up with mama and dada and we managed to double team her, cover all points and angles we could think of, and reinforce the main point: she is loved, and wonderful, and none of this is compromised by a 100m dash on a sunny day in grade two.

boston.

in the long time between one step and the inevitable next, catastrophe and progress hang in stillness.

catastrophe is a relief, a death of a tragic hero who has already wrought so much demise that the only blessing left to end it all is to end it all. progress is going forward. and in the split second between one step and the next, we are confronted with both. stop. or continue...

i have spent the entirety of this new year, and the month before it, confronting catastrophe and progress in their staggeringly repetitive possibility. one step after another, i have taken the long run from 12 kilometers to 34. yesterday marked my last 'long' run, and it was back to 12. between me and race day, there are only 13 more kilometers to run, divided up between rest days and angst days. i do not know exactly what will happen.

i have most recently tried to describe my apprehension as something akin to baking. i've put in my mileage, like flour. i've put in my speedwork, like eggs. i've put in short runs and tempo runs and stretching and foam rolling like all the other things that bring the cake together. the mix is right. it looks right. it feels right. but i have no idea how it will all turn out until i put it into the oven on race day. the unknown is a bit of a torture device. its effectiveness is increased with the amount of risk and the volume of the investment. i have worked this steadily and this hard and with this discipline for very few things in my life. and then there's that small problem of not having a smidge of running talent.

spending the day with underachieving youth is one way to galvanize one's personal mottos regarding the notion of quitting. don't. and settling? don't. with these things in mind, i tend toward my usual modus operandi: aim much higher than even conceivable to achieve, and die trying. this said, my goal is simple.

i left work that day and pedaled quickly and safely to pick up the girls and clunk home in my dirty mountain bike shoes, yellow duct tape highlights and trails of mud. the lady whose desk faces mine had a son in boston, a son who was there to run the marathon. it wasn't until i had already picked up one girl and was on my way to the next that i got the text, and started checking in with twitter and online news. someone had bombed the finish of the boston marathon. 

my first reaction is usually anger. 

there have been times that i've frozen, not really knowing what to do or where to go, but there are many more times that my first reaction is to curse the idiot who caused the pain, and then start trying to figure out what i can do to be productive about it all. of course, there was nothing in either case. boston didn't know who did this heinous crime or why, and there was nothing some random guy in toronto could do about a bombing in a city a thousand miles away. (i need to become more important.)

it has been a couple of weeks since the main conflict of the boston marathon bombing has been mostly resolved, and much of the world, as it does, has gone on. i had running club the next night, but there was no moment of silence. i talked about it a lot with the youth at work, but it was mostly aimless ranting among people who don't even run or know where boston is. it was good, nevertheless, to engage in dialog about it all, because it was in that conversation that the goal became bigger, more solid, tempered, and sharp.

the goal is to qualify for boston. 

probably a whole lot of people want to qualify for boston. probably a whole lot of people can and will and have a lot more going for them than a few months of training, a young body cursed with a very fast qualifying cutoff, and a dream. but i think that the bombing, the audacious insanity of someone so overtly cowardly and hostile, calls up a little more inspiration to my fuel cell. i run better on emotion than any caffeinated gel or super-duper-e-load bottle. remember owen, the kid in the walker who covered 5k with a severe muscle disorder? i saw him in the last kilometer of my last half-marathon, and it was on sight of him alone that i managed to buck up and bring myself home, cheering and tearing that one brave kid. next year, boston will be nuts. chastened, perhaps, but nuts. i have a feeling it is a city not to be undone by one heartless tragedy, that it will come back even stronger, even louder, even bigger. 

and i can't wait to be there.

we put air in our tires
and blood in our veins
we were trainers and
horses
and we all wanted
the same
moment in the light
or two or seven
and for it we sold
every reserve in heaven

goal.

a lot of the long of it is about even more of the short of it, once around and once over and once around again, until the monotony becomes interesting again, but not too interesting because that would be pain, and there can only be so much of that before there is collapse.

and so it went, one foot (mostly) in front of the other a wind gusting like a strong palm into the middle of my back, headphone cord jostling wildly like an untethered lust song, whipping truths about with maladies, from underneath my red raincoat. raincoat. i went for a 33k run in a raincoat.

17k is no longer a long way to run, just like 80k is no longer a long ride, just like the end of P2A surprised me entirely, as i had not yet surrendered to the inevitability that i was bad at the sport and should just quit it all, at only 58k out. but then the wind. at 17k, exactly, promptly, somewhere between a rushing blue minivan and its silver sedan counterpart in stupidly-close-driving-to-pedestrians on aviation parkway, i turned around, and faced the wind that had been molesting me for the past hour and a half.

first, it ripped out one headphone, and lashed my insolent face with the cord. then it spat snow shards into my eyes, whistled through my empty ear, and threatened to dismember me of the member i could no longer feel, chafing compression wear be damned. the final point was a full-body shove in the direction opposite to my intended course. i actually had to brace, and almost step backward. being a short person, i am used to ducking and bracing, so i tucked in, faced the wind like a damn boxing opponent, and stepped forward in a staggering defiance, shoulders hunched and fists poised.

the wind had become a wild thing.

this spring has been anything but smooth. there are barely flowers and buds out, and most of them lie damaged in each other's arms, seeking solace from the fickly sunshine and ever-present rain. the girls wear rain boots more than running shoes. and my riding kit is always wet. my lady just asked me about yet another load of laundry, as she's done one a day since a double day before the weekend. it's wet. we're training. it's wet.

long runs combined with long nights combined with the daily stressors and detractors from downtime combined with every weekend away racing and running and running support have left us all a bit bedraggled. sleep is deep and hard and very, always, short.

and then, last night, nick told me i was running well. he hadn't seen me out last week, and i don't think he was at workout the week before, but then we did hill repeats last night, and it went well. there's a marathon in two weeks. the forecast looks (mostly) not-quite-wet. the goal is audacious. and i've left my bike to gather dust while i focus every bit of training on putting one foot in front of the other, a few thousand times, in three hours. don't tell anyone, but this goal is ridiculous.

soon.

when i get real tired sometimes, i start to think too much, and then i listen to someone speak or watch a movie or hear that song that always gets me, and i think about goodbyes.

