Crack Addiction

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I didn’t think it would end like this.  The snow, or rather the ice came last Sunday and I found myself ill-equipped and forced to park the bike.  Until this Sunday’s momentary respite, the temperatures have continued to be…miserable.  Blowing snow, ice fog, frozen roads and paths, cars slipping and sliding into the curbs and ditches everywhere.  Bikecalgary.org’s How was your ride forum littered with “I got up as fast as I fell down”.  My wrist ached as if to warn me against riding my slicks in this mess.  For once I heeded and drove.

So now I’ve been driving for a week.  More importantly I haven’t ridden in nine days.  Nine.  That’s a lot. The car-commute continues to stink as much as it ever has, worse now that the roads are sketchy and traffic crawling.  I see the few, the brave, cycling along on the pathways and I regret having to drive.  Not preparing ahead of time.  Not having proper tires.  My dislike of car-commuting grows.

The body has revolted.  Every muscle is suddenly contracted and shortened.  Touch my toes?  Ha!  Can barely touch my knees now, which is good because my knees ache when they’re bent.  And when they’re straight.  My back aches in places that have been quiet and happy all season.  My right pinkie finger and it’s neighbour waver between normal and numb.  My neck feels like wire cable.  I feel old.  I feel like a man approaching 80, not 40.

So I deal with this most unfortunate situation the old-fashioned way.  The addict demands to be satisfied and it doesn’t care how.  If there’s to be no cycling, then something else.  Anything else.  While driving to the gas station – something I hadn’t done in weeks – it crossed my mind that they sell cigarettes, that I could be smoking on my way to work instead of just riding the clutch and sucking exhaust fumes.  I declined that rush.

Food.  I lie to myself and think well, I didn’t eat any doughnuts while stuffing another cookie in my pie cookie-hole.  I go back for seconds at every meal.  I order the large satay.  This was marginally tolerable while riding but lethal now.  Self-control falls victim to the ravaging addict and I’m paying the price on all fronts.

Then there’s the drugs.  Not any drugs, the drug.  Crack.  Crack was waiting for me when I got home today.  The sight of it causes panic.  You know where this road leads but the addict shouts.  It’s a wonderful ride he says, besides, it’s the journey, not the destination.  You cave.  The rush of the first hit shoots through your body, your senses reeling.  Dopamine levels shoot off the charts, the pleasure center at Command Central takes down the defensive mechanisms.  It’s like fireworks, on the inside.  The addict is satisfied.  For a moment.

But it doesn’t last.  More.  You need more.  I resist.  Debate.  A fight.  We rationalize.  I accept defeat and feed the addict, bathing in the sensations until they flit away again.  More.  No.  More!  At what cost?  MORE!!  I think we’ve had enouMORE I SAID!  GIVE. ME. MORE!  And I do.

So where do we go from here, my addict and I?  We spread our disease and share our poison.  We infect those around us and seek out our kindred.  So I share with you.

  • Dark chocolate
  • Peanut butter
  • Maple syrup
  • Crispy rice

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler.  While that’s happening, mix the peanut butter, maple syrup and crispy rice (cereal) together into spherical-like blobs.  I assume I don’t have to say “put them on a pan” or other more familiar, obvious steps.  While you’re waiting for the chocolate to melt, drop them in the freezer to make them easier to handle.  Pour melted chocolate over spheri-blobs.  Eat.  Eat more.  Eat more than you should.  Gorge.  The earthly equivalent of the White Witch’s Turkish delight.  My wife is my dealer.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I need another hit.

 

A Dangerous October

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The conversation went something like this: “You’re obsessed.”  “No, just dedicated.”  “Obsessed.” “Persistent.”  Ob. Sessed.”  “Committed, and perhaps a bit competitive.”  “Uh huh…obsessed.”  4000 kilometers came and went on Saturday but not without the earlier blessings (and pointing-out-the-obvious) of Tracey to start hammering out consistent 80km days.  A late-September rally saw a sudden surge in weekly mileage, my first metriccentury, those 80km commutes and suddenly we were there - four thousand…and two kilometers (actually, 4032 if we ignore the pointless April 10th starting date).  Calgary to Vancouver to Calgary to Vancouver to Banff – give or take.

Top of 14th Street, 120 meters from the 4000km mark.

