april selection

It's been a pretty unbelievable month. Other than the fact that I'll be swaggering for the rest of the year [at least!], here are a few favorites from April...
- This month's contribution from Josh: BarBumps. Prepare for LOLZ. [via Bike Rumor]

- Past loves: Bernie being predictably charming, while playing the Air Attack bongos. [via Cycling Inquisition]

- Current crushes: This picture of Adam Hansen taken by Kei Tsuji at the Tour of Turkey.

- Speaking of sexy, the paint job on this Firefly that looks like it was a collaboration with Christian Louboutin.

- Greipel's back-to-back wins at the Tour of Turkey and taking the points jersey. [Look at those legs! Juuuuicy!] [photo via Steephill.tv]

- And if you're missing CX, apparently this is the new thing in American CX courses...watch out, Tim looks like he's getting pretty good at it! [photo by Dave Chiu]


And now, onto the Giro!
[P.S. Did anyone else catch the MTN-Qhubeka guy getting hit by his own team car in Tour of Turkey?]

thanks for the suffering

While reliable and widely-read cycling news sources were reporting on the twenty of so podium hopefuls for Milan-San Remo [“___________ wishes/hopes/ for Milan-San Remo,” as Josh put it], they failed to notice the obvious. That there were a massive number of total babes on the start list. Adam Hansen [do you have to ask?], Bernie Eisel, Tom Boonen [...does he really have "cat lover" in his Twitter profile?], Heinrich Haussler [assuming he’s stopped frosting his tips], John Degenkolb [also, what is it with the collection of babes that were on HTC?]… With a list that long full of smoking hot dudes, you’d think the race would have been super steamy.

Twitter proved me wrong, with pictures that made the race look like it totally sucked. To race, that is. To watch your favorite hotties get all wet and cold…call me sadistic [or maybe just opportunistic] but that’s an ideal set-up for seduction [“Need help warming up post-race? I think I can help you with that…”].

Turchino and Le Manie out? Yeah, I know, kind of anti-climactic so to speak. But watching Sky try to stay on their bikes was hilarious...and I was just happy there were that many hot [shivering] dudes, on bikes, in one race. So the point of this post? Mostly just a thank you for the suffering done for my own objectifying amusement. Seriously. Especially to that guy on Sky Puccio who almost ran down the Poggio descent without his bike, after trying to remount.
Now, onto Catalunya…!

a [time] trial of faith

There’s a place that you fall into at the tail end of a series of power intervals – the kind that puts you in a severe oxygen deficit – or, as I also discovered a few days ago, in the last three minutes of a 20 minute TT.
It comes after the nausea sets in [that’s at around 12:36], and you’re already aching. By which I mean, everything hurts. You know it, you can feel it, but the worst part is that your brain keeps ranting and raving about it. It starts off a high-pitched wail [like Tony Soprano’s mother when she got outraged] that you can push aside temporarily. You can sort of fight it, and beat it down with willpower because you’ve been there before and you still pulled through. Then it changes. The shrieking to stop becomes more of a seductive whisper. “But you’re perfect just the way you are,” it might say, “You don't need to be doing this. I’ll give you a rich, gooey, calorie-free brownie spoon-fed to you by Bernie Eisel/Adam Hansen/[insert favorite hot cyclist du jour here] if you just….....stop….”

It sounds so easy, because by minute 17:00, motivation has abandoned you faster than Nike dropped Lance. People might tell you that under the laws of physics, anything in motion likes to stay that way. Indulge in a 20 minute self-flagellation on the bike and you'll realize that those people are actually wrong. There is nothing easier than stopping the pedals when you are in that dark, special place. There's actually nothing you'll want more. [And don't get me started on how absurd the principle of relativity seems when you're counting down seconds in a TT.]
When shit my heartrate hits the fan, I’ve tried different tactics, like telling myself I liked the burn – “I AM TOTALLY ENJOYING THIS!" – that the pain felt good. This can work on long climbs done at a “let’s just get over this without killing ourselves” kind of pace, and partners into BDSM. It’s harder to do when ceasing the extremely painful activity in question is entirely within your control.
It is, however, one of life's wonderful mysteries that you don't consciously go into the red [unless we're talking about debt]. It doesn't even happen in degrees, really. You hurt, near an edge, then all of a sudden you're at a place where conscious thought becomes detrimental to survival. I guess you can say it gets worse, but you can really only tell in hindsight.
When my brain flickered back on a few seconds after the 20 minute mark, I felt like absolute shit. The pressure that had been pooling at my right temple drained, leaving behind a weird, woozy throbbing. I couldn't remember a thing that happened in the last two minutes of that TT.

People have an obnoxious way of telling me that nothing easy is worth doing. Usually this happens when life has essentially stomped on my throat, when the primary objective in life becomes curling up in a ball while eating brownies and Googling pictures of Bernie Eisel and/or Adam Hansen, not hearing that this is the way life is/more suffering is required but it will all, probably, be worth it in the end. I always temporarily hate those people out of a selfish need to wallow in my self-pity. Like they couldn't give me a second to weep/stuff my face/fantasize about hot pros before powerslamming me with their advice, which is also conveniently structured for a follow-up "I told you so." It's an even harder pill to swallow because it requires faith. Sometimes in the economy, but mostly in myself; and that can be scary. It is much easier - and safer - to believe what others have told me is true: that my legs will always be slow, and that I deserve to be on the receiving end of phrases like, "well, my friends and I usually do that ride faster."
It makes for a lot of bitter, hoarded rage. The weirdly demotivating thing is that no amount of that anger could get me past the 17 minute mark. With 180 seconds left to go, there's no room for even a sliver of doubt; it's you vs. you, and at that point you just have to choose.
Can you do it, or not?
I dug in, hung on, and held some faith in me.
It totally made my week.