Transition

by Henry Charles Mishkoff

  “I still can’t see her,” Leida complains, frowning and squinting. And indeed, the pack of bicycles through which she’s trying to look seems to be a shifting but nonetheless impenetrable mass of metal and flesh, weaving a brightly colored, ever-changing pattern of bicycles and riders, hurtling at breakneck speed down the weathered pavement of the wide, suburban road.

  ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍

  The visibility is just as bad from Jillian’s point of view.

  This pace is much too fast, she thinks. I’m not going to be able to keep up if it stays this way much longer.

  How can these women be so fresh this far into the race?

  And then she remembers: Drafting.

  She was the last woman out of the transition area, and she’s been riding alone throughout most of the bike leg, passing other riders without even an attempt at a momentary draft. But these folks have been riding in a pack for God-knows how long. They’ve probably been taking turns leading the pack, then dropping back and drafting, conserving their energy just for a time like this. No wonder they can sprint so easily.

  I’m going to have to change my tactics, Jillian realizes. If I try to pass them now, they’re going to pull away from me. And if I lose them all, I could be in big trouble. Of course, I can always drop them on the run. No matter how much fresher they are and how far behind them I start, I can run them all into the ground. But I’m wearing myself out for no reason. And I need to do something about that.

  And so she eases up, ever so slightly at first, not really falling back, just no longer trying to pass. And somehow, as if sensing that the danger has receded, the pack slows subtly in response. So Jillian pulls back just a trifle more, actually letting a couple of the women whom she just passed pull even with her. And again, as if breathing a collective sigh of relief, the pack slows to the pace that it had been maintaining before her challenge.

  This is easier, Jillian thinks, as she settles into a slot behind another rider, drafting for the first time in her life. It feels like the wind resistance has been cut in half, like she’s being pulled along, getting a free ride. And as strange as it feels not be expending maximum effort, she actually begins to enjoy the feeling of taking it easy for a while.

  This is the smart thing to do, she reassures herself. It feels weird, but it’ll pay off in the long run.

  So to speak. She smiles.

  A group of boys is playing basketball in a park at the side of the road, and she’s feeling so good that she allows her concentration to be distracted just for an instant. Just long enough for her not to react as quickly as she should when the bike in front of her swerves sharply, for no apparent reason. But then she sees the pothole that the cyclist in front of her swerved to avoid, but it’s so close, it’s too late to do anything about it. She yanks her aerobars to the side as hard as she can. Her front wheel skitters just on the edge of the hole…

  It looks like most of the tire is suspended over the hole (who maintains these roads? she thinks, angrily), certainly less than half of the tire is on the road surface. But she leans her weight away from the danger as far as she dares, and somehow the tread grips the road surface, and her front tire stays on the road…

  But her back tire skids right off the edge of the hole, hitting the far side with a jarring thud that nearly sends Jillian flying over the aerobars. Somehow, she manages to stay in the saddle. She fights desperately to keep the bicycle upright. Bicycle and rider weave crazily for a second or two. And then, as a knot of spectators gasps in horror, she collapses in a heap, skidding to a bruising, grinding halt on the rough, unyielding concrete of West Centerville Road.

  3.1.14: Garland

  Relax, Jillian reminds herself, even as she’s skidding painfully down the street. It’ll be worse if I tense up.

  Now just lie here for a few seconds, she orders herself, as she finally slides to a stop. Don’t even think of moving until the rest of the pack gets by you.

  Another rider, swerving to avoid Jillian’s prone form, hits the same hole that was Jillian’s downfall. Jillian hears, rather than sees, the other cyclist hit the ground with a sickening crunch, followed by the sound of metal-on-metal as one bicycle hits another, then… another? It’s hard to sort it all out, but it sounds serious, like a chain-reaction pileup on the interstate. Somebody’s going to get hurt, she thinks.

