Climbing hills sucks. Being an adult is cool though, because I get to choose to do things that don't suck as much as all the things that USED to suck, like crippling acne, algebra homework and having to buy car insurance to drive across town and slap crusts and deliver pies for Gus the Perpetually Furious Pizza Guy. Signing up for the Hillier Than Thou century was a no-brainer, partly because Dan had been bugging me for an entire year to do it, partly because it has been a while since I had my ass thoroughly kicked by something other than a hangover. And something was said about a monster free barbecue lunch afterwards. The ride promised just under 10k of climbing in just under 100 miles and since I'm more of a clydesdale than a butterfly, I figured it would wreck me and rebuild me as a little bit more of a badass. So me and Dan and Eva pile ourselves and our bikes into a car we borrowed from Dan's mom and immediately get lost in Jersey. It was like Stargate, we turned an ordinary corner in residential Jersey City and passed through this invisible bubble-thin retard membrane to a zone where no one knew what the hell was going on. After a cursory investigation established that there was no map in the glove box, I parlayed my status as the only occupant of the car who was NOT a native of New Jersey into a total pass on any responsibility for improving the situation. I took over the radio instead and dug the ride. If Dan's a scary guy to follow at Monster Track, try riding shotgun when he's on home turf. A few hours of white-knuckle terror later, we screeched into Eva's parents' driveway in a cloud of burning rubber and the stink of just-ripe roadkill. We'd stopped to buy some thick steaks and potatoes and we put these on the grill. Die Hard was on TV and a clean-scrubbed Maggie Gyllenhaal (I've had a grapefruit-sized soft spot for her ever since Secretary) was on the cover of the ladies' magazine and after collecting a small tax from the stash of the old man's dedicated Miller High Life refrigerator, all was sweet dreams and deep snores til six in the morning, at which point foot-and-a-half Eva throws open the door and screams "GET UP, YOU BITCHASS", then slams the door and disappears downstairs. Coffee's on, sausage is on, eggs are sizzling and we chew 'n' screw.
The parking lot at the start is a large grass field, neatly divided into rows where riders have parked their Infinitis and BMWs and they are already gingerly toeing the distance to the pavement, daintily dimpling the turf with their cleat covers, hoisting their Serottas and Madones high above their heads to keep the morning dew off their Zipp wheels. I'm not fucking joking at all about this. Dan swings the whip diagonally to the farthest-flung stretch of grass, where we do our best to distance ourselves from the proceedings by yelling inanities back and forth and blasting Machine Gun Funk loud enough for everyone to hear as we throw on our wheels, stuff our jerseys with snacks and roll the hell out, Eva back to bed and our two sorry asses to the start line. The weather was beautiful, the air was crisp, and the pack was full of the type of snotty, self-important douchelords who feel that every development, no matter how trivial or obvious ("ROADKILL!!" "CHAAASM!!" "SURFACE IMPERFECTIONS!!" "RED LIIIIIGHT!!" and my favorite, "SLOOOWING!!") needs to be communicated at maximum volume, to everyone, repeatedly and with a sense of killing urgency. It's like a great warm circular kissing of asses, in which everyone tries to be the most helpful guy ever to all the rest of the guys. It's recess at backseat-driver's ed. In theory this should allow at least some of the numbskulls in the middle of the pack to disconnect most of their senses and tune out the physical world, enjoying the race in a pure, protected vortex, becoming a nonthinking, nonfeeling part of the Great Godly Thrumming Race Machine. In practice, guys who do this just get chastised for not being part of the yelling, so everyone winds up yelling and the pack plods along, sounding like a terrified herd of feral, paranoid adult babies. Maximum Bitchassness is the name of the game and there are no style points for miles. So I had some motivation to turn on the gas over the first couple of climbs. I had to ditch the punks.
