On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 4/1/2011
Building Character
As I write this near the end of March, 2011, we are looking forward to better weather in April. No surprise there: April is supposed to be nicer than March and May should be better than April. But right now, in late March, I am feeling especially eager to get on to the warmer, drier days because this past month of March has had an above-average ration of rainy days, and those rainy days have fallen inconveniently across the paths of several big rides.
Our club ride calendar states that “rain cancels all rides unless otherwise noted.” March 19 gave us a good example of the various ways that could be interpreted. It was raining in the morning and it rained all day and on into the night. My birthday ride, the 18th annual Apple Cider Century, was cancelled. But the club’s 300-K brevet, using many of the same roads the ACC would have used, went on, with 30 randonneurs enduring 186 miles of cold rain and slashing wind on their way to checking that qualifier off on their lead-up to Paris-Brest-Paris, later this year. Randonneurs are a plucky, gritty bunch. They will layer on the wool jerseys and rain slickers and booties and all sorts of foul-weather fashion crimes in order to slog along through hell, high water, and a sampler pack of suffering. Recall that the last PBP, four years ago, was run under rainy skies for almost all of its 750-plus miles. So what's a mere 186 miles of rain for these folks? A trifle. A mere bagatelle!
The previous weekend, we had another century on our club list: a very daunting (hilly) trek over into Napa Valley and back. The forecast called for an 80% chance of rain, which says to me: you are going to get wet. But a dozen or so hardcore riders showed up anyway, all of them acting as codependents for one another at the start: egging each other on with creative spin-doctoring about that 80% rain prediction. They almost got away with it: they did the first 70 miles dry, but the last 30 miles it poured. That may not seem like much, but those 30 miles included two long climbs--one of them very steep--and two long, technical descents, all of which made the wet miles especially painful. (That ride was on a Sunday. I had looked at that forecast and done a preemptive strike on Saturday, improvising a very pleasant solo century on what turned out to be the last day of decent weather we saw in these parts for a couple of weeks.)
After the folks on that ride had dried out and warmed up, they worked up a busy thread on the club's chat list about the miserable ride…or the nice ride with the miserable finish. Feeling a bit smug about my comfortable century on the previous day, I was teasing the folks who'd gone off into the face of that dire forecast and paid the price for it. I asked the rhetorical question: is there anyone, anywhere as stupidly delusional as a hardcore cyclist when it comes to wishful thinking about bad weather? I asked this as someone who has been as bad as anybody about flying in the face of funky forecasts. I've suckered myself into heading out on dodgy days way, way too often; seeing a little patch of blue sky peeking out from a mass of heavy, wet clouds, and fastening on the one hopeful sign…that one patch of blue…while any sensible person would have seen the towering, glowering cloud banks and stayed home.
But the leader of that Napa Valley ride took exception to my “stupidly delusional” barb. She wasn't really offended, replying in a bantering tone, but she did stick up for folks who do “epic” rides. (“Epic” in this case meaning, as the dictionary has it: “heroic or grand in scale or character.”) And, working that same theme, she asserted that riding in the rain was a “character-building” activity.
When I saw that phrase “character-building,” it struck a special chord for me. It's a little phrase I have employed on several occasions to describe tough spots on bike rides. A character-building headwind, for instance. But on this occasion, seeing someone else use the phrase, it brought me up short. For some reason, it caused me to stop and consider the larger implications of such a notion: that we who do long or challenging or “epic” bike rides, or ones made miserable by adversity--such as ugly weather--are somehow to be exalted for having perfected our character through our suffering; for having engaged in feats that are deemed to be heroic.
What I'm thinking about here is the premise of sport being an imitation and substitute for real life. Now that most of us no longer toil at hard manual labor to make ends meet and no longer put ourselves at risk on a daily basis, sports have become a kind of substitute or metaphorical life-struggle for many of us. Our ancestors, just a few generations back, would have scratched their heads in bafflement at the sight of so many people burning so many calories and putting themselves in the way of so much travail, all in service to some self-imposed struggle called sport. But we do it, and, most of the time, we love it. We revel in it. And even if we suffer for it, we feel the pain is part of the package: that in battling through all the challenges, we are ennobling ourselves…making ourselves stronger, fitter, braver, better. We are not only keeping ourselves from turning into blimpy couch potatoes, we are building character. We are being somehow heroic.
And as our love affair with sport has grown, we have built up around it a richly textured narrative of heroic mythology. We honor the athlete who triumphs over others, but especially who triumphs over the challenges themselves, over all the many forms of adversity we find in our paths. Or that we put in our own paths intentionally: the bigger the mountain, the better! When all the mountains have been climbed, we figure out a way to make the old ascents harder. We do them without oxygen, or we do them in the winter, or we try a route up another face that was formerly thought to be impossible. We do marathons, and when they seem too tame, we invent ultra-marathons. We invent triathlons. Remember when the first Ironman seemed like the ultimate pushing of the envelope? Now we have ultra-triathlons. And so on…
All the while, we are singing the praises of those who tackle these challenges: the celebrity of the sports champion as a sort of paragon of human perfection…the superman…the Triumph of Will. And, as a sort of dark counterpoint to these hymns of praise, we avert our eyes from those who fail: the losers and, worse yet, the quitters.
In my own way, I have contributed more than a little to this mythology of hardcore sports as a metaphor for life. I've written several columns in this space on the subject, in general honoring those who get over the top in the hard events. I was, for many years, the director of and head cheerleader for one of the hardest bike rides around. You'll still find me out there every year, sending the riders off in the morning and greeting them as they roll across the finish line in the evening. I have created the graphics and the maps for any number of monster bike events, from the Terrible Two to the Knoxville Double to the Death Valley Double to the Furnace Creek 508. I am an enabler for hardball bikers.