  And then, in a delayed reaction, the full impact of her own pain hits her, flashing down her right side like fire. Oh God, she thinks, panicked, I’m the one who’s hurt. “Oh, shit!” she screams, more from frustration than pain.

  I have to get up, she thinks, despite the protests of her battered body.

  I have to get up now.

  She feels a light touch on her shoulder, and it’s just jarring enough to drive the fuzziness from her brain. “Don’t touch me!” she snaps. “You want to get me disqualified?” She whirls around angrily. A surprised spectator pulls his hand back as if he’s touched something hot.

  “I was just checking to see if you were okay,” he says, wounded.

  “Get off the fucking course,” Jillian says, using the anger to motivate herself to action. “Spectators are supposed to stay off the road.”

  “Holy shit, lady, I was just trying…”

  “Well, don’t try,” Jillian snaps, climbing gingerly to her feet. “And get off the fucking course before you get in somebody else’s way.”

  She straightens up and assesses the damage. Her right leg is covered with long, colorful scrapes, black and red and purple, but there’s very little blood, so it’s just road rash, painful but not necessarily debilitating. Her right arm is also bruised, an angry red welt just below her shoulder has begun to swell menacingly. Her head is sore from what she vaguely recalls as a bounce or two along the pavement, but when she pulls off her helmet and touches her scalp, she doesn’t come away with any blood. In fact, her head isn’t even especially tender to the touch.

  Thank God for helmets, Jillian thinks. Don’t leave home without one.

  So much for personal damage assessment. Now let’s see how the bike came through.

  But when she takes a step forward, a sudden sharp pain shoots through her right knee and it buckles, nearly sending her tumbling to the pavement. “Oh, Jesus!” she swears loudly, more angry than hurt. Well, that’s something to look forward to, she thinks. Nursing a sore knee while running a marathon can be loads of fun.

  If I can run on it at all.

  She bends over to examine her knee. It doesn’t look too bad, she thinks. I’ve run with worse. She pokes at it carefully. It doesn’t feel too bad either, she notes with some relief. Tentatively, she takes another step forward. A little sore, but not even a twinge of the kind of pain that shot through the joint a minute ago. She shakes her leg out, then even does a deep-knee bend. No problem.

  It’s okay, she tells herself. I’m okay. Let’s get on with it. There’ll be time enough to lick my wounds tomorrow.

  “Do you need medical assistance?” Jillian glances over at the voice. A mobile medic, with a five-rings logo on one arm and a red cross on the other, brings his motorbike to a sliding stop.

  “No, I’m fine.” Jillian waves him off.

  “Okay,” he says, as a few unintelligible phrases cackle over his walkie-talkie. “If you change your mind, just stay put and we’ll come back and get you.” He speaks a few words into his communicator, then he putters off to check on the other victims.

  She sees the obvious damage the instant that she kneels over her bike. Her rear tire is flat. Hoping against hope, she squeezes the tire between her thumb and forefinger. Flat as a pancake. Frustration flares within her. She feels like kicking the damn bicycle, or maybe shooting it to put it out of its misery. But instead she takes a deep breath and forces herself to calm down. The measure of a champion, Jago has told her time and again, is how she responds to adversity. Anyone can be a winner when everything goes right. But only a true champion can be a winner when everything goes wrong.

 
I am a true champion, Jillian reminds herself. And I’m not going to let a flat tire and a sore knee get the best of me.

  But a bent wheel… well, that would be another story.

  But when she spins the wheel, it clicks smoothly on its bearings, betraying not a hint of the jolt that it has taken. Falconi craftsmanship comes through again, she thinks. Man, if Sunshine had hit that hole on her Schwinn…

  Move fast, she thinks, but not so fast that I’m careless. Let’s see… here’s a spare, here’s the tire iron, here’s the CO2 pump. Unhook the chain, undo the clip, pry off the wheel – hell, I’ll be out of here in a minute. And I’ve probably only been here about a minute so far. I can make up a two-minute deficit easy, no sweat. I’ll reel ‘em all in on the run.

