Five Seconds on a Mountain Pass - On Being a Velocity Addict

By Dana Albert

This is an article about bicycle descending. If you’re looking for race coverage, or the latest news about professional cyclists, this article may not be for you. It is an examination of the psyche of the road cyclist who loves to go downhill fast. It’s also the story of a descent that went very, very wrong.

John (left) and Dana. Photo courtesy Dana Albert.
It happened on an organized century ride. On the first of several big descents, my friend John Pelster and I were cautious. There were an awful lot of other riders on the road and not all of them were experts. (One fellow in particular give me the willies: he stood on his pedals, bobbing up and down at the knees to some meaningless rhythm, possessed perhaps by an intellectual idea of what good technique must be. I gave him a wide berth.) Cautious though we’d been, John and I broke fifty-three miles per hour.

John and I agreed to take it easy on the next descent, where a surprisingly sharp right-hand bend had given me a scare the previous year. (I’d lost my focus for a split second right at the apex because I saw another guy sprawled out on the road getting checked out by a couple of EMTs). Not remembering exactly where that curve was, I resolved to play it extra safe, setting a mellow pace ahead of John.

In any event, we didn’t stick to our plan, and before we knew it were absolutely flying. We must have been among the first riders on the descent, because there were far fewer others to contend with than in previous years. I recognized the sharp right curve in time to slow sufficiently for it, and we both made it through fine and accelerated back up to a brisk pace. It was then - after the supposed danger was over, when the road had straightened out - that things went wrong.

But before I get into what happened, I’ll start by saying I don’t consider myself a daredevil, and I’m not out to justify irresponsible behavior with this article. In fact, much of the reason I’ve pondered this matter is the chronic difficulty I have keeping my love of speed in check. Before a long, steep descent I often pull up mental pictures of my two young daughters, reminding myself how much they need me, and I touch my wedding band with my thumb as though it were a talisman. Once I’m actually descending, though, this resolve vanishes. Clearly, the psyche of the velocity addict deserves some analysis. (If you lose interest in the ensuing examination, please click here before giving up on me entirely.)

It may be that our enjoyment of speed and danger - whether racing bikes, skiing downhill, whatever - is a biological instinct, born of some evolutionary advantage. For our ancestors, a fundamentally cautious makeup wouldn’t have been conducive to taking on a mastodon. And I’m sure part of our love of descending swiftly is the pleasure anybody takes in being proficient at something difficult. But I think the most compelling reason is that whatever else a fast downhill provides, it’s a release from preoccupation. Hugging the curves of a steep mountain road, we’re "in the zone" - completely focused on the matter at hand. The stressors that hang forever over us - work, family life, global warming - simply get pushed out of our minds.

Okay, you might be saying, so you’re a stressed-out guy who likes to burn off a little steam: does that justify taking your life in your hands, and threatening the livelihood of your family? Actually, it’s more complicated than that. I believe that the mechanism that focuses the brain into the immediate present is responsible not only for why descending is enjoyable, but for why speed becomes almost irresistible during a descent. To fully illustrate this idea, I propose that we divide thought into two categories: autonomic versus conscious.

What do I mean by autonomic? I’m using the term loosely, not in the sense of the autonomic nervous system, but to suggest automatic, spontaneous action that seems to skip the conscious mind altogether. And this is a strictly amateur treatise - I’m no neurologist and have no brain scans to back up my ideas. Consider this a jumping-off point for your own musings.

This bypass of conscious thought gives the body a huge performance advantage, as it ensures consistent performance and greatly speeds reaction time. It is easy to tell when the conscious mind is interfering with pure technique: movement becomes stifled, robotic, mechanical. If you touch-type, try watching your fingers. They slow down, become tentative, clumsy. A physicist could probably calculate the arcs, trajectories and vectors required to put a basketball through a hoop, but it would take days. The autonomic mind experiments, catalogs, analyzes, executes - far faster than the conscious, intellectual mind.