In the three and a half weeks I’ve owned the Red Rocket, I’ve put more than half as many miles on it as I rode in all of 2011.  I’ve waxed (un)poetic about it in almost every post since I acquired it and I’m still giddy every time we head out.  I feel guilty that the Rescue Bike – the bike that lived with me as I re-learned how to ride and to love riding now sits forlornly, gathering dust.  It’s been bumped from its prime perch and relegated to “resting up against other stuff” status as the newcomer usurps its role.

All may not be lost though.  This past weekend brought the First Arrival of winter which, as we know, may or may not be the Arrival of Permanent Snow.  With the new weather conditions – blowing snow, treacherously icy paths and roads, not to mention suicidal slippery hills, it’s apparent that I’m grossly un-prepared to continue riding in present conditions.  This presents a problem – I need “stuff” - but with a handy solution – I have an excuse to buy new “stuff”.  I have, I think, enough clothing to get through the early stages of winter so I’m not worried about that, but I do need some traction, badly.

Studded winter bicycle tires exist but they’re expensive.  $100 – give or take a few dollars – each.  Now, if I was certain which bike I was going to ride all winter, or if the Rescue Bike and the Red Rocket had similar tire sizes, then it would be a simple matter of deciding on the tire and picking them up.  This is, predictably, not the case – they wear drastically different wheels and tires.  I need make a choice about where my butt is going to spend the slippery months and live with it.  I want to ride the Red Rocket, but I’m not sure I want to put its drivetrain through that sort of winter abuse.  The studded tires will necessarily be heavier which means more work so for that reason alone I’d rather put them on the lighter bike, but then, there’s an advantage to riding a heavier bike all winter – come summer the light bike with the light tires will be like…well, a rocket.  Having been sliding down the path on its side already, I’d be less concerned with taking a spill on the Rescue bike as well.  Decisions…

What’s so dangerous about October?  Food, snow and food.  In one brief period you have Thanksgiving, Halloween and at least in my case, a serious interruption in the daily physical activity routine.  I’ve been on a mild food bender since Saturday – frozen yogurt, chips, fast food burgers and fries, cheese-filled, jam-topped artery-clogging devices masquerading as breakfast…and supper.  I suspect my recent dip into the 195 pound region is going to be short-lived.  It’s as if an entire summer’s worth of cycling-driven weight loss now hangs by a tenuous thread of mindfulness and willpower.

I watched a short YouTube video on the effect of your inner voice and the impact of positive and negative thoughts.  It reflects a lot of the concepts put forward in the area of neuroplasticity only in a more go-get-’em-tiger fashion.  In essence, the thoughts and stimulus you fill your brain with each day determine the physical structure of your brain (yes, really – why should it react differently than the physical body?) and your unconscious focus.

If you’ve ever taken a driving course, in particular a motorcycle course where you’re taught to weave through a tightly spaced pylon course, you’ll recall it being drilled into your head – don’t look where you’re going, look where you want to go.  This explains how people run into the only object for a hundred miles in any direction – because that’s what they were looking at.  I had an incident during my final 50km ride that drove this home hard.  I was tired, day-dreaming and not paying much attention.  In my own head-space, I was riding fast and staring straight ahead.  I was aware of what I was looking at, but it took a few moments before the grey matter worked out the upcoming events.  I was staring straight into the weir, at the back of the giant sluice gates used to control flow from the Bow into the canal.  Before I realized what was happening, I was heading straight for the edge of the works and into the freezing water at full speed.  A moment of panic as the scenario played out in the mind’s eye before my reflexes finally spun up, applied the brakes and altered our trajectory back onto safer territory.

Your brain operates that way – whatever you’re focused on, that’s what it works on – good or bad.  If you believe that the universe or the global consciousness or quantum physics or traditional deities or what have you listens and responds to the things you’re focusing on and brings those to you as you’ve requested, being aware of your focus and your internal dialogue is key!  Are you focused on where you’re going or where you want to go?

 

 

Some Retrospection

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My last post was written and slapped up without so much as a second look.  It was late, I was tired – I knew I’d wandered from my point but I wanted to put something – anything – up.  I still haven’t read it.  If you’re spending your time to come here and read my ramblings, you deserve better.  My apologies.

