The yell from behind sounded too close to have been caused by anyone but me. The reason and its simplicity resulted from the fact that our group had stretched into a thread of single-file riders as we crested a hill. As the grade eased off and my desperation to remain in contact eased from terror into worry, and my legs carried all the lactic acid I could stand—literally—I sat down on my saddle. As my butt dropped the inches into position, I’d eased off my pedal stroke much the way we relax our legs as we sit.
Behind me, the rider clinging to my wheel saw the gap between it and his front wheel cut by half. A foot shrank to six inches, and while we were all moving forward at better than 20 mph, in his perception, a microcosm of relativity, I moved backward.
He yelled, “Hey, take that with you!”
It was a rookie mistake on my part. I was new to elite masters racing and my growth in fitness had outpaced my growth in ability, the kid whose feet grew so fast he skipped a size in shoes.
Minutes later, when our heart rates had cooled to simmer, he pulled alongside me and said, “You gotta pedal as you sit.” From his perspective, I was leaving my bike behind. I needed to keep the pressure on the pedals as I sat so that my pace didn’t drop by half a mile per hour.
As skills go, it was next-level, the sort of subtlety that only those who have practiced at the highest levels would notice. Most group rides I did rarely bunched up to the degree that someone would notice, let alone complain, or so I thought.
I was embarrassed at being chided and swore to myself no one would ever again say that to me.
Ambition can express itself in myriad ways. I possess a keen sense of the social contract, so it is perhaps not surprising that for me, I grew more concerned with whether I was a trusted wheel than the fastest wheel. It mattered to me that riders know they could follow me and I would ride a consistent line, making for a draft for others to follow. My work ethic came with a tendency to pull for too long, and while I wouldn’t blow mid-pull, I didn’t always have the endurance to last the whole of the day. Bound by my sense of the racer’s code—you take your pulls—I’d stay in the rotation long past what my legs could sell.
The lesson for me was that my pride was driving a misplaced sense of honor. I realized that I was riding with a need for the riders around me to respect my riding—I wanted their approval. I’m not sure when I began to earn the respect of other riders, but by the time I realized had earned it, I’d learned how to sit down—the right way.