the trouble with goodbyes is that i used to be good at them. i used to be able to sense when they were coming, and i had the energy and awareness and connection and forethought to make the most of them, to prepare, to ceremonialize them into something worth remembering, something to write down, something to hold sacred and warm. i also used to be good at kissing, and writing punchy and sometimes decent poetry, and dancing. but like my film cameras and sketchbooks, those things are remnants of a past i remember fondly, while i dust them off to replace them on the shelf next to more books or under more bills. and those goodbyes, well, i've become afraid of them.

it all started when i fell in love with a girl who left all the time.

she had spent her life saying goodbye, had gotten used to it, had a well-worn hug and promise to call when she got in. then i found her, gave her my poems and tears and big, bleeding heart, and it was too heavy to take with her, so she stayed.

we kept moving, at least twice a year, in and out of student shanties, living the dream and making love out of the rest of it, and there were fewer and fewer goodbyes. i spent last week away from her, with our two little dreams, and it was a very hard place to be. now i'm tired, i saw my brother off at the airport this morning, then i watched a movie about brothers, and it's the end of the day, and i'm worried about the next goodbye.

my life is not in danger. no matter how many people pride themselves on risking it during my thirty minute commute in the morning, my life is pretty solid. fragile, indeed, but all parts point forth, and so it goes. i'm struggling though, these days, to figure out a grand goodbye, because to admit that it needs to be said would be to admit that something will end. there is a life in danger, maybe even ending, and this deserves a good hard talk, a true finale, a celebration of the good that was had. and from there, i don't even know where we go.

jeni.

jeni is dead. long live jeni.

the girls were dressed and matching and well-behaved and standing interspersed among the more serious adults in the congregation. the building was almost full. the sun streamed through several windows as the ceiling vaulted, albeit humbly and amid a few stains from incense or other offerings, toward something no one could explain, whether the sky, or heaven, or god, or a reason why jeni was no longer here.

i never really knew jeni.

but that's how things can go, sometimes, when you have 52 first cousins from 10 aunts and uncles, under a strong patriarch and matriarch, and then you move to another country before you turn nine, turn into a teenager, have your first kiss, fail your first date, pass your first football, learn what 'cancer' really is.

jeni had that special thing, that ability to disarm others with a genuine interest in what those others were about, and a seemingly boundless generosity that defied reason. when we had our first baby, two young kids out of wedlock (whatever that is) with a lot of ideals and not a lot of other stuff figured out, jeni was the first to send a matching knitted outfit for the little beast. she knew just what we needed, and, with whatever she had, she made it happen for us. i hadn't seen her in years.

jeni had another special thing: cancer. hers was leukemia, usually in her blood, usually fought off after many hospital stays and near-misses. ten days ago, her hospital stay was her last, the near was not a miss. jeni died at 4:48 in the morning, in the company of loved ones, at johns hopkins hospital in baltimore.

everything was fine in that half-beaten church in the middle of nowhere, maryland. loaded trucks rumbled by a few steps from the door. a cold wind refreshed the landscape. many people were smiling at the sight of loved ones they had not seen in so long.

and then the music started.

we cried. we cried so hard we shook ourselves and soaked our lapels and dripped onto the floor the salty proof that were were nothing but children against these things so unfair. others, perhaps those of greater constitution or those that didn't know her so well or those with their eyes not on the sons and brothers and mother of jeni, they could sing. and the music brought it all down. the girls were dressed in their matching black dresses, looking around at all of these dissolving adults, wondering at it all. what had happened? we had lost.

we had lost a strong, beautiful woman more giving than one could ever ask, stubborn and driven and unwilling to let things be anything other than right. we had lost jeni, the first of us, the oldest grandchild.

i had been in this church not long before, a year or two, dissolving in just the same way, about jake. jeni was jake's big sister. this is too much. too much for one family. too much in one go. too many times in one church for the same reason in the same suit stained by the same tears. the music started again as we followed jeni's casket outside, and i couldn't see through the tears to zip up my little girl's coat. it would be cold out by the grave. why did her own son have to carry her casket alongside her own brothers and husband? why was it so cold? why was everything so unfair? i could zip up my little girl's coat, tears or not, but jeni couldn't put a coat on her son. he was carrying her body to the cemetery. nothing made sense. nothing.

we made it outside, and i tried to sing, and i even made it through a few notes, and then i remembered that jeni wasn't here, and i squeezed my little girl's hand and pulled her along, little feet dappling the pavement among the trudging of older, grown-up, devastated children. you should have seen the nephews.

the monseigneur bumbled through further ramblings that had little to do with the pertinence or panache or power of jeni and her life and death, but all was not lost as a young pastor in love with his own words got up and made a lot more sense of it all. i could only wish for her husband to speak. of course, it would have ripped the rest of us apart completely. we laid her low. we sang. i dissolved and was, again, held up by my brother in the same cemetery where we'd stood just a year or so before. and now she is asleep, never to be hurt again.

as much as it is completely inadequate, the one thing that comforts me and my outlook on it all is the fact that wherever jeni may be, she is not somewhere where she can be touched by pain or cancer. she is warm. she is free.

long live jeni.

athlete.

there was a survey out among students that spring, the usual class survey in which the graduates get named, alongside fan favorite teachers, as winners of the 'craziest hair award' or 'most likely to become a millionaire'. i was making my way through some final drawings in art class, the room transient amid the bustling preparations of our upcoming show, and a paper blew across the table. there were snickers. there were hushed glances and lookaways. i looked down at the paper, and saw that it was a creased, yellow photocopy so ubiquitous that week at school. it was the class survey.

i glanced at it because something about it caught my eye. and then there it was, my name, neatly printed and (ironically) spelled mostly correctly, next to the 'least favorite athlete' designation.

i was elated.

it is highly unlikely that heather mcleod had ever meant to make my day with the inclusion of my name on the survey, but she probably didn't know that i had never been called an 'athlete' before she did it. i smiled. i left the piece of paper where it was. and i walked through the door into the blinding pollen-thick sunshine just a step in the springtime blackflies. it felt like my birthday.

as these days go on and the sun makes more promises and keeps some of them too, nostalgia comes rushing back, and i get a bit stuck in it, trying to figure out how i've ever gotten here from there, and whether i've been good for it.

i would not call myself an athlete. kids ask me if i do sports. i respond with a perfunctory, 'sometimes'. they ask which ones. i tell them running and riding bikes. i'm not really good at either one, but i love them. i'm not a runner. runners consider themselves runners, pride themselves in it, look like it. i am also not much of a rider. for all of my time in the saddle and on the pedals over the last two decades, i have not gone very far. i know enough to know i don't know enough, and i love the way spokes ping after a wheel is fully tensioned or the way a top tube feels in my hand as i hoist a bike by its frame, but i don't go fast, i don't have any watts to speak of, and i think about bikes for more hours than i ride them.

