Shadian Shift

Call me Dubstoevsky. 

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 Team Shad has withdrawn from the Rasputitsa.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.

Morale like a Glass of Sour Milk

Harsh. Windy. Snow. March like a wounded animal, a chiseling weasel. Nothing so far to encourage Dubstoevsky. Now is the time of Russian tragedy and farce. A single measly ride in March, and that a timid rambler on the Crux Elite, touring through the neighborhoods like an urban tourist.

Not exactly honing Dubstoevsky's non-conditioning. 

Once, the season looked promising. A half dozen rides in January, nearly the same in February. Not a lot of miles but enough to keep a sense of the edge, the fitness edge, the line that, when you slip over it, you know you're in a place of sloth and lard.

I rolled over that line, mutton leg in hand, some weeks ago. 

Scenes from what amounts to "training for the Rasputitsa." It feels dishonest even writing that sentence.

Harvard St, Woo City, March 19, 2017

Slow Above

Tagged

Bancroft Tower, March 19, 2017

Dub Fat in the Cold

A set back for Team Shad in the lead-up to the Rasputitsa. 

Dubstoevsky, unable to train for various reasons - a trip to Maui, a gout-ridden toe, general weird un-diagnosable body pain, and bitter, Siberia-like weather - has descended into ennui, gluttony, and sloth. This morning he punched the scale at 7.5 lbs above riding weight. Ugly business.

It would be nice to think that last night was the nadir.

Disposing of the evidence

But nothing guarantees that to be so. Each day, each night brings the possibility of reaching one's lowest point. That's called looking on the bright side of gloom. 

DS Mawgs is clearly irritated. 

Last night, after confessing to him the finer points of "Mexican Night" at Chez Dub - heaps of spice-rubbed butter-fried chicken thighs, a small tub of pinto beans, cold Wormtown Be Hoppy IPAs and a few honorary tequila shots (just to "keep it real") - Mawgs fired off this text:

Strength of the bull

"Slag Dub, 157.5 lbs? How are you gonna' ride the Rasputitsa, tubby?
You're the pork butt of jokes in the peloton. Har har, Dub's reaching
into his suitcase of snacks. Again. Damn it, man, show some kind of
impulse control! And NO, you're not serving meat pies tonight!!"

Duly chastened, Dubstoevsky promptly rushed out to an organic food emporium and spent money like the Sultan of Brunei, picking up such staples as German doppelbock beer, Belgian ale, three six packs of local hyper-fresh IPA from Fort Hill Brewery, a rasher of Black Forest bacon, a quartet of chorizo logs, and a few pounds of bull shin bones for braising. "Strength of the bull" he thought.

There's nothing to be done about it now. Restraint is an English word not yet clearly understood by Dubstoevsky, though he's lived in America all his life.  The bone chilling cold is not helping the cause.

DS Mawgs wisely observed that "weather conditions have rendered your fork uncontrollable." This is true.

There is something about single digit temperatures (on the Fahrenheit scale) that begs for braised meat. Haunches, shanks, ribs, an oleaginous sheen of happiness a-shimmering atop the braising broth. The warmth of simmered bones! And the gallant bitter sluice of finely-crafted IPA. This is what amounts to training camp. 

Maui to Now

From this.

Northwest Maui, February 6, 2017

To this.

Holden Reservoir, February 25, 2017

If it can be said that the "season" has started for me, it's because from January 30 to February 20 I was off the bike. In fact, I spent ten days of that time on Maui and despite turbulent, unpredictable weather there, managed to immerse myself in, and give myself over to, the Pacific Ocean several times, joyously so. 

So, because I rode pretty much continuously right up to the end of January and then didn't ride for the next three weeks, and because for some of that time I was literally far far away, and finally because I was discernibly off form on the first couple rides after the lay off, it seems to me that a seasonal swing has occurred, that I am not on ride #100 and something of the season but am on ride #12 of the new year, 2017. 

And a new year for Team Shad means, of course, the Rasputitsa, now just six weeks or so away. 

My immediate focus is building stamina and maintaining power over longer and longer rides. The Rasp is 45 or so miles, not a threatening distance on the face of it, but when you throw in the crazy elevations and the nasty conditions, you have a very difficult day in the saddle. I'm aiming to be fit enough to match the demands of the course and will rely on meditation, savvy, pacing, and Dubstoevskian stubbornness. 

Maui, February 6, 2017