A quick mix

Reflections

Rarely was it a party, and when it was a party, the party sucked.*

*(I say that because people who ask how the clubbing is here don't really have a clue what Spain was about for me. I also say that because when we did go out, the party did indeed suck.)

I came searching for honor, a last ditch effort to immerse myself in an athlete's lifestyle and prove to myself I can craft my body into a machine of muscle and lungs. Air, water and food are consumed in order to maximize power. It's a lifestyle, and my life would have been incomplete if I never lived it.

I searched for what I had believed cycling to be. That epicness you feel when you watch the Tour. I craved to bring the new body and the will that created it into a race against similar souls. I wanted to put the sake of others ahead of myself, contributing all I can towards the success of a team leader.

My imagination was not without images, of course. Mountaintops with cheers and screams that lift clumps of suffering, spandex clad racers up and over the crest to plummet down the other side. Me flying up forested switchbacks with a yellow jersey in tow and the peloton spread evenly along the climb. My own sweaty, strong, shiny legs hammering away at 90 revolutions per minute.

Suffering. Cycling requires suffering, and I have gone through quite a bit. Three hour hammer sessions and 6 hour plug-a-thons. Pangs of hunger, the burn of lactic, extreme thirst, empty legs, the intersection of aluminum and pavement and skin, road rash in the shower, knee pain, strains, cramps, jams, headaches. Training mentality is one thing... racing you must be willing to stay true to that decision. When it gets hard, I'm willing to go harder. When it gets tough, I will not give up.

Fear. Be it as it may, I have long been more mindful of danger than most. In my first vuelta here, I remember thinking after the first stage that I probably had avoided thousands of possibly deadly moments in the course of three hours. Swerving through rotundas and around crashes, avoiding potholes and knarly grates, I felt lucky to simply be alive. Part of the thrill was to know you weren't dead.

Fear and suffering become facts of life, like the pieces of dog shit I walk by every day. It's just what you do. No reason to whine or even talk about it; it is what it is.

Am I happy with my time here? The same high expectations and self-deprecating attitude seems to tarnish my memory, but looking past that, I am already remembering my time here fondly. I suppose, at the most obvious level, the decisions you make in life determine how you explore the space around you with the time you are given. How much are you attune to it, and how much do you tune it out? Looking back, I may regret how much I ignored... how many times I was concentrating so hard on going fast or training correctly that I took the breathtaking countryside for granted. But that's what got me here in the first place.

But there were times where I would sit up, and take a look around. I would look back and see acres and acres of huge sunflowers, rows and rows of fat bright yellow petals. Blooming lavender fields. I would look to one side and see big rock faces and green olive trees, planted along terraces cut into the hillside. I would take a breather at the top of a pass and look to the other side and see the ocean on the other side of the plains. You seem to want to take a piece of it with you; just a handful would be enough.

And there were other times where I simply resigned myself to the passing of time. It could easily be mistaken for laziness or boredom, but I just gently shut down for some reason. Cereal becomes a meal that's always good enough for any part of the day, for days on end.

It will be weird returning: I won't have the screaming neighbors that decorate my street, I won't have the variability of Jose bringing fun and stress equally, but unpredictably. I won't have La Cueva and the honor of being a Gitano Americano and a Mongolico and a Retrasado. I won't have the amazing roads out my front door step that I have become so used to, the familiarity of each road seared into your mind from hours and hours of riding them.

No doubt this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing and I am fortunate. I will miss this place and always wonder exactly how it changed my outlook on where I came from and how it changed where I will go. Thanks for reading along the way.

This pic was taken from the 3rd stage of Avila when I was in the break.

Tour de France

I got to see the tour up close and personal.

With some hectic, last minute hopping from bus to metro to rental car, I got my butt to northern Spain. I crossed the border into the grumpy land known as France. Camping on a field with Basque fans, I woke up the next morning to sunshine on grassy Pyrenean mountains... the stage for an epic day in the Tour de France.

We saw early parts of the stage on the big screen. After hiking to the finish, we decided which part of the road we wanted to watch from, factoring in the number of places we could see them below us, the amount of time we could see them riding along the hillside, and the distance between security guards so that we could run alongside them.

Apparently I was on TV. If you see the footage in the future, I want you to have this thought in mind:
These guys embody athletic perfection in the sport. When I was training, there was some piece of my inspiration that came from a faint hope of racing this very race. And when you're biking there's plenty of time to think about this. All those corny sports movies, where the underdog makes it at the buzzer... that feeling you feel when the crowd stands cheering? That feeling where you can't help but burst out in a fist pumping, Braveheart cry of excitement and victory? That's what it felt like to be so close to these animals, battling towards the summit. That's why I look so excited. I am rejoicing that somebody has achieved the pinnacle, made their body into an unstoppable machine; somebody has become the best.

On a downer note: Yeah, the doping issue factors in, but that's a whole different discussion. It doesn't change how you feel when you're there. It's a spectacle, after all.

On the way back, I stopped by San Sebastian with Sam and KO. One of my favorite towns in Spain. The beaches were so packed that you could see more skin than sand. On a whim, I rented a surfboard and tried that for 3 hours. Then I went for a hike and slept in a bivy sack just outside of town near some homeless people, looking out over the ocean and the town.