anyway, it's about connotation more than denotation these days, and that's all about context. i just want to be physical. maybe that's what athletes want. maybe they just need to be in one moment and the next, as fully and quickly as possible, maximizing their presence in context, breathing through their skin, seeing through their movements. let's move.

shine.

i know her, inside and out, for better or for worse, while this life pushes us through our parts.

when riding bikes in a group of people, personalities mix with physical attributes and get imposed upon the collective ranking categories to result in a hierarchical setting in which momentum runs its course and the rest of us do our jobs. there is the big guy who hammers and provides a great draft for the skinny guy who will come round on the next slight rise and bring tempo that will be easily be matched by the woman in high socks who watches her watts and worries about the handling skills of a jittery accountant in matching team kit on a matching team bike that refuses to match his team drive when it's interrupted by the out of tune chatter of a chain about to be dropped after the next rider in line finally figures out his new shifter combo and tries, then fails, to calculate his effort and its relationship to gear inches. riding. it's complicated.

when i get on the bike, or get off the bike, or go out to just ride, or come in to refuel or put on my helmet or unbuckle my shoes on smear on the chamois creme or rinse off the searing embrocation or lather my calves or dispose of another dull razor or fill my bottles or tuck another wrapper into my pocket or put my bike in the trainer or wash all that grime off of my legs or put it all into words, i am alone. the lady i love does all of these things too, some of them better than i, and she does them alone. somehow, we signed up for all of this. somehow, we spent the best parts of ourselves making a life together, making little dreams come true together, living a big dream come true, outlining the outcomes and plans and necessities, only to do our parts in it all, alone. 

i'm not sure if anyone else gets it this way, but there are a few things i don't like to do unless i know that i will do them well. i don't like to run unless i know i will be able to keep up. i don't like to dance unless i know that it won't matter that i don't know how. writing this is almost nauseating in the knowing that i may not get it right, the first time, for good. i know that i will not ride well with my lady. to begin with, she has twice the fitness that i have on the bike. i suffered through thirty minutes on the trainer with very low outputs the other night; she put in an hour and a half of zone five intervals then got up in the morning to do it again. we have different riding styles. i like short and punchy climbs; she savours long hauls. i hate time trialling; she pines for aero bars and disc wheels and the simplicity of punching the pedals against seconds and minutes. i handle like a mountain biker on a road bike; she prefers to keep things smooth, and only started tucking her descents three seasons ago. my bike is the heaviest metal bikes are made out of, welded by one man in america, a tube at a time, to my measurements; her bike comes from taiwanese factories, a layer of carbon at a time, to be painted in italy, assembled in canada. she sweats and goes harder; i've had salt lines on my kit since kilometer three. of all the sports i do (there are two), riding bikes is the one i do the worst, by far. individually, it's fine enough. in a group, i'm average or below. in a race, i'm subpar. in the grand scheme of things, my name is not listed. the lady is a star, an exemplar. she is part of the industry. she advocates and has the skill and fitness to back it all up. she is in the top 5 in a race. she is in the fast group, or leading it, on a club ride. there is no way i could ride well with her.

we were made for each other. 

i remember a time, a long long time ago, when she was a climber and i was a rider and we did each other's sports because we loved each other so much. i dropped a couple hundred bucks on climbing kit; she made me a chalk bag and dropped a grand on a fancy mountain bike. we tried to go out for a ride on the root-infested trails of lowland squamish, b.c. we got lost. i tried to help her with some handling tips. it sucked. we didn't fight then, but we both smouldered silently, me wanting to help and her wanting to not need help. 

these days i train to be able to keep up. i have no idea what it's like to train to win. but i think that if i can do it, if i can pull it off, one trainer session at a time, it will make all the difference. if we could get a babysitter and leave the dishes and have an extra ten spot for some espresso and a brownie and get some gas and just go, just ride, just be, together, we'd be set. i could keep up or let her go and catch her on the descent the way my dad used to catch me on rockingham road. we could spin and laugh and let momentum take its course. we could shine. 

snow.

this is the first time i've been able to lean back in my seat today, and most other days in the week.

it snowed today. it snowed so much that in the few minutes it took me to shovel our miniscule front walk and portion of the sidewalk, the first areas i had cleared were already white again, yielding not to the ground-in salt or the wind that brought it and threatened to take it away on the next gust.

in these kinds of conditions, riding a studded-tire mountain bike in goggles and blinking lights is an excellent idea for getting to work. fresh snow is usually easier to ride in than the packed-until-it-gives-way snow usually found on uncleared roads frequented by four-wheeled commuters come hell or high snowbanks. of course, fresh snow covers 85% of my bike route, and is perfectly good and safe. it's the 7.5% at the beginning and the other 7.5% at the end that truly worry me: that's where the cars are. and cars can't stop. they don't know this, of course, until it's too late, and all lessons are learned the hard way on days like today.

all this, to say: i took the subway.

this blog was founded on the notion of riding bikes, and how that practice links to human pursuits of all other dimensions, so it's odd to break a dry spell on the one day i'm not actually riding bikes. the fact of the matter is, this break from churning pedals through salt-crusted tracks has given me pause. i don't like being able to lean back in my seat.

most other days, i arrive at work well before the main rush, and i am soaked in sweat and covered in road grime, usually salt. having no showers available to the lone bike commuter, and no area in which i may drape my clothes in the hopes of drying them before my return trip in the afternoon, i work all day in the residue of the morning's effort, and my kit hangs in evidence all over the collective office space. i kinda feel bad for that; i kinda can't bother to fix it.

not having ridden today, the back of my chair is covered in dry outerwear that was not soaked in the sweat of an honest commute. i took the subway, stood next to all kinds of people i don't know in a rumbling embrace punctuated by squeals of metal on metal, and that kid's headphones screeching some poorly done remix of a 'classic' that came out before 'vintage' even existed. goodness, i'm old. i think this, and type this, as i lean back against the dry liner of a thick parka that is so warm i had to take it off and hold it after the subway cleared out, trembling on toward the next wintry station. i'm typing on a computer i could bring in because i wasn't afraid of falling on hidden ice and smashing it along with all the other contents of my backpack. i'm full from the lunch i just ate, and i'll have to work it off tonight because i haven't done anything other than trudge through snowbanks for minutes at a time. commuting sucks. riding bikes is beautiful.

