On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 7/1/2022
Life in the Slow Lane
In between my spring and summer columns devoted to professional racers going really fast, I am this month squeezing in something different…pretty much the opposite of going really fast. This is, I suppose, yet another installment in the saga of my descent from kick-ass hammerhead to slow-poke tourist.
But that makes it sound sort of depressing. It’s not, really, at least not once you get past whatever might be discouraging about simply getting older. It comes to all of us eventually, that slippery slope. Dylan Thomas implores us:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Can’t argue with that! And yet at some point it almost becomes unseemly and embarrassing and, functionally, futile to make a stink about aging. Rather than raging against it, my approach is to be one of those elders who is said to be aging gracefully instead of raging furiously. At least I hope it comes across that way.
As for how the years affect my cycling, I am simply slower and not as strong and a little less coordinated. (I used to be able to ride no-hands for long stretches, eating a snack or taking off a vest or just to stretch my back. Now? It’s getting to be about as dodgy and challenging as it was when I was learning to let go of the handlebars as a kid.) So I’m slower moving the bike up the road and especially up the hill. And slower downhill too: the coordination, plus the memories of too many past crashes and how much they hurt and how much longer they take to heal now.
Because of all that, I can’t hang with the gang I used to ride with. But the other people I know who ride more at my present tempo don’t want to log the miles I like to do. So for more and more rides every year I ride alone. This is not new. I can review columns in this space from over 15 years ago where I said I was riding alone more and more. It may be a slippery slope but it’s a long, gradual one (I guess until it slopes off more steeply…not quite there yet). Riding alone eliminates the challenges of the group: the need to keep up or get ahead. Now, without other riders to egg me on and keep me on the boil, the prime directive becomes not inflicting pain on myself. So I lose that cutting edge. That’s not really new.
Here’s what has changed lately. For most of those years, I was chastising myself for losing that edge. Guilt-tripping myself. I was still raging, still working hard to stay as fit as I could manage. But I have to work twice as hard to stay fit at my age and—at the same time, lately anyway—I’m only half as motivated to make the effort. One way or another, I’ve mostly ceased to care. Waved the white flag. Stopped raging.
Instead, I am riding with other goals and priorities. It’s probably even wrong to call them goals now. It’s just living my life…being comfortable in my own skin. Going out for a ride and enjoying the scenery along the way has always been a part of why I ride. The fitness and speed kind of just happened while the beautiful world was rolling by, keeping me entertained. What’s different now is that I don’t just glance at the pretty world as I hammer by; now I slow down or even stop to take it in. If bikes had bumpers, I’d have a bumper sticker that says, “I brake for beauty.”
What inspired this column was noticing that now I not only slow down to look at interesting sights along a ride, I will actually brake and make a U-turn to go back and check something out more closely. Put a foot down for five minutes to take it in. Compare that with something I wrote in this space way back in the ‘90s, where I described being obsessed with going fast, faster and fastest to the point of begrudging even the tiniest slow-down to look at the scenery. I have drifted, gradually, slowly, so far from that obsession about speed that I hardly recognize the current me as the same person who used to hammer so intensely. Who the hell was that guy?
That said, let me just add one more thought. Last Saturday I rode up into the Sonoma County wine country for what I expected would be yet another of my many solo rides through this lovely countryside. What I hadn’t expected was that my route and that of the Giro Bello Century were the same for almost 30 miles, with me in the midst of the many riders doing the event. So instead of cruising along lazily, looking at vineyards and woods and old barns, I was doing something approximately like pack riding. Not quite that. The crowds were not quite that thick. But there were always riders ahead and behind and alongside. And in that mass of bodies, I was amused to discover that those old habits and impulses die hard. Some long-neglected fast-faster-fastest gene kicked in for me and I suddenly was having fun getting on a fast wheel, passing slower folks, and just generally doing my sorry-assed impression of a hammerhead. And for whatever it’s worth, I can report that I was passing far more riders than were passing me. Which segment of the Giro Bello pool I was riding with, I have no idea. They looked like a sampling of average riders. And in that crowd I was holding my own.
So most of the time these days I enjoy life in the slow lane. I still get in the miles and I still have fun. But contrary to my main premise here, my little visit to the Giro Bello reminds me that my inner hammer is still in there, still happy to get out in the fast lane now and then, if only for 25 miles.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net