So far be it from me to shove a stick in the spokes of anyone's fancy wheelset, but just now I am experiencing a bit of a reality check about it all. I am wondering if all the sports-hero mythology is everything it's cracked up to be; if battling through all that adversity is such a “character-building” activity.
Hold this thought: all sporting challenges are self-imposed. They are voluntary recreations. Games. Leisure-time entertainment for ourselves. Nothing of any real consequence hinges on whether we finish a race or climb a mountain. Or if it does--as, for instance, if we will die if we don't get off the face of K2 before the next storm arrives--it is only because we chose to put ourselves in the way of that difficulty. Nobody forced us to be there. Nobody forces someone to stand by the side of the road, puking their guts out, at mile 190 of a 200-mile ride. People do these things because, through some tortured logic, they decide the prize is worth the price.
Just for the moment, I am wondering if this sort of behavior is really all that praiseworthy. I've done enough of it myself to appreciate how satisfying and uplifting it can be to push yourself to your limits and to find out what you're capable of doing; to stare into your own, personal abyss and to get past that. But I have also had those bad days when I couldn't get past the adversity, where my mental or physical resources ran out and I had to pack it in. Many people would say you should carry on at that point: get back on the bike or back on your feet and keep pushing, past the adversity and debility, all the way to the finish, no matter how much it breaks our bodies or bakes our brains. In theory, we all feel like we ought to do that. We all come at these events with the myth of triumph over adversity as our guiding, motivating vision. But in the gritty reality of the moment, it may not be possible or at least not prudent. And really, in that moment of deepest struggle, sometimes it may take more character to abandon the effort than it does to continue; it may take more courage to face up to your failings honestly and accept them; to humbly acknowledge your own limitations.
Aside from having the honesty to know when you're cooked and having the courage to act responsibly on that knowledge, there are other sorts of character-building moments in sports that, to my way of thinking, are finer than the obsessive-compulsive push to the finish. I have known cyclists who have given up their own chance at a good finish in a big event to stop and help another rider in trouble. Maybe it's just a little thing: slowing down from the pace you know you could be doing and finishing your event an hour later, just so you could slowly pace in another rider who was running on vapors and needed a little moral support. Or it could be more serious. I know of one cyclist who probably saved another one's life by stopping to give first aid and stay with the injured rider until the ambulance arrived. We read about cases like this sometimes. Examples of sportsmanship and decency that are uplifting and maybe even tear-jerking. We do honor these people and these precious moments when they are called to our attention. But most such examples of selflessness and kindness go unreported and unremarked. The doer of the good deed takes a DNF or is recorded with a time much slower than he might have done, and that's all that history will tell us about what went on out there. To me, those are moments of true heroism and character.
And then, back to the thought that all sports are essentially our own whimsical, fabricated amusements. Yes, it may be admirable to do well in this or that sporting challenge, and the more challenging, the better. But is it really all that heroic? Is such a triumph really a mark of superior character? Are the artificial constructs of some sporting challenge really an authentic parallel for the challenges of real life? If you want some real character-building moments, how about the workers in the nuclear plant in Japan, working day after day near the leaking reactors, knowing they are quite probably in the process of dying right there, as they work, but sticking with it so that the radiation may be contained. If you want heroism, try the protesters in the streets of Libya and Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, knowing they might be shot dead for having the nerve to express the desire to be rid of their tinpot tyrants. If you want courage, look to the Afghani women standing up to the Taliban. If you want character building, consider the single mother, working two jobs and saving every penny and still finding the time to help her kids with their homework, so that they might have a better shot at life than she had.
On a personal note, consider this: my father-in-law walked with Martin Luther King in the famous march from Selma, Alabama in 1965. I am so proud of him for that. I hope my children are ten times as proud of what their kind, gentle grandfather did back then than they are about any double century I ever did, no matter how much adversity I had to overcome to finish it. Nothing, nothing in the world of sports can match up to that kind of quiet courage and strength.
I'm adding one photo to this column. It shows me at the end of my first Terrible Two, being congratulated by my wife, with my knucklehead pal Tony Gomez--who finished with me--nearby. I am happy, but I am also exhausted. I look a little gaunt and hollow-eyed. One of my friends, on seeing this photo, said, “Bill, does the term ‘Bataan Death March’ mean anything to you?” Now, I know my friend, and I know he was just making a joke, based on the way I looked. But I want to take the question at face value to illustrate this point. For most of that long ride, I was dancing along in great shape, hardly suffering at all. Over the last three hours, I was increasingly fatigued and frazzled. Anyone who has done the Terrible Two can appreciate that. But all in all, those few hours of modest suffering were not that big a deal. Clearly, it is a very challenging bike ride, and it took its toll on me, as the photo shows. It has a fearsome reputation, and not all that many people can finish it or even choose to try and finish it. I'm proud to have done so a few times. And yes, I can say that, every time I did it, it was very much a character-building experience. But do those three or so hours of modest suffering compare to the Bataan Death March? Please… It's embarrassing to even mention the two ordeals in the same sentence.
So okay…go ahead and find your so-called character-building sports challenges out there: go ahead and ride in the rain all day and night; go ahead and do your doubles and your brevets; chug along around the clock at Furnace Creek until you start hallucinating dinosaurs in the road outside Amboy; climb the mountain and let frostbite nibble off your toes and your nose… We will all salute you for it. But don't get too caught up in the "heroic" hoopla of the moment: don't imagine it's any substitute for real life.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net