Bike Tribes

by Mike Magnuson

  Now, if you were to ask a noncyclist at the mall for an opinion on the subject of a ride named Mountains of Misery, that person would say: “Nuts.” But the truth is, most challenge centuries have waiting lists just to gain entry. It might be easier to obtain season tickets to the Green Bay Packers’ home games at Lambeau Field than it is to get a bib number for the Death Ride.

  Some of the participants in these events consider them to be a race, which isn’t surprising, since the riders receive an elapsed time and results are posted in order of finish. But for racers in official racing categories, something like a challenge century is considered to be the equivalent of a regular recreational ride.

  But if you ride 200 miles in 1 day, with 20,000 feet of climbing, does it matter if it’s a race or not? Hell no. It only matters that 14 hours later, you cross the finish line with your hands on the bar and your head held high.

  the Male Pro

  Pencil-thin arms.

  Confident, smart-ass, completely relaxed expression.

  Small jersey hanging loosely like an XXL T-shirt.

  ROADIES

  He is moderately famous, at least within the world of moderately famous bicycle racers, and we see him riding his bicycle in mufti—

  not in his team uniform—which is proof he’s moderately famous, because only a moderately famous bicycle racer can afford to buy, at full cost, cycling clothing not supplied by his team. While he’s pedaling down the road, however, you can’t miss that this is a person who not only rides the bike well but seems to belong on a bicycle. His pedal strokes are amazing perfect circles, his cheekbones prominent under tight skin, his arms so thin that any weight beyond the weight of a water bottle might stress his biceps to the point of failure.

  He’s really tired. He’s been racing almost nonstop for a couple of months, and the only reason he’s out riding his bike today is because he has no choice. He needs the rest, but he needs to rest with his legs moving, something that doesn’t even make sense to him, but he does it anyway because his entire life involves doing the proper thing in cycling. He’s out for a 3-hour spinner, and when he’s done with this, he’s thinking about stretching for an hour and then loafing on the couch, with his legs elevated, and watching professional golf on the Golf Channel. In his view, there has never been a finer sport to promote viewer unconsciousness than golf, and unconsciousness is what he wants more than anything else in the whole world.

  Someone rolls up alongside him now, a kid in his twenties wearing local bike-team kit and riding a midlevel race bike and clearly interested in chatting.

  The kid takes the pro’s left and wheels him up slightly, continually wheedling the pace faster by a tire length, which causes a strain and an unhappy dull ache to develop in the pro’s legs.

  The kid says, “Hey, man. You ride bikes much? You look like you could be pretty strong.”

  The pro says, “I ride a little bit. Yeah.”

  The kid asks, “You ever race?”

  “Not today.”

  The kid doesn’t seem to hear this. “Well, I race all the time. I’m a Cat 3. You know what that is?”

  The pro used to be a Cat 3 about 12 years ago, when he was 15 and winning every race he entered, sometimes lapping the field in criteriums. Hell, he raced Elites at Junior Worlds how many times? But the pro doesn’t feel like explaining it. The pro says, “I guess I don’t know what a Cat 3 is.”

  “Oh well,” the kid says. “Come to group ride at Big Ed’s sometime. I’ll show you some cool stuff about racing.”

  With that, the kid attacks down the street, carrying huge speed toward a stoplight, and the pro is surprised the kid is able to avoid slamming into cross traffic at the red light.

  The pro chuckles. What a jackass! But he’s glad the kid’s up the road.

  the Female Pro: BONNIE

  From her desk, she can see her bikes, and from her bikes she can see her desk.

  Overwhelmed expression.

  Bonnie is broke.

  She wants to make that perfectly clear, that even though she has four bikes in her apartment and two closets full of cycling clothing and 10 pairs of cycling shoes, not to mention multiple helmets, sunglasses, gloves, tires, tubes, chains, spare wheels, spare cassettes, spare saddles, spare brake pads—gosh, is she forgetting anything?—all that bike stuff doesn’t prove she has money. If anything, it proves that what money she’s got, if she ever really had any extra, is tied up in her cycling. She didn’t buy most of it, in any case, and the stuff she did buy she bought at a deep discount.

