The Weakest Link

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My heart is pounding so hard that it feels as though it is hitting the inside of my ribs with each beat. Breath coming in desperate gasps; I can't push enough air from my body to take anymore in. The burning sensation is flowing up my legs, my vision is turning to pinpoints. The world is shifting and breaking away, and all I can think is that I do not know when this will end.

Often I feel that I am the weakest link. As an athlete I am naturally competitive. Training to make myself stronger, faster and fitter has been of exceptional interest to me ever since I understood the concept as a girl, watching the Summer Olympics for the first time. After that first Olympics I was hooked. I wanted to be an Olympian. Other kids wanted to be a Firefighter, or a Veterinarian (I did go through a phase where I wanted to be a Vet), but no, I wanted to go to the Olympics. I would design elaborate courses in my backyard and make all my neighborhood friends compete. In retrospect I think they thought it was stupid; I thought it was awesome.

When the Olympics came around every four years I spent the entire two weeks in this state of awestruck inspiration. I watched everything. I made my parents buy stacks of blank VHS tapes so that I could record everything. I even watched the closing ceremony (which I've now learned that nobody does), my face glued to the TV as I watched my obsession being packed away; vowing as the host of the next Olympics called to the youth of the world that I would be there someday.

It is my nature to reach far beyond my own capacity, often without a shred of an idea of how I'm going to accomplish the feats that I dream up. I really believed that I would go to the Olympics one day. 

I'm all grown up now and with a healthy dose of reality and cynicism I understand perfectly clearly that I don't have an ice cube's chance in hell of making it to the Olympics for cycling. I am strong, I am fit, I have years of training layered onto my body like some kind of absurd cake where the frosting is tan lines on your thighs that never go away--BUT it is not enough. There are so many women who are stronger, fitter, faster, have more ridiculous tan lines. This is simply a reality that I have had to accept, a reality that forces the question of why? Why do this? Why train so hard when I am so sure that I will never be the best? This is a question that my Mother puts to me when I am in particularly hard training blocks and she asks me how I'm doing.

Exhausted.

Sore.

'Why don't you take a break?' she always asks me.

I can't. I can't take a break, and it's not because I have someone with a whip behind me forcing me onward. Well, I do have someone with a whip behind me, but it is myself. 

Training doesn't necessarily make me feel strong, however. Most of the time it makes me feel very weak.

Most of the time I train alone. There is something very zen about embarking on a training ride alone, like some sort of stoic warrior with only my wits and my iPod for survival. However, the rest of the time I'm training with men. Since I am a woman, this gives me an absolutely warped perception of my own fitness and ability simply because when I train with men I am constantly getting my butt decisively handed to me. Oftentimes I am dangling off the back, struggling to stay with the group, watching my friends, my male friends, chatting and pedaling with ease. This makes me feel very weak.

This is a phenomena that all female athletes in endurance sports have experienced at one point, and something that I just don't think men understand. Suiting up for a ride with my male friends, a few of which are real-live pros (as opposed to dead pros) for me feels like preparing to go into battle. It is distinct from a race because in a race with your peers you know that there is a possibility that you will come out on top, whereas in riding with the boys I know that at some point a grenade will be thrown into my foxhole and I will not escape from it.

'This is good for you,' they say, 'it will make you stronger,' they chirp as they pedal in front of me with lightness and ease, as my vision starts to swim and my lungs simply cannot fill themselves with enough air.

There is a certain stoicism associated with training rides, one in which you must endure, even if it is killing you, and you must do it silently. I don't know when this unwritten rule was created or conveyed to me but I know deep inside my soul that the only way I will escape the shit talking when I'm on a ride and I'm so deep in the pain cave there will never be any light for me again, is to literally die on the side of the road. I picture this as tantamount to the story of the Spartan soldier who brought a fox back to training camp without killing it, and instead of face the shame of being caught with his meal, he let the fox eviscerate him in silence while he listened to a training lecture.

In most of the training rides I do with men, the fox is eating me alive. The worst part of this pain is not the searing in my legs, the feeling of near-drowning in my lungs, but the idea that this ride is four hours long, and I do not know when the pain will stop. They have the controls, and they can twist them as they please to ramp up the amount of agony I experience, and the only way I can stop it is if I rip out the plug, and I hate ripping out the plug.

It's a test, it's always a test. How much can you endure?

Unfortunately my ability take these doses of exercise-induced torture have become on par with my own self image. Cycling and training are so intrinsically entwined with my own being that it is very hard for me to separate out my performance on the bike and my self worth. Logically, I know this is a dangerous path to follow, but sometimes I feel that I can't help it. What makes it all the harder is that I am putting myself into situations, by my own choosing, in which I am the weakest link. This makes it very hard to see myself as a strong, capable athlete.

However, if this is what I want, what I want to be, a half-way decent cyclist, a professional cyclist then I will give the controls to my training away again and again. 

As I go deeper down this rabbit-hole it gets harder and harder to separate myself from my training, gets harder and harder to see myself as having value without the bicycle. It is a bit surreal however that I derive self worth from my cardiovascular and muscular systems.

Unfortunately I am guilty of this perpetuation as well. I have been so trained to expect this kind of behavior from people that sometimes when I take a friend on a group ride and they go from quietly riding in the group to ten miles off the back it's not cause for alarm.

Oops, so and so has cracked, guess we were going too hard.

There is no canary in this coal mine, just the sudden explosion.

 It seems like it would be nicer and more efficient for us to simply let each other know when we're hitting the breaking point, so we can all help them along, instead of watching them detonate and crawl into the woods in despair. Ah, but this would of course go against the whole 'hard man' (hard woman!) aspect of the sport, and far be it from me to change tradition!

Really though, people in the cycling world are always wondering why there are so few women who race, in comparison to the number of men. Maybe this gives a little insight, at least into my brain, and why I chose to do this. But it is a hard thing to do, for the most basic reason that you are giving someone a bat and saying, 'Here you go, beat the shit out of me! It will make me stronger!'