For five years I have labored like a Welsh shepherd for Team Shad. Rain, snow, blazing sun, rocky tarmac, long tortuous ascents in the wake of the Virginian's unwashed racing kit. I have ridden with teammates, ridden with the Badger, and I have ridden solo along little-traveled back roads past dilapidated houses that bring to mind lurid crimes from the 1940s.
I have not complained. I have sluiced the gruel of disciplined cycling like a camel at a palm nut oasis, snout deep in the sloppy trough.
Not for glory, not for prizes and adulation, not for the sponsors with their gold pens and advertising campaigns have I ridden; not for the right to wear the lapel pin of a secret society nor to receive the teddy bear of indifference from a hairy-armed podium wench have I labored hour after hour in the saddle. Not for the worthless contract I signed with the rug merchants and caviar hucksters from Odessa and Baku have I dedicated myself to churning the cranks week in and week out, season after season.
No, I have mounted the holy bicycle again and again like a Tibetan lama in Himalayan meditation, have supplanted the zabuton with a racing saddle, have burned the magic incense and faithfully waved the smoldering brass censer, all with singularity of purpose: to mine the ore of self-awareness and extract the diamond shards of essential wisdom.
Here's the point. Team Shad has withdrawn from the Rasputitsa. In fact, the entire season is now a question mark. While Dubstoevsky struggles with the existential angst of Life itself, the Virginian erodes the hillsides of western Mass with his relentless pedaling. I Ward has disappeared into Never Ever Land. We have become our own planets spiraling away from the gravitational force that heretofore cohered our imaginary peloton.
Team Shad was always an amalgamation of hubris, intemperance, hi-jinx, and Dada. With the world at large erupting into madness, with the armies of Gog & Magog stomping around the planet, the question of what becomes of the team seems relatively unimportant. We are but shad coursing up a vast river toward uncertain spawning grounds and must now navigate the watery chaos individually.
I admit it, I am relieved to bag the Rasputitsa. Despite having six solid rides in each January and February, March came along and dealt a weather blow to my training regimen and only now does the wretched spate of wintery bluster seem to finally have broken; only now does there seem any likelihood of dependably conducive training conditions persisting. I managed my first legitimate ride in weeks just a few days ago. I refuse to go to East Burke just to suffer.
But all that no longer matters. What's done is done. The only target on the calendar now is the D2R2, a distant four and a half months in the future.
Adopting a new Zen attitude toward The Ride and having cast off the shackles of Team Shad's Azerbaijani taskmasters, I, Dubstoevsky, am now free to determine my own course of action, train at my own pace.
I am now free to journey into my own cycling future.
I can don a hair shirt racing jersey emblazoned with a cycling Shaolin warrior shad and cycle down the road of no expectations.
I can huff the meditation and chant a silly litany in poetic cadence.
There once was a shad on a bike,
a pedaling piscine tyke
who got a bit radical
and took a sabbatical
to go off and do as he liked.
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