By Neil Bezdek
Earlier this week I spent a full day organizing my activities around a Tuesday-night training race, part of a weekly series held at the local fairgrounds on the outskirts of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
I’d started the day by venturing out for a morning spin, then later unpacked after a weekend of travel, napped, stretched, ate, and drank coffee—the oh-so-demanding tasks that preoccupy a full-time cyclist on an otherwise idle weekday …
All these tasks were scheduled in precise relation to the hour-long race that would commence at 7:40 that evening.
Then the race was cancelled because of thunderstorms.
I was disappointed. As I pedaled home in a warm downpour, thinking to myself how pleasant it was to ride in the rain—at least for the first hour or two—I pondered how my disappointment seemed to exceed the relative significance of the cancelled race.
After four consecutive weekends competing at national-level events in Florida, Arizona, California, and, again, Florida—ones that I had prepared for and fretted about all winter long—the cancellation of a weekly training race shouldn’t have been a letdown.
So how do I make sense of my disappointment?
Perhaps the Tuesday-night training race, a staple in most cycling communities, was supposed to be my opportunity to get out and ride just for the sake of it. Finally, a chance to fly around a course with no pressure to perform—no team agenda, no spectators, no sponsors scrutinizing the live TV feed. And no expectation to report to my bosses with an assessment of the race. Just a Tuesday-night showdown, bike racing at its purest.
But the thunderstorms …
I’d experienced this feeling before, but it was less typical of a professional cyclist and more reminiscent of my days working a desk job in Manhattan. Back then, at 5:30 every Tuesday—come hell, high water, my boss’s disdain (but not race-canceling thunderstorms)—I’d rush out of the office, embarking on the desperate race-before-the-race to the far side of Brooklyn, a dash to beat the scheduled start time of a similar training series held on an old airfield called Floyd Bennett Field.
Like Clark Kent shedding his suit and bursting out of the offices of the Daily Planet, I felt like Superman, complete with absurd costume, flying off to complete the task that really mattered.
You don’t have to be a professional athlete to find meaning and identity in competition, and you don’t have to be a desk jockey to feel the need to hit the racecourse to blow off steam. In either case, we all have jobs to do and commitments to maintain. Racing can be an escape, whether it’s in healthy contrast with your job responsibilities or a restatement of them.
We’re not that different, you and I.
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