This thing was sort of a farmlands alleycat. There were six rest stops, where all the racers had to get their numbers signed in order to prove they had completed the whole course. I almost missed the fourth checkpoint but one eagle-eye killer in my group brought it to my attention and about seven of us hit it together. When we got there, the guy told us we were the first group through. I knew that there was a lead group (containing Dan) that had at least two minutes on us, so we all started congratulating ourselves on our new position as official race leaders. Fantastic! Dumb technicality for the win! And since I was the only sub-30 year old in my group, and the worst hills of the day were behind us (I thought) I figured that all I had to do was not flat or fuck up and I'd scoot away with the 1st place for my category. I brightened up and the riding got a lot easier after that. There was a lot of talk about not wanting to win due someone else's mistake or misfortune, but I had a hard time swallowing it. It was gracious-loser talk, politician talk. It was the type of thing everyone wanted to be heard saying. I got worked up, pushed the pace at the front and reminded the group about the tent full of terrified virgins tethered at the finish, the pick of which had been promised the top ten finishers. I think it was around this point that the group knew for sure they didn't like me. It may have been due to the fact that most of them were of the age to have fathered teenage daughters, but I'd prefer to chalk it up to their Inability to Handle My Shit. And there was a good amount of cash at stake (well, maybe not for the dentist-lawyer crowd I'd landed in, judging by the bikes they were riding) which could have offset the cost of the whole weekend for me, and although we were all pretty strong, none of us were in shape to win the thing UNLESS someone up ahead had seriously fucked up. I figured the raging testosterone, the blistering pace and the snarling competition in the lead group had completely besotted their judgement and they'd furiously hammered past the checkpoint, hare-style. I felt so good about this turn of luck that I got out of the saddle and took off from the group. I was already rehearsing the crowing I'd do when I collected my envelope of cash and Dan, the brazen, cocky Prince of the Alleycats, would be crushed and humbled by the painful reality that a simple failure to keep his head up had cost him his placing. I'd condescend to buy the whole company a victory round and strut around with a totally undeserved sense of superiority for a couple of weeks.
Alas.
I guess 70 miles into a hilly century was too soon to blast off. I was caught, not easily, but decisively. I sat up and sat in. But these clowns were on to me and they didn't want me around. I can't blame them, I was fucking up their whole program. I got dropped somewhere on the flats, they got together and I just couldn't hang in the paceline. Surprisingly, I was at the front over all the hills (this having more to do with obnoxious tenacity and some inappropriately high gearing than any real physical prowess; I probably could have jogged the hills as fast as I rode them) but I'd fired just about all of my bullets and I watched them go on without me. I settled in for another hard 20 miles or so, knowing that as long as I didn't get passed I'd be fine. I couldn't see anyone behind me so I started checking out the scenery. There are a lot of nice colored cows in Jersey. Lots of greenery, fragrant rows of crops I couldn't quite identify, chirping birds and huge caterpillars. Lots of motorcycles too. I heard "FEEL THE BURN, MOTHERFUCKER" and one of them spit in my direction as I clawed my way up what wound up being the last big climb. It was one of these that kept spiraling up, flattening out, promising a summit, and, just as I was certain I could safely blow the last of my reserves on a strong finish, unleashing another killing grade. It was on one of these that the fatal, killing cramps got me. I got out of the saddle and BOTH hamstrings quit, walked off the job simultaneously. No scabbing here, just a concerted, immediate demand for NO MORE BICYCLE RIDING. I was going about 1/2mph at the time and just collapsed sideways into the bushes. God, I wanted to stay there. Of course, this was the moment a brace of smug, smartly kitted euro-jerks picked to sail past me with their perfect white teeth flashing in the sun that had just poked over the real summit, one of them asking, I assumed rhetorically, "hey dere buddy, how you feeeeling?"
I felt great. I felt even better when I arrived at the finish in around 5 hours 30 minutes (somewhere in the top 20, based on what I saw of the organizer's sheet) and they told me they'd passed out the cash to the winners as they had crossed the line. Once riders started showing up with six signatures instead of five, I saw the "oh shit" expression and the little beads of sweat popping out of the organizer's forehead. He buried himself in his clipboard, trying to keep the panic at bay, and braced himself for the onslaught. I stuck around the finish for a while just to watch ol' Eagle Eyes cry and pound his fist and wail to anyone stupid enough to listen about how he was the martyred, jilted champion of the day. Highway robbery! He cracked me up. He sounded like Milton from Office Space, but his stapler was the "cycling jersey" of the day's champion. The guy was a terror, and he refused to shut up. He was waving his wad of cash around (since I guess he'd placed well enough at least to merit that), yelling that he'd happily trade it for the "cycling jersey" and to have his name on top of the standings, but the "cycling jersey" was the real issue. Dude, we finished fifteen minutes behind the winners. We fought valiantly and were crushed. Come back and fight another day. Hast thou no sense of propriety? Hast thou no pride? The adult-baby syndrome had followed us out of the pack and continued to dog us throughout the otherwise fantastic post-race meal. Strains of his whining followed us to the car and out the parking lot...
So I left Jersey in a near-coma, with a renewed faith in my ability to endure pain and a seriously bitter roadie horse-pill stuck in my craw. Finally! Something to be sick of that isn't rich kids on track bikes.