  She also has one bookshelf crammed with medals and trophies and plaques and framed newspaper clippings, because that’s the kind of rider she is: She wins. She’s a professional cyclist but a professional in the amateur sense, because if you look at the other bookshelves in her apartment, you will see them crammed with novels and books of poetry and literary criticism and books on social theory and political theory and so forth. So aside from being a professional cyclist, she’s also getting a PhD in English literature—specializing in 17th-century literature, thank you very much—and you don’t get a PhD in English literature and you don’t become a professional women’s cyclist if you think you’re going to have trunkloads of cash lying around your apartment when it’s all said and done.

  She has been standing in front of her refrigerator thinking about this and taking a few slugs of soy milk to calm her nerves. What else can she do?

  Go for a ride, of course. And it doesn’t take her long to suit up. Summertime. Midweek. She’s in bib shorts and a jersey before you can recite the first 20 lines of Milton’s Samson Agonistes.

  She hears a knock at her door now and opens up, and her friend Alice is there.

  Alice is not unfit, which is to say she’s not fat or anything—she is actually quite beautiful, with flowing black hair and incredibly alert blue eyes—but Alice isn’t a cyclist. She’s a PhD student and has been one of Bonnie’s officemates in the English department for the last few years.

  Alice stares at Bonnie’s cycling uniform and says, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to stop by unannounced, but I was in the neighborhood.”

  “The ride can wait,” Bonnie says. “Hell, everything else in my life can wait, for all anybody cares!”

  Alice takes a long measure of Bonnie and cocks her head and says, “So what’s really bothering you, Bonnie?”

  “I’m two people.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “I really am two people. I’ve got my bike life and then my English department life, and neither of those worlds cares about the other’s existence.”

  Alice shakes her head and pats Bonnie on the shoulder. “Well, I care about you, Bonnie.”

  Bonnie says, “That’s a comfort.” She means that ironically and not ironically at the same time, but whatever the case, that pat on the shoulder has put Bonnie in a better mood. She smiles and blows out some air. “Sorry, Alice. I’m just so busy all the time.”

  Alice says, “I’ve got the cure for you. A bunch of us from the seminar are going to the Brewhouse tonight. Wanna come?”

  Bonnie shouldn’t drink beer. It collects on her ass like flies collect on cow shit. But the lit seminar people are so funny and crazy, and hanging out with them at the Brewhouse never fails to be the traditional graduate school proverbial bucket of laughs. Bonnie says, “I have to ride for a while now and do some work, so I’ll just have to see.”

  “Come on,” Alice says. “You know you’ll have a blast.”

  “Okay then,” Bonnie says. “I’ll be there for one beer. But that’s it.”

  Alice says, “You can do better than that.”

  Bonnie smiles. She can do better than that, and she will.

  the Category 3 Jackass: DENNIS

  Sitting on top tubes, ultradorky way to look cool.

  Looking around to see if anybody’s staring at him.

  Dennis wants this training ride to end but at the same time wants to stay out for a while longer.

  People
on the sidewalks are gawking, no doubt because they can see plainly that he’s no ordinary cyclist but in fact an amazing racer. Sure. People can’t help but stare. People in the cars are staring at him, too, in his Big Ed’s uniform, pedaling so perfectly and riding with such balance and such lightninglike speed. Like did you see how he dropped that skinny guy a few blocks back? The guy fell away from Dennis like a rock dropped off the Eiffel Tower. Now, that guy looked fast, but he was simply another slow guy who gives off the impression of having something special under the hood. Besides, the guy didn’t even know what a Cat 3 is! Talk about clueless!

  Dennis rolls up to a stoplight now—it’s red—and he does a track-stand instead of putting his foot on the ground till the light turns green. He balances his bike with such ease, such grace. No wonder people watch him: He’s an inspiration! Next to him is a pickup truck with two guys in feed caps sitting in it with the windows open. The guy in the passenger seat is staring at Dennis.