  “Are you alright, Jill?”

  Jillian glances up, annoyed by the distraction. Michelle Stackhouse is kneeling in the back of the ESPN truck, wearing a headset, looking concerned. “Fine,” Jillian says curtly. Next to Michelle, a man points a shoulder-mounted video camera at Jillian. Great, she thinks, the entire country gets to watch me change a tire. How exciting for them. And isn’t that the reporter who interviewed me earlier? Why is he crumpled up in the back of the truck like that? He looks like he’s in worse shape than I am.

  And just as she’s starting to bend back over her Falconi GoldenGirl Racer, she spots another figure on the far side of the truck, and she does a quick double-take. Oh, Jesus, Jillian thinks, what’s she doing here? I thought that Michelle wasn’t working with her anymore.

  She certainly seems to be getting a laugh out of this. The bitch.

  But I’ve got more important things than Leida Andersen to worry about right now, Jillian thinks, as she quickly pries the tire off the rim and begins to remove the tube.

  I’ve got a race to run.

  3.1.15: Dallas

  Sunshine has decided that running is, simply, boring.

  It was a novelty a few weeks ago. The run leg of the triathlon in Boston was the first time that she’d run any kind of distance, and it was a challenge to see how she could perform. But she’s been running almost every day since then, and the novelty has quickly worn off.

  It’s not that running is difficult, or even overly demanding. Now that I’m pacing myself a little better, it’s not even that tough.

  It’s just dull.

  Maybe it would be more fun if I had someone to run with, she thinks. Well, I won’t be alone for long. Jill and some of the others are bound to catch up with me sooner or later.

  The crowd sure is enthusiastic. They’ve been so friendly, cheering and yelling – and there’s a whole lot more of them then there were in Boston. I feel like I’m picking up energy from them, she thinks. They must be sending out some kind of powerful vibrations. I’ll have to ask Nathan about that.

  But even with the waves of energy radiating from the crowd, Sunshine decides, running is not really much fun. But I’ll be done with it in a couple of hours, and then maybe I won’t have to compete in these stupid triathlons anymore.

  Unless, of course, I end up in the top three.

  In which case I’ll have to go to the Olympics and suffer through this all over again.

  3.1.16: Dallas

  Jillian catches up with the pack less than two miles from the transition area.

  That’s incredible, she thinks, I can’t believe that they hung together this long. Nobody had the guts to make a break? More likely, a few people tried to break away but got reeled back in, so they finally just gave up and rode along with the rest of the flock.

  Baaaaaaa.

  If only I hadn’t had that little mishap, she thinks, I sure as hell could’ve opened up this race.

  She glides up to the back of the pack and settles in just behind the last cyclist. She can feel herself getting pulled along in the draft, and not just off the rider directly in front of her – somehow, it’s as if the entire pack is exerting a strange force, a magnetic attraction. Like she’s caught in some kind of powerful tractor beam.

  And she knows that there’s no need to try to pass anyone, not now, not this close to the transition area. Not with a sore knee. Not with a spot on the Olympic team on the line. I should just cruise along, she thinks, conserve my strength, follow the pack into the transition area.

  Then I’ll blow all of them away on the run.

  Well, almost all of them, Jillian thinks. There’s no telling where Sunshine is. She’s certainly not in the pack. Either she already dropped out or she maintained the lead that she must have established in the swim leg, and now she’s running way out in front somewhere. She might even be too far out in front for me to catch up to her. But it really doesn’t matter, even if I come in second I’ll still be in the Olympics, and that’s really all that matters.

  Isn’t it?

  But Sunshine will probably quit in the middle of the run like she did last time. Of course, last time she did have a little help from me. But even without my assistance, she’ll get tired, or bored, and then she’ll slow down, and then I’ll blow her off the course. She doesn’t have the determination or the talent to keep up a fast pace for twenty-six miles.

  Does she?