The conscious mind turns information into general policy. It knows, for example, that my hand shouldn’t be held in a flame, without needing to try it. It remembers that Fabio Casartelli crashed on a descent and died, and grasps the equation f=½mv²(which says force increases hugely with speed).

The autonomic mind doesn’t think big-picture. It pilots the body, period. The first time you do something physical, the conscious mind is heavily involved. You take abstract descriptions of the technique involved, try to turn them into physical motion, flail helplessly for awhile, and then begin to get the hang of it. A concise definition of "getting the hang of it" might be "passing technique from the conscious to autonomic mind." When you’ve had enough instruction to carry out the essence of a physical technique, that’s when it’s time to go out and practice on your own. "Practice," in this context, means "the autonomic mind refining motion, improving it, honing technique." This is the essence of practice, rehearsal, drills - everything that makes an athlete or performer more proficient than the dabbler.

In other words, the autonomic mind works toward riding faster. It doesn’t evaluate in terms of "safer" versus "more dangerous," but in terms of "works better," "doesn’t work as well." You can’t improve on not crashing - it’s a binary matter, not open to enhancement. But so long as you’re not crashing, you can always learn how to find the optimum line, how to carry more speed into the curve and still make it out the other side.

I contend that during a descent, the autonomic mind has the upper hand, for it has the focus. Ideas retained by the conscious mind aren’t part of this focus - they’re distractions. The autonomic mind is paying attention to road conditions, speed, traffic, and such, while notions like "be careful" and "remember Casartelli!" get pushed aside just like "Megacorp proposal due Thursday," "Am I sexy enough?," and "Gotta clean out those rain gutters."

Let’s not oversimplify, though. I believe I have the skill to descend faster than I actually do - thus, the conscious mind must have some ability to influence behavior, even "in the moment." Whenever I descend with my brother Max, I watch him eventually drop me, and I count up the differences between his style and mine. Max says he knows to pull back when he starts to feel his tires losing traction. "Loss of traction is just the friendly edge of an unfriendly situation," he says. His reason for descending so fast: "It’s great to have control even when you’re doing something extraordinary. Do it enough and you can make the extraordinary feel ordinary." Max goes faster because of a hundred small choices he makes. He’ll hold a tuck through a sharper curve, valuing aerodynamics over quick access to the brakes. He’ll pass another rider with very little room, assuming that the guy won’t suddenly swerve. More so than mine, his autonomic mind appears to run the show during descents.

In certain cases, it’s actually the conscious mind that gets a rider into trouble. Sometimes, especially when competition is involved, the conscious mind values speed above safety, and asks the autonomic mind to do something it really isn’t capable of. Two examples come to mind. After he crashed on a downhill in the first long time trial stage of the ’99 Tour de France, Bobby Julich conceded that he was descending beyond his limits, taking too many chances as he tried to make up for poor split times. And this year, Levi Leipheimer made a similar admission after he crashed on a descent in the Dauphiné Libéré, going all-out to protect his leader’s jersey.

Though my conscious mind doesn’t apply that kind of pressure, neither is it completely innocent where unnecessary speed is concerned. If I were rationally convinced that my love of speed were a real menace to my family, I would take steps to avoid the steep stuff. But I differentiate between caution alone and overall safety: I believe that the expert descender, though he goes faster, subjects himself to no more danger than a cautious novice. The expert understands the hazards he may encounter and how to handle them; doesn’t get distracted; doesn’t panic. The cautious novice may get scared and brake when it isn’t appropriate (e.g., in a curve), or may brake too hard, skidding the rear tire or flipping over the bars. Intent is not the same as ability. I take bicycle safety statistics with a grain of salt.

Finally, my conscious mind trusts my autonomic mind. Fifty miles per hour just doesn’t feel particularly fast to me while I’m doing it. Though the autonomic mind is directing things, the conscious mind is watching, and it likes what it sees. There’s a right line to take through a curve, and I consciously admire it as a thing of beauty. And during moments of real danger, when something has gone wrong, the autonomic mind is completely cool, decisive, strong.