expectations.

in my line of work, there is a list of 'overall expectations' outlined at the onset of any interaction. and then we get a set period of time to make sure that all participants are able to exhibit skills and knowledge that meet those expectations.

for some reason, people seem to have unrealistic expectations of the wrong kind, of the wrong people.

when i was better disciplined at riding a bike, and i was much slower and infrequently a runner, i used to ritualize my time in the kitchen. i would do the dishes so that i didn't have to look at them while i suffered enough as it was. i would clear the counter so that i could put my laptop in front of me in hopes of staving off the boredom. and on that laptop, i would play movies of people riding bikes faster than i ever will. those movies would remind me to go fast. and usually, i would have headphones in, with some kind of music rattling through my mind instead of race coverage in flemish or whatever. one of my favorite movies was lance big six.

i used to love the panache that lance brought to his riding. when i was younger, i had no idea that it had to do with drugs, that it could even be through anything other than all the training and pain i was too afraid to execute. i just thought he was an absolutely amazing rider doing amazing things and it was really fun to be proud of an american doing something i loved to do, and doing it better than the whole wide world. (being american was a hard thing for a lot of my younger days, surrounded as i was by prejudice and small-town mentalities amid chip trucks and ski-doos.)

as i got older, i realized that lance was likely doing a bunch of drugs. he was likely doing the same drugs as everyone else next to whom he was riding, so even though it wasn't just pure hard work and genetic gift, it wasn't like he was racing people who were any different in the drug sense. he was a race horse among race horses, and he was still the best one.

these days, i wonder what it is with all of the lance disappointment. anyone who was into bikes at all already knew/figured/had to admit that lance had probably doped. anyone who grew up and got his/her heart broken, saw a rock star get fat, stopped believing in santa claus, or went to a funeral would share the same mindset. folks, the world is full of humans, and we are flawed, and we are unrealistic, and we love to create myths and burn them down.

i just don't understand why the expectations for lance were different.

yeah, the guy seems like a hypocrite for lying so vehemently and specifically destroying people he knew to be truth-tellers and leading a cause about cancer and basing parts of his character on things he thought to be righteous and holy. but, so what? what do the kardashians think? what about people who have actually done truly bad things to entire national economies? where is bernie madoff? speaking of people who effected massive change in drastically horrible ways, whether celebrity or idol or whatever, how many people felt ripped off by the honesty of (insert name of your preferred war crimes leader here)? why does the sports world purport to be so fed up or put off or tired of or shocked by the admissions of a formerly-great athlete who cheated among a culture and a roster of cheaters? what were the overall expectations?

when i watch things on tv, i expect that they are heavily filtered. there are theatrics in every type of medium (production, is, after all, what makes something available to an audience from an author), and as cognizant adults in a reality of mass participation, we should understand that we are being fed all kinds of stuff, much of it crap. the question is what we make of what we get.

so i watched lance do those things on his bike. he accelerated away from the front of the field and never got caught. he said obnoxious things and backed them up with stomping wins up mountains too steep for cars. i watched fans scream and cheer and get in his way and clap him on the back. i watched him win and win and win. he loved winning. and, as someone who has never won a damn thing, i made a lot for myself out of what i got, watching him win. i made inspirational scenarios in my head to get me through those last few minutes on the trainer. i made better comebacks for any excuse as to why i didn't have to train that day. i made anger turn into power. and i did this watching lance.

i was surprised to hear about lance's interview, and that he admitted to his doping past, but i wasn't devastated. i cared a little more than the headline about the kardashian baby dramas, but not as much as this cool new app for my daughter's typing skills. i expect that famous people are flawed and crazy and mean to other people and subject to the whims and sway of much larger bodies of opinion than i will ever know. i expect that we, as adults, already know this and aren't hold our collective breath for the next round of admissions of faults inherent to our superstars. nobody died. maybe we should remember what's important here.

And the moral is...

Don't be a dick.

No, we are not mincing words here. The moral of the story really is: Don't be a dick. Don't be an asshole. Do not, in any uncertain terms, make your time on this earth a detriment to the rest of us who have to suffer through our time here. Honestly, man, there's so much else out there.

Of course, I was riding my bike. I wasn't even flying along. I was steadily making my way, within all speed limits imposed on users of a multi-use path, to the place where I live, in order that I might pick up my offspring along the way. They are the best part of my day. And the other best part of that day is the quick ride to pick them up; it's like riding a bike towards Christmas.

And it's terrible when you get in my damn way.

I postulated some time ago on the correlation between wearing khakis while riding and motorists being much more considerate. Seems all that considerateness has been exhausted and all that's left are the trembling tendrils of knee-jerk-reaction nerves. No one's waving me through or even seeing my excessively fluorescent yellow jacket until just before the moment of ABS brakes. Nice. And then there are the pedestrians. In the upper part of the commute home, most of these pedestrians are wondering teenagers, very self-absorbed, and completely oblivious to anything, let alone truly hazardous things that are quickly approaching in a possible threat to the teenagers' physical well-being. Nothing has changed, of course; we've always been this way. But now I'm not the teenager. I'm the brightly-colored hazardous thing moving briskly, on my side of the path (of destruction), getting by and trying very hard not to hit anything.

Today, this idiot kid blew smoke in my face.

Now, if you want to be dumb enough to smoke, go for it. It's not my problem. You can do whatever you like with your own body and your mom's money. But when you blow that stupidity in my face, trying to make your scrawny pseudo-gangsta self all threat'nin and shit, well damn man, that's just rude.

I debated for several pedal revolutions as to whether and go back and make a big deal out of it or not. I have kids to pick up. I have professional relations with teenagers all day and I really look forward to the end of the day when I can stop relating with them. And then there's the problem of kids being rude, stupid, dumb, whatever, and getting away with it until they do it to the wrong person and get themselves in jail or the morgue. Ugh. So I turned around and approached him.

He didn't expect me to come back.

He also didn't expect me to try to reason with him, so he kept his headphones on and acted like he didn't know what was going on. Then his buddy mumbled something and spat in my direction, though, thankfully, it was on the ground before it was actually anywhere near me. I became increasingly incensed, and asked if he had something to say. I invited him to come on over and clarify. He considered. He and his buddy, the original smoke-blower, were probably quickly calculating whether or not they could confront me successfully, physically or whatever, and they must have come up with a good answer: no. No way. So I asked if they had a problem, and they claimed ignorance, and I said fine, and wished them luck. I meant it with all my heart. Assholes like that really will need all the luck they can get.