  But the possibility that she might come in second begins to gnaw at Jillian. It’s just a little twinge at first, it but quickly explodes into a full-blown obsession. Second is just not good enough, she thinks. I can’t believe I’ve been sitting here trying to convince myself that anything less than winning is acceptable. What kind of way would that be to get into the Olympics?

  If I let Sunshine beat me, then I’ll know that I’m not invincible – and everyone else will know it, too. And I have to be invincible going into the Olympics.

  Nobody can beat me. Certainly not Sunshine, that bizarre little aberration of a girl who doesn’t have the foggiest idea in her strange little brain about what’s really going on.

  Sunshine’s a quitter, Jillian decides. The accident at the aid station didn’t stop her in the last race, she could have picked herself up off the ground and kept going, but she chose not to. She quit. And if I don’t do my very best to beat her now, then I’m a quitter too, no better than she is.

  And that’s how it comes to pass that Jillian, against her better judgment, finds herself cautiously weaving her way through the pack as she tries to gain just a little ground on the leaders before they roll into the transition area.

  I’ve got to be careful not to make too strong a move, she thinks. I don’t want to cause an all-out panic again. So instead of trying to pass everyone at once, she just picks off the other cyclists one at a time, increasing her speed just a notch, swinging out to pass, then swinging in again behind the next rider and settling into the slipstream once more.

  And it all happens so fast that Jillian is never exactly sure of the precise sequence of events that leads to her being sprawled out on the hard pavement for the second time in the race. Even when she reviews the video later, even in slow motion, one frame at a time, the evidence is inconclusive. The ESPN truck is at the front of the pack, perhaps fifty yards away. And although the camera does capture the incident, it’s just not possible to see all the details through the maze of bodies and bicycle frames.

  But somehow, just as they’re all straightening up after coming out of a gentle curve, Jillian is stunned to realize that she’s become entangled with the bicycle to her right, and that no matter how hard she struggles to regain control of her bike, she’s falling. And then another bicycle is involved, and then another, and then it’s impossible to tell how many, and it all seems to be happening in slow motion, like the video that quickly makes the rounds on YouTube that night. And once again, she tries to relax and to free her feet from the pedal locks. And once again she finds herself floating, slowly, inexorably, to the ground.

  And then suddenly everything gets very fast, it’s as if someone has comically sped up the video, but it’s not at all funny. It’s horrifying. And it’s very loud. The grinding of metal on metal as bicycles hurtle into e
ach other. The scraping of metal on pavement as they slide along the road. The horrified gasps and shouts from the crowd as the tangled mass of flesh and metal slows to a sickening halt. The moans and curses of the riders themselves as they bounce and skid painfully along the pavement.

  Somehow, Jillian finds herself rolling clear of her bicycle. Although the video later shows that she rolls exactly three times, it feels to her as though she’s spinning endlessly. It’s like when I used to roll down the hill to the lake, she thinks, dizzily. But the road’s a hell of lot harder than the lawn.

  And then, suddenly, she’s still. Everything is still. It’s as if all the bicycles and all of the riders have come to rest at exactly the same instant. And, for a frozen moment, everyone has stopped talking, moaning, yelling. The silence is eerie.

  Then someone screams, one of the spectators, judging from the direction of the sound. The shrill cry slices through the thick early-afternoon air like the whine of a chainsaw. And as if it were some kind of prearranged signal that everyone was waiting for, the strange tableau sprawled out on the highway stirs and grudgingly begins to come back to life.

  “Somebody, get a doctor!”

  “Don’t touch them! If you help them, you’ll disqualify them.”

  “But they’re hurt! We gotta do something!”

  “Look, one of them’s sitting up. She’s okay!”

  “There’s another one. They’re alright.”

  Slowly, carefully, Jillian sits up. She came to rest on her back, and she wants to prop herself up on her elbows to take a look around, but her elbows are too sore to support her weight for too long, so she pulls herself up into a sitting position, folds her legs Indian-style, and just sits there on the ground, trying to compose herself.