Perhaps the most magical trait of the autonomic mind is that during a crisis, time seems to slow down, to stretch out. Tight tolerances seem more generous; an odd tranquility descends on the scene, and there’s an overwhelming sense that there is plenty of time to process information and act on it. That’s how panic is avoided.

I first observed this stretching of time when I was thirteen or fourteen, while descending the Flagstaff road in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado. A year or so before, the road had been closed due to landslide for an entire summer, and my friends and I endlessly practiced descending without needing to worry about cars. We knew that road cold, and could take half the curves without braking at all. By the time it was reopened, we’d learned not to overshoot our lane, so the cars didn’t matter anyway. At least, it was tempting to think so.

But on this particular morning, as I flew down the straightest, steepest part of the descent, I encountered something bizarre: a car, driving up the road towards me, had no driver. Actually, the driver had just dropped something on the floor on the passenger side, and was continuing to drive while bent over hunting for it. The car was drifting toward me, well into my lane, heading toward the steep embankment on my right. I had a fairly narrow gap to dive through between car and embankment, and it was getting narrower all the time. As it turned out, I had enough time and space to make it through, which fact my autonomic mind never doubted. (If, however, I’d lost my cool, I’d almost certainly have braked - and might have reached the car later, when it was even closer to the side.) It wasn’t until the descent was over that it hit me how terribly close a call I’d had. This retroactive freak-out couldn’t touch my autonomic mind, which had simply known what to do and had done it.

I have been explaining how my intellect evaluates the risks of descending fast. The philosophical question is, do I even care whether or not I’m taking unnecessary risk? Obviously I do care - I don’t want to crash, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to let my family down - but the question is, how much do I care, and how do I position the trade-off between risk and enjoyment? Or to put it another way, can the philosophical mind be expected to value safety above all else? I eat saturated fats despite established facts about blood pressure, cholesterol, and cancer, simply because I love rich food. And I love to ride downhill fast. I told this to my wife, and she responded, a bit testily, "Is that what you want on your tombstone? ‘Liked to descend fast’?" I said, "I can think of worse things to have on my tombstone." She reflected for a moment. "Yeah, that’s true," she said. "Like, ‘Never left the house.’" My point isn’t that I’m reckless; it’s that I weigh this risk against simple joie de vivre.

I can offer no better illustration of these ideas than what happened to John, so I’ll return now to my story. The most technical part of the descent behind us, we were enjoying a much less challenging section, straight but very steep. John, no longer needing to benefit from my greater familiarity with the road, rolled by me. He happened to check his speed right as he pulled out of my slipstream: 58.5 mph. He wasn’t in an aerodynamic tuck like we’d been in earlier; his hands were on the drops of the bars, so his position should have been very stable. But suddenly, his bike started to wobble horribly. He’d mentioned a problem with speed wobble a couple of weeks before, when he’d descended at over fifty with a crosswind. We had a crosswind now as well, and I immediately realized what was happening.

I’ve had speed wobble on about half the road bikes I’ve owned. It’s usually a very slight shimmy, maybe in inch or two back and forth, that happens at high speeds (reputedly to bikes with misaligned frames or bad headsets) when the bars aren’t held tightly. Normally, a firmed-up grip on the bars makes it go away.

What John had, though, was far more severe. His bike developed a simple harmonic motion with an amplitude of at least a foot and a half. He was slaloming down the road with a violence that was bound to crash him. A person couldn’t direct this motion if he tried: it was sickeningly precise, as geometric as a sine wave, indicating that physics had taken over. John had become a helpless passenger, a captive of malfunction, like a pilot whose plane has lost its flaps and has become a missile.

It took me just a split second to assess the situation: John’s bike has a bad case of speed wobble; he has completely lost control; without question he is going to crash; I am far enough behind that I will have plenty of room to stop once he does. During this brief moment, I was not worried at all - because I was only looking at my own situation. But once I’d crunched the available data about what action to take, there just wasn’t much left for my brain to do but watch the staggering drama playing out before me. In brain time, the next five to ten seconds felt like minutes.

