I Didn't Race My Bike So I'm Just Gonna
Talk Crazy For A While
"Hey kid on the Razor Scooter, tell your Mom to buy you a helmet, and while you've got her attention, tell her to stop buying you Twinkies".
Greatest act of self preservation on my ride Saturday evening:
Not yelling at the guy who cut me off with a flying right turn on red in the clapped out Chrysler Lebaron because he looked like Charlie Manson and had a large German Shepherd in the passenger seat.
I'm working on a screenplay for horror movie called "The Booth" (not to be confused with "Phone Booth" the crappy movie with Colin Farrell, where he's trapped in a...phone booth, pinned down by an extortionist sniper). It's about a bike mechanic trapped at the service counter of a busy bike shop on a sunny Saturday. He has to listen to "The Flat Story" time after time until he's ready to jam a pair of Ksyrium spokes in his ears in hopes that he will forget everything he's ever heard. Oh, you don't know The Flat Story? It goes something like this:
"OK, so we pulled this bike out of the garage, we haven't ridden it in years, we tried to pump it up but there might be something wrong with the pump...or we don't know how to use those weird French nozzles...or the wheel is defective...or...I don't know, maybe you can patch it or something or...do you think we need to replace the tire? What do you do plug it? Is is because we lost the cap that holds the air in?".
I'm at work so I can't respond like I would to a child asking me such questions,
"Your tire went flat because you are a bad person and God hates you".
And that's not really the end of the story either. If you allow them to the teller will carry on until it dwarfs the Icelandic Sagas, even though there are ten people in line behind them, it is imperative that you walk away at some point to go fix their flat.
I know that most normal people's idea of horror involves Nazi Zombies or Nazi Werewolves (which would win in a fight anyway?) but for a misanthropic bike mechanic, this is true horror. The Booth. Coming to..,well, a theater nowhere near you, this...never.
Now for the note to self portion of the post, the part where I talk about my "training" so that I can look back next season and see what I did right or wrong. Friday I recovered, or tried to. Had a tough time getting the legs back under me after Winding trails. Don't know if it was the stupid gear or the heat or a little from column A, a little from Column B. Whatever it was, it left me pretty tapped. I wasn't able to effectively train until Saturday and Sunday.
Saturday I did the Pyramids: 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1 minute intervals. Roughly. No way to really do these accurately while riding to work the total-non-crap-way through Weston. I did more on the way home, really going more "organic" with the intervals. "Well I know I'm going to hit that stop light or that cross street so I'll start this one a little late...or a little earlier". Seemed to work better. Been spending so much time on the Superfly SS mashing the big gears that when I'm doing proper douche bag intervals I'm doing them super-high-cadence and trying to breath hard. Hopefully the lungs will catch up with the legs sometime soon and we'll put together a couple good races when it counts.
This AM (Sunday) I did the Joe Friel hill cruise intervals up on the water tower along route 2 in Arlington. The access road, not Eastern Ave. or one of the undulating, stop sign broken pitches through the neighborhoods. I start it at the manhole cover by the merge sign in my 39 X 19, switch to the 39 X 21 when the pitch changes, switch down to the 17 across the false flat up the Park Ave., hitting Park at about 4 minutes in, then continuing up to the tower for about a five minute interval. I do them until my times start to increase, this time I got six. With a ten pound pack. I pack light these days but I've developed a habit of dumping change from my huge change collection into my pack in case the service registers run out of it during a busy day at IBC. In The Booth no one can hear you scream...because the sound will be drowned out by the wailing of children and the incessant ringing of bike bells.
This post was brought to you in part (the fuzzy part) by Speakeasy Ales & Lagers.
Change is Good. And Heavy.
4 comments:
I thought my tire went flat because I touch myself at night, so finding out it was actually just God doing it is kind of a relief.
I would have to say that a Nazi Werewolf would definitely win out over a Nazi Zombie. With equally wicked ideologies, the agile movement and jagged teeth of the werewolf would make quick work of a partially decomposed, lumbering zombie. A Hare Krishna werewolf, on the other hand. . .
Here is a thought: on a busy Saturday, wouldn't it be cost-effective to just give a pile of tubes to the delinquents you give riding lessons to, and set them up with a booth out in the parking lot? Have a "greeter" head the Magna and Varsity toting suburbanites off at the pass. Sort of pre-screening for the bike shop. Should any of the PITA's infiltrate the "real" inner shop, thwart them with a "priority service line" sort of like first-class on an airline. Give out cards to people who actually buy new bikes and spend money at the shop, allowing them to bypass the f-ups and freeloaders.
Or is fixing flats on garage dinosaur bikes lucrative enough to make it worth torturing you in the booth all day?
"Your tire went flat because you are a bad person and God hates you".
Can I use that as the title of a blog post? I'll give you credit of course.
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