First – the obligatory Ridley X-Fire bicycle update.  Still in love with it after 700 kilometers together.  It’s fast, it’s light and it continues to impress me.  The bicycle is amazing – the rider however is another matter.

Previous to picking up a bicycle last year, I didn’t care about cycling, it’s stars or it’s problems.  I’d heard of Lance Armstrong of course, you’d have to have lived in a cave not to, but Verbruggen, McQuaid, Landis, Andreu and so on – never.  No idea.  The UCI?  Never heard of it.  I admit to being fascinated by the Lance Armstrong case though, certainly more-so than my poor wife would like me to be.  When I start a sentence with “I was reading”, she’ll interject without skipping a beat “about Lance Armstrong”.  She’s right more than she should be perhaps.  Why should I care about Lance?

The obvious of course – a superstar cyclist, paragon of perseverance, triumph and the will to win, cancer conqueror and philanthropist being outed as a cheat, a doper, a liar and a bully.  I didn’t have much of an opinion of the man before, which is to say I didn’t have one, not that I viewed him dimly.  Getting on that bike led to paying attention to Ryder Hesjedal’s performance in the Giro, which in turn led to following some cycling journos and bloggers on Twitter and suddenly finding myself bombarded with details.

Intrigue and suspense, the hero / villain, the villain / hero (or heroes in this case), allegations of a corrupt system that protected it’s star personality while tossing others under the proverbial bus, dodgy European hotels, private jets and shadowy doctors.  Most of the tweeted allegations have shown up in the 1000+ page USADA Reasoned Decision in sworn affidavits which they published on a special website.  It will take a feat of unimaginable legal gymnastics for the UCI to refuse to strip Lance of his results now.

Given the mountain of sworn testimony, there’s no doubt in my mind the man is guilty of cheating through the use of illegal performance enhancing drugs.  The multitude of sworn testimonies that fit together nicely paint a picture that is every bit, if not worse, than the man the USADA made him out to be.  Now, while it’s my opinion that the sworn testimonies are accurate depictions of reality, it must also be said that it’s possible everyone is lying.  That begs the question though – what kind of individual must you be to have 11 former teammates – one of whom you described as a brother – and 14 (or was it 25?) additional connected individuals all conspire to ruin your life in such a fashion?  Possible?  Sure – but not probable.

So – does it matter to his legion of Livestrong fans?  Does it change their perception of him?  His foundation?  Cancer being what it is, it wasn’t hard to reach into my little circle of connections to find some input from people touched by cancer.  Perhaps being Canadians, his charm is slightly muted, the Foundation’s work less tangible but the majority of feedback I received could be categorized as “Meh – whatever”.  They have no opinion of the foundation or of the man.  They’ve not followed the story beyond filing the soundbites in the dim recesses of the “unlikely to be used again” section of their memory.  For them, it isn’t even much ado about nothing – all of it is simply…nothing.

Others had more opinion on the matter, but not a whole lot more information than the previous group.  Distilled, it comes to this “We’re all human and make mistakes”.  When probed a little further, they believed he’d been accused of using steroids to win – full stop.  They didn’t reveal being aware of the remaining accusations - threatening teammate’s wives, telling new riders to get with the (doping) program or they’d find themselves terminated, relentlessly crushing anyone who dared speak the truth – even under oath.  I didn’t offer up the information – my purpose was not to debate or change anyone’s position after all – I wanted their unfiltered view.

What I didn’t find?  People who railed against the injustice of the witch hunt or who had digested the 200 page summary and determined that the witch hunt had found an undisputed witch.  Not a single person seemed to have consumed the volume of information I’ve read – which is not to say that their positions are incorrect or that I know and you don’t – only that I’m the foolish one spending my time reading it all…for purely spurious reasons.

What of Livestrong?  My wife – a survivor – feels as I do, that nobody is uni-dimensional.  Nobody is completely evil or without anything redeeming.  Similarly, nobody is without failure or lapse in character or judgement.  I suspect I’d have chased the money as a pro cyclist and doped to the eyeballs, rationalizing it in whatever twisted way was required, or maybe not.  It’s easy to say I wouldn’t today but 20 years ago I wasn’t me.  So, Lance’s cycling-related actions, despite providing the basis for the foundation he promotes, don’t need to overshadow the work they do…whatever that is.