My only verbal thoughts were "shit, shit, shit" over and over again, like a chorus or mantra. During this compressed shard of eternity, a hundred thoughts flew through my brain, complex and intricately detailed, and incapable of being expressed verbally in nearly so short a time. First, I had the image  - almost a hallucination - of beating my handlebar with my fist in protest of John’s awful fate, but of course both hands were actually firmly on the bars, ready in an instant to grab the brakes. John’s past wasn’t flashing before my eyes, but his immediate future did seem to be. Even before actually seeing him fall, I could envision the whole thing. His bike would continue its mad slalom until something gave, and then it would slam him forcefully into the asphalt. This would make a lot of noise, a horrible scraping, and with all his momentum he would tumble, and the bike would get tangled all around him. He would take a long time to come to rest, while I braked safely to a stop behind him. Then the assessment would begin. Living or dead? What is broken? How much blood?

I had a sickening realization of the sudden shift from everyday life - thoughts only of the century ride, of pacing ourselves, of finishing - to a grave realm of emergency response, notifications, preventing shock, doing the best I can until the EMTs arrive, feeling a wave of gratitude when they do arrive and know exactly what to do. My reverie fast-forwarded through John’s less immediate future: now a doctor is explaining what the prognosis is - exactly how close John may come to restoring, through physical therapy, his former abilities..

Alongside all this, my mind was carrying out an (intellectual, not autonomic) examination of what John ought to be doing. He hasn’t hit the ground yet, and he owes it to himself to try to do something. My lack of control was agonizing. I surmised that he should apply the brakes, but I couldn’t be sure. Braking would be like a plea bargain: it probably wouldn’t stop the wobble, but when a crash is inevitable, shedding speed at least mitigates the consequences. I couldn’t of course do math in a moment like that, but as I mentioned before, I’m well aware that higher speed geometrically increases the force of impact. (In this case, reducing speed by a third, from 59 to 40 mph, would lower the force by well over half.) Above all, braking would be doing something, instead of stepping willingly into the role of victim.

Something like guilt settled over me - the long overdue questioning of why we descend so fast, and the germ of this article. I had the sad, selfish realization that I’d never get to descend this fast again, or that if I were to, it would never be the same again, as it would feel foolish, or seem disrespectful of my fallen friend.

Suddenly, amazingly, John’s bike returned to his control. One moment he was doomed, and then the next he was utterly fine: the speed wobble vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. My reaction was complete disbelief. It seemed impossible that death or horrible injury could get replaced by a complete lack of consequence. The bullet didn’t miss the heart by millimeters - at the last second it turned ninety degrees and missed the body entirely. So often we expect fate to be a matter of degree; the binary flip of this episode, so like a coin toss, hammered home how lucky John had gotten. In the blink of an eye, we’d returned to the normal, crisis-free world we’d been enjoying before. My epiphany about safety retreated, this episode relegated to just another cautionary tale.

How had John pulled it off? He touched the rear brake, but lightly. (He’d braked during his other bout of speed wobble, weeks before, and it had seemed to make things worse.) His snap judgment was that among the circumstances that lined up to cause the harmonic motion - speed, crosswind - one of them could change just enough on its own that the motion would just go away before causing a crash. Clearly, he’d guessed right.

For the rest of the ride, I was hugely preoccupied with what had happened - more so than John was. This makes some sense; after all, throughout the episode he was focusing on how to respond, rather than idly collecting terrifying images to flash upon his memory. He hadn’t had that feeling of powerlessness, and hadn’t been envisioning his fate, so he had much less to recollect after the fact. If we’d traded roles (or bikes), he might well have written this article.

We took the remaining descents cautiously - not that our confidence was shaken or our philosophy revised, but because we could no longer trust John’s bike to behave predictably. At one point, though, on the last descent, we went from double- to single-file because of the cars, and once I was in front, I automatically got into an aerodynamic tuck. Then I remembered John’s wobble-prone bike and thought, "What am I doing?"