So the moral of the story? Don't be a dick. And its corollary? Don't waste time on teaching ignorant fools about not being ignorant fools. The world will teach them. It will hurt. And in the meantime, I've got kids to pick up. I do still toy with the idea of bring those idiots doughnuts or something though. Doughnuts make everyone happy...

happyhallidays.

the snow gave way to pavement, eventually, just like we all do, melting or sublimating into the shiniest thing we can show, sometimes blinding, to passersby and other folks yearning to be elsewhere. we drove for hours and hours and hours, and all this, to get home after only six days away. inevitably, we arrived in a flurry of disappointment and chaos, the renderings of an ending. this ain't no happy new year. not yet.

this holiday season was one of those that brings me immediately to a list for the next one: How to Fix All the Things That Sucked About the Holidays Last Time. there weren't a ton of things that sucked, really, but it seems that the holidays happened without enough buildup, with very little spirit, and it all just passed by without enough notice or pause or momentum or panache. so here i sit, still sitting as i have for so many of the past six days, yearning instead of doing, planning to improve, improving my plans, sixteen steps to a better me. one step would be to get up and go and not worry about who can keep up or who wants to stay. another might be to hug my mom more; we had great chats but not enough of them. i might continue with the imbibing and staying up late, if for no other reason than the opportunity to sit next to those i love and just be there. i will run more, a lot more, even if it is cold enough to freeze the snot inside my nose, while it's still inside my nose. and i'll take a lot more pictures; things look better 1/125th at a time, and i can focus better through a pentaprism. and there must always be a fire, and a slackline, and enough time doing enough things in the cold to get sweat frost on my hat.

back in the big, dirty city where no one gives a fuck and there's enough concrete to keep everyone's mood to themselves, we have a dishwasher that might work and a four-year-old who has already puked her holiday all over the dining room table. we have clean laundry, a seven-year-old who is perfect, and a freezer full of bread products whose consumption will inevitably fall to me. there are tires to be changed, bikes to be put to action, and enough bailey's to get through any project hot or cold. merry christmas. and happy new year.

newtown.

i don't know what it is about december, but sometimes, people are horrible.

i got home from work on friday and had had a fine ride, had picked up the girls, was getting changed to head to my sister's, and made the unfortunate move of checking up on some stuff online. splashed across the news page was another tragedy, but this one hurt more than many: twenty children had just been killed, on purpose, without a reason.

there are so many things wrong with killing children that there is really no unblurred location for the raging reasoning to start. i don't care if you are mentally ill or suffering from anything physical or mental or social or spiritual; you have no right to take the life of a child. having children of my own, and having grown up in two different cultures of varying gun/violence-centricity, i hate the headlines about this news. i hate that this is news that we have. i hate that anyone, on a whim, shattered so many people at once.

some of the things i have been hearing/reading other people say include making sure to not remember the name of the murderer. some people say we should only remember the children. some people say remembering will never be enough, and perhaps too much.

whatever the case, i cried when the president cried. i don't know how to bring up the topic to my girls. i can't even imagine having to not come home with my girls. i have to hope harder for the future.

guns suck.

hilly 1

because we had been so far and so wet and so cold for so long, we took some solace in the red glow of the last obstacle between ourselves and completion: it looked warm.

we had talked ourselves to and through this last little point, the point where we would be confronted with the fact that it was over, and we had succeeded, and there must be something next because the ache in the legs will never appease the ache in the heart. so we pedaled forward, wondering about the last few meters of the rise, about the cop in front of whom we almost ran this stupid red light, about how in the hell we willed ourselves through the last two hundred and forty kilometers. it would, of course, be a sprint finish.

______________________________

tumbling down the pseudo-smooth highway from the highest point in southern ontario, it never occurred to me that i was flirting with the edge between sanity and something else. i was screaming at myself in the hopes that vocal volume alone would generate some much-needed heat beneath my layers. i was repeating phrases like 'nice and warm nice and warm nice and warm nice and warm'. my teeth were chattering. i could not brake because my fingers would not bend. i was stuck, as it were, in the highest gear i had and i was hammering my pedals into it for all i was worth. my tires sprayed road grime up my back and into intimate areas that had long since gone numb. i was blind with the abrasive impact of infinite rain drops that felt like a sand storm on the parts of my face i could still feel. my legs went round and round and round. my words did the same. nice and warm and nice and warm and nice and warm and dry and dry and dry and nice and warm and nice and warm and dry and dry and dry. i couldn't wait for the next ascent. i couldn't wait for the next instance of warmth, no matter how much my thighs screamed for rest, the rest of me screamed for heat. we needed a hill, and here we were, screaming down the biggest hill in southern ontario, trying to not fall off the edge altogether. scary things are afoot when we start talking about our body parts as individual entities.

_______________________________

jada said, months later, that she had gone out in the car on that dismal day to look for us. no real plan or map or route, just an idea and a general profundity of love that would likely guide her to us. she mentioned that it warmed her heart to see so many riders on that scrap of land we were lucky to call home once upon a time. i responded that if she saw riders, she would never have seen us.

we saw riders at the first rest stop, and again at the turn that they all missed to cut their ride short by some miles. there is something torturous about knowing just where you are, just where a warm home and hot chocolate could be, and how many miles, vertical and surface, have to be ridden in between. ignorance would have been bliss. i hadn't studied the route map for that very reason. then i had decided to take some ownership of it and make sure that i would know the turns and the order and all that other crap that ends up hurting my brain after my legs have spent all of its oxygen. as luck would have it, i should have kept to myself and remained in ignorant bliss. for i made the correct turns, knew exactly where i was, and always had too far to go, re-learning every vertical inch one pedal push at a time.

________________________________

outside of kaszuby the road regresses to its original garbage state, more pothole and patch than pavement of some kind. hopefield is a rugged and beautiful ridge that shoulders up to other high points and eventually foymount, and its inhabitants are varied and few. outside of a modest brick home whose aesthetics leaned more towards military practicality than soaring architectural ideals, i was powering up a hill, optimistic about my chances of keeping up, cautious about using my reserves to climb too fast too soon. i need not have worried. as i drew abreast to the upper limit of the hill, and parallel to the pragmatically gravelly driveway, i felt something begin to ease, and i noticed the sickening hiss of a tube gone flat. this was to be the first of two catastrophic punctures of the day, the first of only two CO2 cartridges, the first of three oversized tubes carried, and the last time i would feel confident.

