It’s All About the Bike

After reflecting on this evening’s Wednesday Night Unfriendly Ride, from Park City to Kamas and back to Park City, I was contemplating how much I hate road cycling when my legs feel like wood. I had a few issues tonight:

1. Dead legs because I was off the bike for a week while on vacation.
2. Slight headache from working too hard in an office where little things get in the way of the big ones.
3. Or maybe that headache was from working too hard and forgetting to drink water most of the day.
4. Saddle height adjustment that made sense, but just didn’t feel quite right. You raise your saddle a millimeter and it feels like a mile.
5. Stopping with Jasonn after he flatted in Brown’s Canyon and then riding the whole way up with nobody to draft off of.
6. Headwind. See #5.
7. Freaked out every time a truck went past because of the recent death of a Park City woman who crashed while riding down Brown’s Canyon last Saturday. 

It’s really pretty fun when your legs are good and you can get out there and slay people. It can sometimes feel effortless. When it’s miserable and every pedal stroke feels like a punch to the loins, it’s hard to imagine why we do it. So then I read the article on cyclingnews.com that Richie Rich finally admitted to taking EPO in the Tour de France this year. Here are a few thoughts that really describe how I feel about doping:

1. Cheaters will never admit to cheating. They’ll say they made a mistake. A bad choice in a moment of weakness. I’m sorry, but that does nothing to humanize an egomaniac like Ricco.
2. Cheaters will never admit to how long they have cheated. I only used EPO once, the time one time I happened to get caught. But the rest of the time, I was clean.
3. Cheaters who are young have nothing to lose. Ricco will be racing again in two years. He should be banned from the sport and required to give back all his winnings and salary, but he probably has that all neatly tucked away in Monaco.
4. Ricco has a point: the testing must suck if he was tested more than once but only popped a positive once. He says the testing is flawed. I say he fucked up and got lazy with his masking. But maybe he’s right. How many other small fish cheaters are slipping back into the water through the holes in the nets? Maybe they only care about catching the big ones?
5. Like reformed doper and prodigal son David Millar says: if a rider looks too good to be true, they probably are too good to be true. After all, he should know.
6. Ricco idolized Pantani. Enough said. Pantani died alone with a bag of blow on the table. Do performance enhancing drugs become addictive? Are there some athletes who have addictive personalities and they are going to risk everything because they can’t help it?

I’ve never taken EPO when I was racing or even thought of it, but I know people who have. Thing is, for how wooden my legs were today, all the EPO in the world wouldn’t have made me ride any faster or made it feel any less hateful.