  Dennis plays the part of dignified cycling ambassador. He says, “Hey, man. How you doing?”

  The guy in the pickup truck asks, “Why don’t you just put your foot down and quit wobbling around like that?”

  Dennis says, “Because I don’t need to. I could balance like this for a full hour if I wanted.”

  “Looks like you’re gonna fall on your ass to me.”

  “What?”

  “Idiot,” the guy says. The light changes, and the truck moves forward with traffic.

  At first, Dennis can keep up with the truck, tucked in the truck’s draft, 20 miles per hour, 25, 30, then he just can’t manage it anymore. Dennis is fast but not as fast as a pickup truck. Oh well. He’s ridden enough today anyway.

  A few minutes later, Dennis carries his bike up the stairs to his apartment, which he shares with his girlfriend, Natalie, and he finds her sitting at the kitchen table reading a book and taking some notes for a college class in dialectical therapy or something like that. She doesn’t look up when Dennis walks in.

  “You wouldn’t believe what just happened,” Dennis says. “These two rednecks in a pickup truck called me a pussy for shaving my legs. And I totally chased them down to give them a piece of my mind. But they got scared and took off.”

  Natalie finally looks up. “You have the money for the utility bill? It’s late by 3 weeks.”

  Dennis says, “If I win my race on Sunday, we’ll be in high cotton.”

  Natalie has amazing brown eyes, almost black; sometimes it’s as if Dennis can stare into them and see the meaning of the universe. Nothing is in those eyes now.

  “Whatever,” she says. “Keep up with the bicycle fantasy. I can tell it’s really taking you places.” She turns back to her homework, and Dennis doesn’t know what to say.

  How could she be living with him and not know how amazing he is at racing? He leans his bike against the wall and wanders in the direction of a hot shower and thinks, dammit, if he only had the money for the utility bill right now. Maybe he can sell one of his extra sets of wheels or something. Maybe that will get him by till the next race.

  the Masters Sandbagger: Bill

  Personal team tent (used only for bike races)

  Euro-style van (used only for bike races)

  Fancy race bike (used only for bike races)

  Spare fancy race bike (used only for bike races)

  Tools for all possible repairs

  Old-man ass

  From this European-style Ford Econoline van, the state road racing champion is about to emerge.

  He’s been the champion for 3 years in a row and would have been the champ the year before that but was vacationing with his family in Italy at the time and couldn’t convince his wife to come home early so he could be at the race. He was pissed because he was superstrong that year, too. But then again. Italy? It was molto magnifico.

  The side door opens, and there he is: Bill. Forty-eight years old, 5 foot 10, 160 pounds. And here’s his bicycle, a Pinarello Dogma with SRAM Red gruppo and Zipp 808 carbon tubular wheels—we’re talking about eight grand worth of racehorse Bill’s rolling out. The money he’s spent on his body is impressive, too. He hired a very well-known online coach, not the low-level coaches sitting in cubicles at the online company’s corporate offices; the real guy, the head honcho of the coaching company, has been personally coaching Bill. Plus he’s hired the finest trainer at the local gym and the finest dietitian in town, and if some people think this is excessive, they need to think about Bill slaving his entire adult life to become a success in the mutual fund business. Why shouldn’t he spend what he wants on his passion in life? He could be buying yachts—what’s the big deal about a few bikes instead?

  He’s in his racing uniform—a custom-made skin suit that he always wears for events 1 hour and under, which today’s criterium race will be. He’s racing the Masters 40-49 Cat 4 race, and, barring a mechanical incident, he will probably win. So he’s just standing there, as innocent as can be, and some of the guys in the parking lot start giving him grief.

  “Hey, Bill,” one of the guys says. “Are you gonna lap the field again this week?”

  These guys are bike racers, too, obviously.

  Bill says, “If you race harder, I won’t drop you.” He smiles to let them know he’s kidding.

