On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 7/1/2000
Are you an athlete?
A couple of months ago, I wrote a column entitled "The dubious importance of being fast." It had to do with how we see ourselves as cyclists, and whether we ought to feel any stigma of inferiority or suffer the pangs of an implicit caste system if we're not as fast as other riders. (The simple answer is: NO!) Judging by the positive e-mail I received from all over the country, this column really struck a nerve with a lot of people who aren't racer-fast, or aren't as fast as they used to be, or who simply have never worried whether they're fast or not.
Now I'd like to revisit the subject of how we see ourselves as cyclists and look at it from another angle...one suggested to me by a discussion on a touring chat list. A while back, someone posed a question to the list: "Do you consider yourself an athlete?"
Bear in mind the context: the question was directed at a group interested in fully-loaded touring, one of the least racy, most uncompetitive branches of the cycling tree. In spite of the ostensibly laid-back image of touring, there was a complete lack of consensus in the replies. The responses covered the whole spectrum, from "Absolutely!" to "No way!," with all sorts of lines of reasoning being spooled out to defend positions.
I found it an intriguing question, and I guess the first place I started looking for an answer was the dictionary definition of "athlete." An athlete, according to Webster, is "a person trained in exercises, games, or contests requiring physical strength, skill, stamina, speed, etc.." I doubt very many people would disagree that this is a good description of participants in real bike racing...the Tour de France, for example. (These days, when mainstream newscasters are doing their little segments on Lance Armstrong's storybook career, they all read copy which describes the Tour de France as, "arguably the toughest sporting event in the world" or something like that. And yet it hasn't always been this way: when Sports Illustrated named Greg Lemond Sportman of the Year 
in 1989-after he won his second Tour and the World Championship-some conventional sports writers jeered, saying in effect, "Hell, anyone can ride a bike!" Yeah, and anyone can throw a football, but that doesn't make us all Joe Montanas.)
Anyway, most would agree about Tour de France participants being athletes. But if that represents the ultimate pinnacle of cycling athleticism, how far down the big biking mountain does one descend before all aura of athletic endeavor is lost? Does a cycling event have to have a finish line and a winner to be an athletic endeavor? Most of us are trained--or at least self-taught--in exercises requiring physical strength, skill, stamina, and speed, as the definition proposes. All that is missing, for most recreational riders, is the aspect of cyling as game or contest, and even there, many of us delight in scrapping for a hilltop with our pals or sprinting for a city limit sign...just for the sheer, bloody hell of it...just for the simple, stupid fun of it. Does that make us athletes? In my opinion, yes it does.
I consider myself a fairly average, middle-aged cyclist. At this point in my life, I ride 6000-7000 miles a year. My favorite kind of riding is touring...cruising along and looking at the scenery. I don't race. But I do sometimes enter centuries and double centuries that feel a bit like races: they have mass starts and time keepers, and if you pass someone on the road, you know it's a pass for position. Although I tend to think of myself as a non-competitive person, in a few of those events--in particular the ones where I have done well--I can tell you in detail where I placed, who I passed, and pretty much anything else to do with the results of the "contest." I don't do this too often, but enough to have to admit to myself that that part of my nature is still alive and well.
I ride a lot with the same group of friends. Several of them are stronger (faster) than I am, and one in particular is much stronger. He will ride with me when we're all being social, and if he backs off a little and I pick it up a little, we can even look like we're hammering together. But in big events, he takes off like a scalded cat, and I never see him again until the finish, if he hasn't already gone home by the time I get there. Now, this friend of mine also trains with the local racing club--quite a bit faster than our sociable gang--and sometimes their rides will include some very fast riders: pros from the Saturn and Mercury teams for instance, as well as some very accomplished Masters racers with national and world championship titles in their resumés. My riding companion can hang with this group about as well as I can hang with him: as long as they're not going full-tilt, he's okay, but if the hills get steep or the pace gets much above 30-mph, he's off the back.
The faster riders on these race club training rides are about on a par with Triple-A baseball: they're one notch down from the the big leagues of the Tour de France and other top flight events in Europe. (Actually, some of them have competed at that level, but most are not quite there. At any rate, their training rides--the ones on which my friend is being dropped--are not being run at Tour intensity.) Above them, you have the Euro-pros, competing in the Tour, and above them--above the domestiques and lieutenants--you have the really elite handful of stars who actually have a chance at winning a Tour or other major event.From where I sit, the Tour de France is as lofty and distant as Everest. What they do is so far beyond me, I almost cannot comprehend the levels of "strength, skill, stamina, and speed" required to stay in the race, let alone win. And yet, through this tenuous chain--from my faster friend to the racers' training rides to US pros to European pros--I can feel a link to those titans of the sport, and I know that a small sliver of what animates their contests also animates my bicycle adventures. I also know there are riders in my club who are a bit slower than I am and who consider me "fast," but whose own cycling souls can also feel the pull of that same chain, extending through their link to me and all the way up the line to the yellow jersey.
But what about the days when I'm not hammering? When my chief motivation in riding is enjoying the wildflowers and waterfalls of this world? What about bike miles spent commuting or running errands? What about strapping 60 pounds of gear on the bike and trundling off on a three-month trek across the country? What about taking your kids on a bike ride down the local nature trail?
In the end, it probably comes down to how we see ourselves...how we spin-doctor our self-images. If you shy away in horror from any taint of competition in your riding (and in your life), and never, ever ride fast just because you can, and because it feels so good, then perhaps you can honestly say you're not an athlete, at least as Webster defines the word. If you do enjoy going fast now and then; if you do sometimes play around with a hill prime or a city limit sign; if you refer to your weekday rides as "training rides," then you are at least some sort of athlete, regardless of whether you ever enter an official race or contest.
For me, being an athlete does not imply the bull-necked, macho world of the cliche jock. Rather, it means rejoicing in having a healthy, reasonably finely-tuned body that can do things the average couch potato's body can't. (That doesn't make me a better person than the couch potato. It just makes me glad to be me rather than him.) If we ride to become fit, then we become fit to ride...to ride to the top of a long, steep hill, and then to look out over the beautiful world that hilltop offers us, and to be proud we got there under our own power. For me, that is the purest form of athleticism. And frankly, it strikes me that almost anyone who puts a foot on a bike pedal--no matter what their purpose in doing so--is imbued with at least a little of that joyful athletic spirit.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net