Desperation

The road split two almond orchards in the Central Valley of California, near towns with names only Californians can remember. The spring rains brought forth blossoms on the trees, turning them white, and bees, from boxes that lined the side of the road, crisscrossed like tiny UPS trucks making their rounds.

The surface of the road told anyone passing over it how much it mattered, which was not much. How the name chip seal came to join our lexicon, I can’t figure. The chips are not sealed. They fly up off the road, tinging off frames, tocking off helmets, ticking off glasses and the riders wearing them. The undulations tell us that the road didn’t merit enough time or effort to drive a steamroller this far into the countryside. Every now and then a lump hefted a rear wheel into the air and it was possible to see the rider’s body tense in that blink.

None of that mattered, though.

I was on the wheel of a rider I didn’t know, a big guy and to the degree that I’d win anything that day, I’d won his wheel from two other riders who didn’t know how to use a crosswind to saw people off the paceline. But sitting on his wheel served up a loss as much as a win. Having slotted into the last good draft to be had, I picked up a responsibility: A line of riders trailed behind me like the tail of a kite—and I needed to stay there otherwise everyone who was on my wheel would be dropped.

I’ve never faced a life-or-death fight, a situation in which either I mustered all that was necessary to survive or my surrender would see me give up the whole of my future. And I hope I never do because that would mean a level of fright beyond anything I’ve felt. I point this out because every time I’ve been in a single-file line of riders fighting to maintain contact, the desperation I felt seemed existential. I didn’t care about how nothing truly bad would happen if I pulled to the right and flicked my elbow; in the moment, stasis equaled victory.

I wonder how much my fear of being dropped caused my heart rate to rise. At the level of effort an extra four or five beats per minute divides the margin between maintaining and the burn of having my blood replaced with hydrochloric acid.

Alpinists speak of how a climb is clarifying, that the margin between success and death—for any failure results in a memorial service—strips away all the complications of the modern world.

As we cut between the orchards and farm fields the world felt confined to the moment at hand, each effort the criteria by which I’d be judged, not by Saint Peter, but by the other racers with designs on the white line in the distance. In this world neither resumes nor rap sheets mattered. My legs told everyone around me how much I’d trained, or not.

Each pedal stroke required more effort than the one before it. It’s a cliche to say that seconds stretched into eternity, which is silly; a second is not infinite, but I can say that I’m chastened by how much doubt can be crammed into the tock of a second hand.

As I fought to hold that wheel, I admit, I did so less for myself than for those behind me. I’ve been defeated so often and with such frequency that I’m a gold tier member of the losers club. I could stomach losing a bike race. I could stomach being dropped on a road I didn’t know in a place I didn’t know. But I could not stomach the idea of ending the race for the riders behind me. Whether it was a single rider or dozen didn’t matter. My surrender, had it come, could not avoid collateral damage.

The relief I felt when we turned right and the wind pushed at my hip can’t be overstated. And that’s the part that soothes me. Not that I found relief. No, what eases me in remembering that feeling is that nothing else has ever imparted such an intense existential dread within a given moment. If something so inconsequential as a bike race can offer such disparate degrees of fear and peace, I tell myself the rest can’t be so bad.