Breaking through the pain

One summer, when I was 13, I was spending the summer with my grandmother in Southern California. It was Saturday in July, I had just returned home from a day of surfing with my uncles and sat down to see what was on television. While flipping through the channels I stumble upon a bike race. I was utterly entranced by what I was seeing. Two hundred athletes riding so close together that from afar the group looked like a swarm of bees. They were riding up these enormous hills, descending down switch backs and sprinting at speeds that I thought was unbelievable at the time. “What is this?”, I said to myself. It was the 1984 Tour de France, which was won by the frenchman Laurent Fignon.

I had to do this. I had to race bikes! I walked out to the kitchen where my Uncles and grandmother were talking. “I'm going to race the Tour de France!”, I proclaimed to my relatives with utter confidence as only a teenager could. One of uncles started laughing. My grandmother asked, “What is it?” “It's a bike race and I am going to race in it someday,” I said. My uncle kept chuckling to himself. For the rest of the summer that was all I could talk about. That was the day I fell in love with cycling and especially bicycle racing.

The following Christmas what does my Grandmother get me? A Italian racing bike. I was completely over the moon. The bike was a little big for me, but I couldn't care less. I loved it. Every minute I could I spend on that red bike I did. The absolute freedom and joy riding that machine brought me was indescribable. As a teenager growing up in a small costal southern Oregon lumber town, falling for cycling was definitely not the norm. Two sports existed were I lived football and basketball. That did not stop me.

Every summer my home town had a weekend festival. At that festival they had a bike race, called a criterium. Soon I was bugging my parents to let me race in it. Fortunately they let me. I will never forget that first race. I absolutely had no idea what I was doing. I led every lap of the race except the last one. I was supper disappointed, but if I had the bug before the race, it was now a hundred times more intense. This is what I was meant to do, race bikes.

After the race, one of the older racer, the president of the local bike club, came over to me and invited me to go out on a training ride with him and the other members. When I showed up for the ride there were twenty other riders gathered. “Awesome,” I said. There were others like me in Coos Bay. I could hardly believe it! I learned so much that first ride and I loved it. There was something called drafting, riding behind other riders to conserve energy. There were actually tactics during racing. What I really learned that day was that I was really out shape. I kept falling behind, I learned that was called going “off the back,” but the man who invited me stayed with me.

Soon, I was racing in regional races. I did well in some races, poorly in others. At this time, I also secured a job at a local bike shop to help my mechanical knowledge. As high school was winding down, my plans were to forgo college, move to Southern California because of its vibrant racing scene to pursue my dream of racing in the Tour de France.

I quickly found out that I had a ways to go. As a backup plan, I enrolled in the local community college to pursue my AA. Unbeknownst to me the school had a collegiate cycling team. It was there I learned I had true potential. I was a very fast sprinter. Not so fast on hills. When I sprinted during training rides I felt that same freedom and joy I felt as a youngster. Soon, I was winning races and making my way up the the Untied States Cycling Federation categories. Once I reached Cat 2, the only level left was reserved for the national team riders. I decided I needed to go to Europe. I needed to go there to race, to see if I was good enough. I had to try.

I soon found myself in Gent, Belgium racing the bullrings, called Kermesses, of West and East Flanders. Holy crap! I thought I was pretty good. In my first race I was off the back in two laps. After some time I began to see some results, but the joy and passion that I once had for the sport began to wane. Very quickly I had begun to see truth in the rumors I had heard about the sport. Performance enhancing drugs were rampant. My first year there, five dutch amateur cyclist died from using EPO, a synthetic blood doping drug.

Although I was starting to see some results I was discouraged by the doping in the sport. I was also questioning whether racing was what I was meant to do with my life. The love I had for racing was gone. So after much thought, I decided to come home. As I write this, the sport I fell in love with is being torn to pieces by constant drug scandals. At times I wonder why I still follow the sport. I still love its beauty. The sport can be hard. At its core it is about suffering and fighting through pain. When you reach down and find that part of you, the part you did not know you had and break through the pain, that is beauty.