______________________________

broadside.

it was a rainy day after so many of the same when he sat down and i got up and he was in that chair that his mother had given to us and the children that used to sleep in it after a good feed now bounced around his knees in capes and costumes that could never disguise the truth: he has colon cancer.

i have a pretty good imagination but i cannot imagine the cold, sinking feeling that must come with a diagnosis that contains the word 'cancer'. most of mine include mere mentions of things like 'cortisone' or 'sterol' or 'bronchiodialator', to say nothing of any disease other than that breathing hassle that bothers me when i do the thing that gave it to me. i stood up and came upstairs to stare at cycling goods i could not afford on a forum classifieds section populated by affluent cyclists and starving artists alike. i went back downstairs and did the dishes, just a few steps away, and there was not enough air in the room or soap in the sink. sometimes everything feels like this: just sickeningly grossly inadequate.

it's been raining for weeks here. the forecast bears more of the same for the remainder of its foreseeable future. i didn't want to ride today or yesterday. i don't feel like suiting up to run again in so may droplets and so much wind and so many things against me when everything else is already stacked. and then he sat down and told us these things, casually optimistic. words like 'prognosis' are nauseating. 'biopsy' offers no comfort. and 'protocol' is a process too clean to be undertaken by a human. we haven't cried yet. i don't know what to do to support. there must be a cancer patient's family support how-to manual somewhere. somewhere. somewhere to begin. these are the inevitabilities that sound a long way off, and then breeze to an awful stop right in front of us, brakes squealing, tires shredding, teeth gritted, the stop soon enough, or not.

Caroline had a way of hunching her shoulders to convey humility, authentic or otherwise. Well-proportioned and unpretty, she had learned the importance of suggestion without follow through, and the magnetism of her breasts over her gaze. She shifted conversations from their origins below her neckline and concluded them with a flourish of unassuming vocabulary and above-average insight. She was a prize fighter in the cafe boundaries. She always won.

when the difference between life and death became as fine as a flicker, we knew we had become men. and when life and death reversed themselves on the shelves of our yearning, when we ran to the dark, away from the searing light, we knew that never again would we, men, be.

kars road.

we had been driving that way for a while: her, restless, me, uneasy, the children, relatively oblivious and on the lookout for grazing bovines. as i am wont to do on these long drags between our parents' houses and our own home, i had asked some kind of stupid question. sometimes it's to spark conversation. sometimes it's to cause shit. sometimes it's because i really want to know and don't know any other way of discerning and i also want her to know and i can't bear to tell her outright.

so i asked a question.

"what do you think about when you're riding?"

of course, there was too much to say, and her knee-jerk response was, "nothing."

also of course, i had hoped for much in her response, and to be part of that much, and to be much a part of what she thinks about, ever, maybe even while she's doing what she loves most. instead, i was part of nothing, or of all the things that would be cleanly removed from her thoughts while she went out there and tore the legs off of men twice her size.

the car tires hummed along. i switched my thoughts to some rare traffic movement ahead of us. the children yawned. i was glad to be wearing sunglasses that reflected back the world and would not bely the truth of panic in my eyes. nothing? eventually, she collected enough of something to revisit the subject and started a litany of her typical on-bike thoughts. i don't really remember the list; i was just glad to hear that she had one, that she could tell me what it was, that i wasn't on it. i know, i wanted to be on it, but the more she listed the less i wanted to be part of it. i wanted to be an annexed idea, something saved for full attention, for dreaming, for something less mundane than cadence and nutrition in gel format.

in turn, she eventually asked me what i thought about on the ride. my inevitable answer, the one in the question i posed to her, was, "you." and it was true. i had spent six and a half hours in the saddle two days before the drive, and most of what i thought about was trying to make her proud. i wanted to live up to her, to meet or exceed some kind of expectations she might have for me. i wanted to ride hard, like she always told me to before i left. somewhere after a flat and four substantial gravel sections and about twenty-five kilometers of cracked pavement, i started riding for me, or all of us, and it hurt more and went better.

i am not a great rider. in fact, much of my recent time on a road bicycle has been spent figuring that out, learning it acutely, and finding every possible glaring or insidious flaw, one chain link, shift, or pedal stroke at a time. you would not believe how tedious this can be, grinding against the inevitability of physics, on a broken road covered with sand, somewhere west of the highest elevation point in southern ontario. there was no greatness there.

and there was no greatness on the flat land stretching from ottawa to the saint lawrence seaway. there were long miles and deep cracks. there was gravel and smushed sandwiches. there was sweat and streaks of salt and remnants of energy-promising gel. so i thought about things that were great. i thought about the fact that i was riding. i may not be good at it, but i can do it. i thought about my children, whom i missed, who would be spoiled rotten by their grandparents, who would know that riding is important and suffering is too. i thought about my lady, how far ahead she would have been on the ride, if i could have caught her in the gravel sections, whether i'll ever ride well enough to live up to her. i decided that i would likely not, but i could love riding well enough, love her and our children well enough, to exceed any expectations. so i smiled to myself and pushed on, looking forward to that snickers melting in my back pocket, wondering what was after this broken stretch of road.

asterisk.

in the summer of 1997, i moved to virginia to work for a landscaping company. the heat was sweltering, the ground-level ozone at an all-time high, and i was working for six dollars an hour, averaging 14-hour days. as usual, i was in for a hard-ass learning experience, and my one big saving grace was my family.

my family dropped me off on a humid june night, just a day after my last high exam. i watched with a heavy heart as the tail lights of the beat-up suburban faded into the dark, and i was left with two people i didn't really know and a summerful of the hardest work i hadn't yet done.

i would come to grow up in that house, living with my boss and his beautiful, pregnant wife, fighting it out in their newlywed year, making a business take and grow, tolerating the heat, and me, and that endless seeping humidity.

about an hour and a half away, somewhere up the 270 corridor, my uncle was hashing out his life with his young family. he had been my favorite uncle growing up. we had spent summers together. he taught me how to draw and he gave me my first road bike frameset, a glorious fat-tubed cannondale with red paint and a steel fork and enough acceleration to kill a horse. every weekend, my uncle would pick me up, and take me to the washington d.c. area to be around the rest of my cousins and aunts and uncles. this saved my life.

we were sitting on the floor of my uncle tom's house one weekend, watching bits of the tour de france highlights, talking the interspersed talk of people who get interrupted by chubby children and the proceeds of dinner melee, and my uncle asked me if i had heard about lance armstrong. i told him i had, that i had seen his picture on the cover of bicycling in the world champion's jersey, that he was barely older than i was. my uncle told me that lance had cancer.

