It starts with a list.
A dozen or so names, repeated again and again. There are so many more, but those dozen are the ones that really mattered to me. Friends. Family. Mom.
There’s cancer and car wrecks, suicides and overdoses, all-too-young heart attacks and freak accidents. I think of them and I think of their bodies and how they’re no longer here, how they’re just gone, possibly somewhere but probably nowhere. I think of my legs. I feel them, their pain and their power, and I acknowledge how those legs are very much here. I acknowledge, despite all the misery that can often come with bike riding, when those legs feel utterly empty, how powerful they can be. I feel the air in my lungs and try to focus on my respiratory process; in, out, in, out. Not too fast, not too slow, taking in as much oxygen as I need. No more, no less.
Finally, I feel the sun on my face, my arms, and my legs, and I remind myself that I’m here. That I can ride. That I can feel this sun. That I can climb. That I can sprint. I’m here and they aren’t. I exist and they don’t. How dare I wish I were anywhere else. How dare I think of quitting. How lucky I am to be here, miserable as it may be. How lucky I am to be riding my bike. How lucky I am.
And again, I repeat their names thinking of that luck and how unfair it is that I’m here and they aren’t. But life and death really isn’t fair or unfair. It just kind of is.
Still, it’s unfair that they’re gone and that makes me angry and I try to turn that anger into the fuel for my legs to turn those pedals over and over and over. Because sometimes anger is good. Sometimes rage can help us, if we know how to harness it. Because I’m here and they’re not. And that makes me rageful. And I repeat their names and I remember what role they played in my life and I remind myself how they died. And sometimes that’s enough to get me to through.
This is what I call The Dark Place. It’s where I go when things start to get truly brutal when I’m on the bike; when the pain of the climb overtakes the joy of riding to such an extent that it’s almost impossible to recall what being happy feels like; when I need a reason to keep pedaling.
We all have this place. But only those of us who’ve been to the bottoms of our wells know what it looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like. It’s a place of internality that can only be found in the depths of pain and, as depths of pain are often what define cycling, you may know this place well. In fact, you probably have your own version of it.
If you think of the right way, The Dark Place is a beautiful place. It’s the place where I commune with my ghosts, a place where, for fleeting moments, Mikey is back, where Chris is back, where my mom is back. It’s a place where they’re alive because it’s the place where they live. It’s their place. Not mine.
It doesn’t only happen when I’m climbing mountains but it always happens when I’m climbing mountains. But sometimes I go to The Dark Place on the polar opposite of a mountainside; on a quarter-mile asphalt track at a nearby middle school, a track that I decided to circumnavigate some 400 times, totalling a hundred miles in tiny increments.
I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea. Then, immediately, it seemed like a bad one. And whenever that happens, I get excited, knowing it must be special.
Still, long before the day, I knew it would be a ride I’d remember forever.
400 laps around the same quarter-mile oval
In an effort to keep myself honest, to keep myself from waking up on the day of my ride and saying, “Eh, f*ck it. This actually is a terrible idea,” I announced my intentions on my area’s cycling listserv, asking for friends to come join me for a few miles, to help keep me sane as I made four-hundred laps around the same paved oval.
And they did. Todd—beside whom I’ve pedaled tens of thousands of miles over the undulating hills of central North Carolina—came by, as did Andrew, hoping to test out the new pursuit bars on his track bike. Phil was there for my last few laps, capturing my final turn as the mileage on my computer clicked over from two digits to three. A couple who I’ve never seen before showed up to take a few laps beside me, as did the drummer in one of my bands.
Their conversations and listening ears all helped me fight the mania that might come with doing the same thing over and over and over again, and then doing it 397 more times.
But this ride wasn’t about them. It was about me and my mind and the place that I go in my head when I’m going somewhere else on my bike. And, for as happy as I was that they were there, that they took time out of their lives to help me do something stupid, I was equally as happy in the silence of solitude, in the quiet of the scientific laboratory that the 400-meter oval became.
There, lacking the distraction of traffic or other riders, the constant pinging of my bike computer alerting me of a coming turn, I could zone out—Zen out—and let the repetition of the same endless turns take me to The Dark Place.
I once read a passage by a writer who was dying of some incurable disease. As he sat on a park bench, considering his impending mortality (though, I’d argue all of our mortalities are impending), he noticed a caterpillar crawling by. The writer remarked how, at the end of his life, the world grew so much smaller. How he didn’t consider the big stuff nearly as much as the little. The beauty of the movement of a tiny caterpillar, making its way past some dying behemoth its tiny bugbrain couldn’t fathom.
In a way, riding a hundred miles in round, quarter-mile increments allowed me to see the world beneath my wheels similarly. There, a tuft of grass poking through the track’s pavement, cracked after years spent beneath the South’s unforgiving sun. Here, a small stone that I tried to ride closer and closer to with every lap, seeing how near I could pass without touching. Finally, an otherwise insignificant crack in the asphalt that became my start/finish line.
As I rode, I found myself playing tiny games. How many pedal strokes could I squeeze in between that tiny crack and the little bush beside the track a few dozen meters down the track. How far could I ride on top of the white lines of the track without hands. How long could I keep my power meter at exactly 250 watts.
I didn’t notice the sun for the first seventy miles of my ride. That’s because it was cloudy. But the July sun in North Carolina is a motherf*cker of a different breed, whose ferocity makes itself known the instant you move from shade to light. And as soon as the morning’s fog dissipated, my ride became an entirely new endeavor; suddenly, I was deep in The Pain, headed straight toward The Dark Place.
“Discomfort never killed anyone” – Marcus Aurelius
I’m paraphrasing.
As my mileage and the temperature ticked up toward 100, I found my ghosts and I reminded myself that I’m here, that I can ride. I found my son, an avid mountain biker himself, and reminded myself of our shared mantra: “Don’t let the mountain win. Never let the mountain win.”
I repeated the list of names and how each one died, why each one isn’t here. I stared down at my own legs, aging as they are, still capable of making power, of breathing life into the bicycle beneath me. I swallowed a breath of air and felt its heat trickle down my throat as I made the final of my eight hundred turns. I crossed the little insignificant crack that became the talisman of completion, the little crack I passed over 399 times before; the crack that no one will likely even consider, let alone ascribe any value. After all, it’s just a crack in the pavement of a middle school track somewhere near the center of North Carolina.
In the days following my ride, a lot of friends asked why would I do something so pointless and dumb. And I repeated some rote party line about how it was for a story and, therefore, I was technically being paid to do it (not untrue). But the truth is I did it because I still can. Because I’m still here.
