The first time I lined up for a bike race, my sole mission was to see if I was strong enough to stay with the pack. I did, but what I though the race had been, which is to say the whole of the race up to the final 500 meters, was not the race at all. What unfolded in the final 500m turned out to be the domain of guys who never bothered to put their noses in the wind until after our last turn.
What I thought had been strength—the riders I thought had been the strongest—turned out to be bravura, a child’s bragging. Half a dozen riders came around me as I arced toward the yellow lines and left me behind, the gap growing at a rate I didn’t think was possible for anyone not already racing as a pro.
That was my first lesson in how bike racing was a game and you had to choose which game you wanted to play. Anyone who wanted to go out and ride as hard as possible for the length of the race could do so. Riding hard at the front is alpha stuff, the act of someone who has something to prove. It’s the best way to get stronger, but it won’t teach us how to win. It won’t win the race.
Winning means waiting.
Waiting is the currency of the patient. It is what we do when we know that not all the cards have been played—or not all the attacks have gone.
As I gained experience, I began to appreciate that those hard early efforts needed more than to be hard. They needed to be as hard as was possible, in order to shed anyone who wanted a free ride to the final sprint. The riders who knew they could sprint were only going to ride as hard as necessary to stay with the bunch to the finish.
I learned that unless I was going hard enough to string riders out single-file, there was little point to being at the front, that until we were single-file, the splintering necessary to make a race something other than a cruise to the final sprint was unlikely to unfold.
That caused me to confront a question: Was I willing to go as hard as I possibly could with the race less than half complete? If I waited until the end of the race to go as hard as I possibly could, I would still be beaten in the sprint by better sprinters. But if I attacked with everything I had, or if I used everything I had to follow an attacking rider—there might be no sprinters at the finish.
It was when I began racing on teams with more than three or four riders in the field that I learned how my defensive riding could help a stronger teammate. I had a teammate who was an incredibly strong time trialist. He could make a stopwatch blanch.
With a stronger teammate to protect, my role shifted to something other than winning outright, and at that point, that’s when road racing become most interesting for me. Being the teammate to a rider capable of winning gave me a chance to leave a mark on a race in a way that mattered.
Early in the race, the attacks would begin and as soon as he and one or two riders from other teams would escape, my job began.
I was the cycling equivalent to the offensive lineman. I didn’t physically block anyone, but I’d do all I could to disrupt what the other teams were doing. If several teams organized a chase and everyone pulled off to the left as the paceline circulated, I’d infiltrate it and following a brief, underpowered pull at the front, I’d pull of to the right, meaning that the rider who had previously been ahead of me and had been awaiting my wheel to recover from his pull didn’t find reprieve. And any impatient rider coming up the right and wanting to drive the pace invariably found themselves having to work around me as I dropped back through the field.
On occasions that a break made it up the road without our guy, I would cajole other teams into the chase, often recruiting teammates of riders in the break; with so many jerseys decorated in black, white and red, it was hard to tell which was which at 100 meters and a heart rate of 170 bpm. By the time they could tell they had a teammate in the breakaway, they were close enough that the catch had grown imminent.
Yes, I got cussed out lots.
The thing was, to me, we were playing a game. Monopoly money for the aerobic set. I took none of it personally and meant none of it personally. It was only after I stopped attaching a race’s outcome to my identity that racing became fun.
Image: Jorge “Koky” Flores, Justpedal