i was floored.

this was not the first time i had heard of cancer. this was not the first time i had heard of cancer affecting someone i knew of, or even knew. this was the first time i had heard of cancer affecting someone so young, someone who did the same thing i did, on two wheels, as much as possible.

obviously, i didn't know lance. he is just a bit older than i. he was the most naturally talented adolescent athlete america had seen since greg lemond. maybe the most talented because he could do so many sports so well. i happened to ride bikes, slowly, and had grown up with the names merckx and lemond. lance was new and brash and interesting, but not a classic, not yet. and then he was diagnosed with cancer. i remember feeling a sense of despair at the time, a vague sense, at the way that a lot of stars seemed to hold a great deal of promise, and then have that potential taken away by one force or another. AIDS. Cancer. things that shouldn't happen to anyone. (and i only really knew a little bit about the privileged developed-world people to whom these things were happening, to say nothing of the rest of the world and its large-scale tragedy.) people were dying.

lance didn't die. in fact, he went on to become the most successful cyclist ever to come from america. he raced hard, and dominated the field, in a charismatic and flashy and exciting way, in the dirtiest years of a doped-up sport: professional cycling in the 1990s and 2000s. blood doping. EPO. dirty doctors and webs of lies and covered up controls and bags of blood. HGH. everything everywhere, race horses and 'trainers', careening through the dark. the rest of us cheered in ignorance, adopted or true. and on top of it all, on top of the world, lance armstrong took his handsome face to the primetime view and told us all that he was doing it clean.

just yesterday, news broke that lance was giving up his handsome face fight, that he is done with the courts and allegations and legal proceedings and WADA and USADA and tygart and non-believers. i figure he probably doped. i was never there when it happened so i don't know for sure. i figure there were once dinosaurs. i wasn't there when it happened so i don't know for sure. and i haven't built my cycling passion on armstrong and his charisma. this is important, because armstrong was a huge kick in the ass to the sport of cycling in north america. i know people who started riding because they saw him do it, and do it with the panache and boldness unique to american pride. armstrong was not subtle. he went big, american big, and he commanded the attention of millions. he had heroic qualities, he was born-again, he was a survivor of one of the most widespread diseases of our time, he shaved his legs and wore spandex, he wore oakley and nike, he rode a bike made in wisconsin. he was an all american hero, and he used this to his advantage, and to the advantage of his cancer-fight-funding foundation. he became an american celebrity, something generally unheard of for athletes not in the major leagues sports like baseball or football. for people who shave their legs and wear spandex and get things thrown at them from the windows of passing pick-ups while they practice the sport they love, the celebrity and machismo of armstrong was a bit of a beacon. and now, here we are, faced with the fall of the hero.

lance didn't get me into cycling. my dad did. and then my uncle gave me his hand-me-down kit. and that beautiful red cannondale. and my dad built it while i worked for it, hour for hour, him inside stringing cables and housings, me outside catching rough-cut lumber off a portable saw mill. i built my first wheels for that red cannondale, and they're still rolling today, almost 20 years later. i learned to wrench bikes from my dad. our first christmas in canada, my dad got up with us at 5 in the morning and set to work unboxing and assembling four brand-new bicycles i'm almost positive he and my mom could not remotely afford. i will never forget his blue coffee mug, the stubble on his chin, under the profound smile that only comes from giving someone a bicycle.

it sucks that lance probably doped. it sucks that everyone in the peloton at the time was probably doping. it sucks that positives must exist among negatives in order to be positive. but i know that my children want to ride like their mama, like emily batty, like clara hughes. they want to ride the ride for heart and the tour for kids, because the money they 'get' goes to people who need it. and i want to ride because i love bikes. i love remembering rides with my dad. i love riding with my girls. i love the sound of tires revolving over pavement, the wind in my ears, the feeling of sweat dripping off the end of my nose, the washing off of road grime from my shins. i love the ker-chunk of my chain dropping into a faster gear. i love leaving and arriving, each moment at a time. and none of that is tainted.

heart.

when my cousin jake died there was nothing i could do.

jake was an exemplary young man of interesting talents and diverse pursuits. he chopped wood. he made movies. he wore his hair long and his mouth in a smile. he adored his nephews. he was formerly a talented wrestler. he could draw and sing and dance. all this to say: i didn't actually know jake. he was younger than i by a few years, but not many, and our paths crossed less frequently than with those of some other cousins. i only came to know him through his passing. and when someone is so young and full of the about-to-happen, death is not just a tragedy; it is a full-on crime.

i mention all of this because there was nothing i could do. i had no stake in the guy's life other than being a blood relative who knew him vaguely and genuinely liked him. we hadn't talked much. and i think the last time i had seen him had been with his hand in a canoe full of icewater and kegs, participating in a willpower test with my brother. i don't know who took his hand out first, but jake was the first to be taken from all of us, and for no goddam reason. jake died of heart failure two decembers ago.

when there's nothing i can do, i resort to the normal process of making something for myself to do. my brother and i fuelled up his truck, installed the snow tires at 2 in the morning in knee-deep snow at minus 20, slept for three hours, and started driving south. what the hell were we going to do? help out? with what? we got to maryland just in time for the wake, changed in the cab in the parking lot, and walked in to cry.

crying was something i could do.

i realized at some point that although i could do nothing to console a family who'd had a son stolen from them, i could feel. i could stand there, in the funeral home, and weep like a man obliterated. i could stand, in honour (and lack of seating for the honouring of such a great man), soaking the lapels of my suit. i could rage at the injustice of the death of a young man so full of possibility. i could see his simple, perfect coffin, remember the grandfather who started our whole family and seeing him in just such a coffin, and i could drip these memories hot and salty down my cheeks. i could see my family ruined. we were undone. and i felt it, bleeding from somewhere very red and very deep.

i do not believe that i did anything helpful by feeling all of this. i merely felt, and i believe this to be a valid, important thing. somewhere on the spectrum of feeling, i am on the further side of rather. i feel rather a lot. maybe it's an artistic thing. maybe i just can't help myself. i temper this tendency, daily, with a good dunk in reality, and hear my afterthoughts and should've-saids hissing away in steam clouds. regardless, i still feel quite a lot, and i think the world needs people who do this. we all, of course, need people to feel less and do more or feel lots and do lots and think and dream and all that other great stuff. but this feeling must not be let to waste. it must not be shut off. i may not drown in it either. it is important, and it must be done.