  The guy says, “You should cat up, for crying out loud. You need to race with the big boys one of these years.”

  “Not gonna happen,” Bill says.

  The guy laughs, and the guy’s buddies laugh, but this is not friendly laughing, really.

  Bill is not stupid. He knows what’s pissing them off. If he wins all the time in Category 4, the usual path suggests he should move up to a Category 3, but Bill has never been a person to follow the usual path. In his mind, the cat-up situation presents a serious problem. He’s winning races now and is consequently enjoying himself a great deal, but if he moves up to the next category? No more winning. He won’t be enjoying himself as much anymore. What’s the point of having a hobby if you can’t enjoy yourself? True, he’s heard complaints, sometimes angry ones, that he’s too fast for Cat 4, but if the officials don’t actually force him to move up a category, why would he move up a category? Nobody can force him to move up a category, and if they were to try, he would sic a lawyer on their butts pronto.

  So for now, he’s having fun and not worrying about anybody else. That’s the key to success for Bill.

  He removes his stationary trainer from the back of the van and sets his bike on it and gets his iPod ready for his warmup sequence. Before the music comes up, he hears somebody say, “That guy is a total sandbagger.”

  Bill doesn’t acknowledge this. He turns on his music and starts pedaling circles that look a hell of a lot like victory.

  Road Racers

  See that group of five small men, in matching spandex uniforms, with their matching road bikes arranged in a semicircle facing an even smaller man who sits on the top tube of his bike and gesticulates with his right hand as if he were issuing commands for the French army’s invasion of Russia?

  These are road racers, and when we use the term roadies, we generally mean this group of cyclists. This isn’t to say that the century riders and the triathletes and so forth aren’t riding road bikes, but the true roadie—the cyclist with a dictatorial manner and the desire not just to ride a bike on the road but to beat other cyclists in a race on the road—is a road racer. In the United States, not even 70,000 people hold road-racing licenses, which puts them in one of the smallest groups in cycling. They know this and feel therefore they are in an elite class of people in the sport. Any human being on two wheels who doesn’t race is a “recreational” rider in the eyes of a road racer. A roadie despises triathletes. A roadie thinks poorly of old men on upright bikes. A roadie cracks jokes about fat people on bikes. A roadie believes that without roadies, there would be no cycling at all.

  There are roadies who would object to this assessment, but then again, roadies will object to just about anything
. If you are bored sometime, search the Internet for a road-racing message board (something that may seem like a thing of the past in the days of social networking, but trust me, the road-racing message boards are still there) and read through the discussion threads. Could be anything—tire choice, bike choice, race route, who’s at fault for a crash, even the position of the sun in the sky—and the roadies will be bickering the subject to death. This bickering, it’s worth pointing out, is oftentimes amazingly savage. Maybe this is because they race at high speeds in tight packs and have to yell at each other a lot to be safe? Probably not. Cyclists who aren’t roadies almost universally believe that roadies behave the way they do because they are assholes. For proof of this: Call a roadie an asshole, and see if the roadie doesn’t act like an asshole when he explains why he’s not an asshole. Note that I use the pronoun he here, which isn’t to say that there aren’t female roadie assholes, but roadies are predominantly male, predominantly type A, predominantly the type of people who, were they to be taller and able to play lunch-hour basketball or weeknight softball, would take their involvement in their sport way too seriously.

  Within roadies, there are countless subhierarchies, some of them determined by official racing categories on racing licenses (Cat 1 for pro and 2 for almost pro; Cat 3 for fast jackass; Cat 4 for fast beginner and old sandbagger; Cat 5 for slow beginner and medium-slow sandbagger), some of them determined by the time spent involved in the sport, but most of them determined by a simple, brutal fact: who is the strongest rider. Strength in racing, however, is not a matter of brute strength, really, because strength in cycling is not determined by actual power output but instead by speed and endurance, and because speed and endurance are a consequence of a rider’s power-to-weight ratio, the strongest rider is often the smallest person in the group.