“Two inches!” He yelled.
“I want you two inches off my rear wheel.”
We were deep enough into the Berkshire Mountains that I didn’t know where we were. The road was lined with trees and the occasional farm. The sky was so gray it seemed to drain color from the surrounding forest. The temperature hovered in that range that chaps lips in less than an hour.
My teammate Paul was a national-caliber rider, and spent time with the famous French club ACBB and on the Junior National Team under Eddie B. To me, he was an encyclopedia of cycling how-to. If he’d told me to eat horse meat, I probably would have.
If I’d lost his wheel, I could have wound up in Vermont or New York, not back at the UMASS Newman Center, where I hoped to arrive, regardless of condition. Paul had elected to shepherd us when the bulk of the team sped away toward Brattleboro, a distance that seemed impossible at the speed I was going when I got dropped.
He turned around again, pointed down at his rear wheel and said, “Two inches!” I’d never ridden so close to another rider and the headwind was stiff enough that shifting slightly left or right of his wheel would simply trade terror for suffering. Zero-sum math a first-grader could do.
My Avocet computer reported that we were doing 23 mph, but it couldn’t factor the extra work of riding into a headwind. On my wheel was another teammate, just as green as I. By luck of some draw I’d wound up on Paul’s wheel and with him doing all the pulling there was no excuse to shuffle me to the back of our trio. Paul couldn’t see Mike leaving a bigger, less insane gap.
Somewhere in our third hour I traded my terror of being discarded like a burger wrapper with the terror of Paul admonishing me for leaving too big a gap. Was one fear worse than the other? I can’t say because what lingers in my amygdala is my inability to go any harder than I already was during those moments I performed a system check.
We talk about muscle memory, knowing the feel of what it is to do a thing. That knowledge doesn’t come in a single lesson, but that was a day where my desperation taught me more about how to match the effort of the rider ahead of me in a way no other day ever could.