The ignominious finale; the beautiful peloton

So, after hanging on by fingernails for stages 3, 4, and 5, at last for stage six the fingernails were too brittle for strength, the thread was severed, the last straw was cast upon my back.

Stage six, the Awbrey Circuit course, was 5 loops of a 27km (135km total) with several short but torturous climbs to shatter the peloton. For my part, having plucked, in discordant tones, the string of fate in stages 3,4 and 5, Atropos was ruthless at last and severed her thread to watch my ignominious ejection from the rear of the peloton at about kilometer 24. Being the final stage, beginning at 1:00 pm and with a long drive home looming and a work day to follow, this was not to be a stage in which I would elect to ride around for four more loops on my own simply to finish the race.

The first half of the course was largely either flat or descending; the second half being where all the nasty climbs occured. On this second half, just after closing gaps that rent themselves open on the first long climb, I could only make one last ditch effort for the sprint over the short steep one that followed. And when Leipheimer and the angry teams that followed pounded the roads with their unrelenting hammers, it was up the very next rise when I was severed from contact, and that was the end of my Cascade Classic.

All in all, however, I am content with my race over five days and six stages. There is little I would change, but if I could have anything back at all, it would be to have lasted longer in the criterium, because it was truly the crash that marred my race. It is a notoriously difficult criterium, and oddly it feels rather like I’m better at that sort of effort (short bursts of near maximal effort interspersed by periods of recovery) than the hard sustained time-trial type efforts - which have traditionally been better for me.

In summary, I had a fantastic experience. I enjoyed my stay with my hosts Jason and Theresa, the logistics of the racing and the atmosphere of 150 riders, and their support crews; the commissaires, the police escorts and the rolling road enclosures, the suffering in the peloton and the satisfaction of the first day, and all the preparations for the days that followed.

As much as anything, however, and perhaps more greatly so, I revelled in the sight of the amorphous and twisting formations of the peloton, which, from certain vantage points, was eminently visible. For me there are few sights as beautiful as the organic bicycle peloton. And when you can both see it and be among it, to know that you are both observer and participant - that is as awe-inspiring for me as the stars in the night, the mountains in the distance, the breadth of the ocean, and the enigma of human genius and consciousness.

It is not merely a metaphor to say that the peloton is a unitary organic entity: there are physical constraints of collective energy dissipation by which the riders, when coupled globally, give rise to a collective dynamic that exhibits true features of complex and organic processes. How amazing it is to be a part of those processes; and then how astounding also to realize how much, in our daily lives, we are all a part of a vastly more complex peloton. How the bike race distills to its essence and wonderful simplicity the massive and beautiful collective dynamic we know as life!

Filed under Uncategorized |