Hung up.

I’m hung up on something at the moment. The other day I received the August issue of Bicycling, which has been pretty damn good since the redesign. I opened it up and ran through the table of contents, looking for the pages that contained Bill Strickland’s path to the cyclist he once was (pg 50) I then set it down and went about the process of recovering from my ride. Later that night I reaped my reward as I laid in bed with two magazines, my journal and two books (The Lady is out of town so I fill her space with books.). I was not let down. Bill Strickland always delivers the goods.

I like, most amateurs I assume, love reading about the trials of  the PROs, but what I really want love hearing about it people like me (not that I’m like Strickland). I want to know how others, who are going after the same thing I am, are experiencing what I’m going through. Maybe I’m just looking for validation. Maybe I assume that everyone thinks about this silly pursuit the way I do. But maybe that’s a huge leap.

There’s a popular adage (among the bike racing types at least) that states bike racing mirrors life. Even as I was getting into this silly pursuit I thought that statement was bullshit and really I’m still not sure I agree with it, though someone who doesn’t race is trying to convince me other wise.

I’d been turning these ideas over in my head for the last couple weeks when I read this month’s Pursuit column (its not online yet). Here’s the bit of text that hit me.

“What he taught me about riding taught me that how you ride is about how you live, and that if you were lucky you could make how you live about how you ride”

That hit me hard. So hard that I read it at least five times before I move on to the rest of piece. It hit to the very center of what I was trying to talk about here: The Line. I’m not ready to fully dump this on all of you yet. I will say that you should re-read the quote above, then think about all the times I’ve launched a desperate, ill-timed, doomed attack and you’ll understand how my racing mirroirs the way I currently live my life.

If I change the way I race and ride, will it filter down into the things that matter in my life? That’s what I’m about, that’s what this blog is about, that’s why I want to dig so much deeper than I have.  Let’s hope so.