toothless.

it is possible to be flat broke in the bank and utterly filthy rich in the heart. i know this, because this is where i am today.

apparently, one of the stupid habits of poor people is to know exactly how much money we have at all times. another is to spend it before the new instalment gets in. i am guilty of both of these, frequently. today, however, i had the privilege of spending hours and hours, from a little after dawn to early evening, with a wonderful child. the child is mine, of course, and it probably helps that we had the weekend away from each other so i was really in the mindset of appreciating each second with her, but she is a great kid, and our day of wonderfulness dwarfed any debt i have.

i was walking from the kitchen to the front closet, glancing at the wall of bikes, stepping on the worn-out hardwood cracks that will never sweep clean, and all of a sudden, i was overwhelmed with happiness. it was like christmas or my birthday or somehow something wonderful had just burst into my consciousness, and i was shining. all the moments of the day had added up, and i was struck with wonder.

there was nothing overtly special about the day. we did the morning routine. we drove downtown to collect documents and then uptown to submit them. i may even have earned a raise this summer. we ran errands at bike shops for my lady friend. we got groceries, filled the pool, and went for a ride. she asked me, with her toothless lisp, if i was going to wear bike clothes for the ride. i could tell by the question and tone that my answer would dictate whether she would wear bike clothes for the ride. we had been planning this ride since this morning. i figured she really wanted occasion to wear her bike clothes. we agreed to wear bike clothes. we rode almost 20k. she ate a bar and finished two bottles. she rode singletrack and ruts and gravel and paved path. she lifted her bike, the heaviest one in the house, over obstacles and gaps and kept riding. she smiled the entire time. and so did i. i rarely come back from a ride sore in the face, but i had smiled so much and so intensely and for so long, that my mouth hurt from the exertion. that's what happens when you set out to just ride with the world's greatest 7 year old. we came home and changed and she ate an egg that i boiled for her and we picked up her sister and i made dinner. we vacuumed the car. we set the table. nothing special.

now the children are fast asleep, dreaming about magic wands and railing turns on their bikes, and i am dreaming, right here in my chair, amazed at the immediacy of things come true.

begin.

the moratorium on writing is now over.

for clarification, the coffee has been consumed, the nap looms on the horizon, both children are well taken care of, elsewhere, and it's been a month since my last post: july was busy. i knew that july would be absolute hell, and full of writing more scholarly than what is to occur here, so i resigned myself to writing entirely for class, and not at all for this blog. unfortunately, that means that i have a lack of creative juice running over these keys, and an habitual itch to capitalize things.

i learned a lot in july.

there is something about going back to the role of student in classroom subject to others and their learning and teaching styles that brings back all the notions and prejudices and uncomfortable recollections of the last time i was a student in a classroom. thankfully, these things are now mixed with a heavy dose of coarsely chopped perspective and teaching experience, and nuggets of genius have been folded in gently. there will always be more to know, and learning is more fun than knowing. it's also harder, significantly more taxing, and not as immediately beneficial.

regardless, i learned a lot, and now i know a little more, and this is pretty exciting. i learned that i can be a student again, and that i'm not as bad at it as i was in undergrad. i learned that i know some things that are important and valuable to people other than myself. i learned that i'm terrible at giving critiques, which used to be a strong point for my art endeavors. i learned that all those prints look better when i collage them, and that cedar is a tough ground to glue to. i learned that postmodernism is the loose term for what i think about education, that, if nothing else, it helps to define a bit of the crisis of the system right now. i remembered that much of this only applies in my head, as i grasp things, and not in the world where rich people are still rich and it's hard to be one if you're not born that way. some systems and metanarratives will not dissolve as easily as education or religion or the Truth. i learned that i still have something to say, and much to do, and it's important.

i also raced a bunch in july, and there was learning there too. second overall in the duathlon. a good hard finish for my leg of sinister seven. i can run much better than i can ride. and, if i put my mind to it, an impossible thing can really become possible. and sometimes, we need to borrow before we can pay everything back in full.

welcome to the first day of summer.

spit.

we undulated, and the wind whipped out and curled back in around us like a tongue ready to soothe us toward inevitable devouring, pushing and pulling use toward fangs and black gums and a throat that led to absolution. it was neither tailwind nor headwind or belgian crosswind laced with sleet and that farm smell that is at once haltingly fresh, and historically stale: it was wind, and it was going to win.

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i heard his footsteps so delicately placing the pavement behind him, as if selected carefully before executed, as i plodded foolishly to my demise, and the hill began to rise. he had a close-cropped beard, round glasses, a bandana round his forehead, and sweat pouring down his bare torso into the dark-stained waistband of his blue running shorts. i knew this without looking behind me. i knew also, from listening, that he was suffering as i was, though it wasn't his feet, rather, it was his breathing. we were going to do it, then, we were pitted. it was lap four of seven, no reason to race, or to cede an inch, so we drove forward, each to his doom.

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i knew that i would win. this is a bold statement from someone who never wins anything, but this wasn't really winning anything, so i knew i would do it.

i led to the beginning of the false flat. he waited. i led to the beginning of the last kick of the hill. he came round. i let him get a few strides on me, maybe three at most, and then i decided that i would kill myself reeling him back in. step for step, i suffered, sweat and snot streaming down my face, shoes pounding audibly into the hill in that funny kick-step way, just on the balls of the feet, never there long enough for more than a temporary purchase of traction. i came round. we ran even for three, maybe four more strides. then i pushed. he faded. i pushed again to come clear, he huffed his resignation, and i went.

there's something exhilarating about departure. as soon as those perfect striding footsteps faded into the background, my beleaguered cadence lit up. i attacked. it was only a few more lengths to the top of the hill, to the metal post with fading yellow paint, to the cloud of smoke rising from the tourist on the bench, but it seemed to take forever. i had become time. at the speed of light, time ceases to exist. legs churning, muscles dissolving, the finish line impeccably preserved, i approached, but never gained. it was yearning, perpetual.

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we sweated back down the slope in our 'easy' gaits, each plotting the next one's death, a perfect murder amid pines and race flats. he sweated and jogged, coughing now and again with the remnants of a near-death exertion. some spit or sweat landed on my face. i lapped at it, unconsciously, eating the heart of mine enemy, ingesting the meat of an animal that is fast, taking in the flavor of victory. i had broken him. and i was still running.