Cyclists are freaks, but they know things

The best thing about riding a bike is after you’ve freaking gotten all dressed up, gotten your drinks, bars, spares, cell phone, key and all that shit together, maybe driven somewhere to freaking ride your freaking bike for less time than you’ve been freaking sitting in traffic, and you’ve already warmed up. Then, every now and then, you’ll be out there riding and you’ll get into a rhythm where your butt doesn’t burn, you could give a crap about the cars all around you, you don’t feel the sweat globs streaming down your face on their way to pooling into your shoes, and the cramp in your lower back fades away. And always, on the day you’re surely going to have the worst ride after work, you get this second wind and you climb up the hills feeling like nothing. Sometimes after a good race when you’re heaving just to get oxygen to your blood, which is pounding against the sides of your skull, it just feels good. Even the next day when the skin on your face, which will surely get skin cancer, is raw from the wind and you can feel the tears turn your quads into jelly when you’re walking around, it’s real satisfying. Even when no one else in the whole world could care less it’s just fine.

I like that. I like knowing people who know that stuff too. I like guys who shave their legs, aren’t afraid to wear spandex, and have a line separating the front of their thighs. I like girls who aren’t afraid to sweat, know how far fifty miles is, and won’t have flabby arms when they’re fifty. People who get off on seeing pretty bikes drive by on roof racks and get that sick feeling in middle of their gut when they see them mangled by the roof of a garage know what it feels like. I like going on easy rides with some of them when it’s all sunny out and shooting the shit about Tyler Hamilton, 12 year olds and smokers who wear yellow bracelets, cursing at people in minivans, and almost running over chipmunks.

You can always spot the people that know this stuff. There are certain clues, the way they are aware of their body when they walk, the little hollows in their cheeks, the veins popping over the bones the tops of their hands, the twenty or so vertical lines that show up only on the backs of the calves of cyclists, and the little purpley spots of scarred over road rash. These people I respect and they know how to blow snot rockets. Most of them even learned the hard way, boomerang style, when it smacks back into your shoulder and freezes there in a kind of crystallized spider-web splotch.

Yea, people who go out of their way to suffer fascinate me. Not even just a little out of their way, but people who rearrange their life and spend unfathomable amounts of time and money undisclosed to their spouses and friends in order to suffer are generally interesting. This behavior is not quite like heroin addiction, but it is still illogical even though a lot of them are engineers. Of course, not all of them are cool. The ones who talk about how they won such and such race and spent X dollars on whatever are annoying. But the rest of them, the ones who want to kill the people on the sidelines of races that yell "Go, Get up there!" when they don’t know how bad you’re hurting, are cool. And everyone who knows the full spectrum of the yellow in pee thus determining how much liquid you’ve sweated out, are cool. Even the people who pee in their shorts so they don’t waste time scrambling to the bushes and can maybe win a race are cool. Well, they are definitely dedicated, or at least they have a tendency towards dirt so they don’t mind walking around like an ammonia scented sweat-ball with grease marks.

That is not to say that people who don’t cycle are not good people or that everyone else doesn’t think that cyclists are freaks and give blank stares to comments about EPO and think the Tour de France is boring. Hell, I even think the Tour de France is boring. Sometimes. No, those people just spend their spare time doing other stuff, like golf. Or actually going out and partying on a Friday night instead of going to bed early so they can get up at 7 for their workout. And I respect that. It’s just that sometimes there is no better way to bond than to suffer with someone.