Mankato Area Cycling Team

Just have to say....
I had a BLAST tonight at Franklin School. I met some excited young cyclists who will join the local cycling team.
Singletrack High is so much fun. I made me want to just get out and ride right now, but it's late and dark and cold and windy. I'm hoping that it will be nicer in the morning, and maybe I can sneak in a ride before school.
Thanks Mike Busch and Matt Busch and Jenna and Justin Reinhardt from Nicollet Bike for all making this happen!

I got to talk a bit about Chasing AllieCat (and even read my favorite race scene), and we watched the trailer, too! It was much fun!


If you have a chance to see Singletrack High, and you have the least interest in cycling, see it!

The Rider by Tim Krabbé

Book Review, or maybe book rave?
The Rider by Tim Krabbé. Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition 2003 (Originally published in the Netherlands in 1978).


The Rider wins my heart. This novel, by Tim Krabbé and translated from Dutch, is like watching a classic one-day race from inside the peleton. For anyone who’s ridden a bike competitively, or ridden “over your head” to keep up with buddies, or seen black from cranking up a hill so big you think it’ll kill you, you will understand this book. The translator Sam Garrett did a beautiful job because the language and metaphors are spot-on. Krabbé has nailed the physical and psychological agony and joy. Some gems:

Despuech, who has just made a break but obviously won’t stay away off the front.: Despuech is crazy. Despuech is only showing us that he doesn’t stand a chance in hell. He knows it too, but still it’s a fact: he has to choose between finishing at the back after shining, or finishing at the back after not having shone at all. Dozeas of riders are now thinking the word ‘Despuech’, and people along the route will clap for him. And later all the riders will slide right over him, like a net over an undersized fish.
Gradually I find a cadence. Climbing is a rhythm, a trance; you have to rock your organs’ protests back to sleep.

I shift down. Forty-three nineteen: the gear of champions. How the hell do I keep talking myself into racing?



Gerrri Knetemann: “You guys need to suffer more, get dirtier; you should arrive at the top in a casket, that’s what we pay you for.”

Asked about the pain of getting dropped, Knetemann say, “It’s too bad, sir, but at a certain point you just can’t do it. And when can’t do it any more, you get dropped. Too bad. Nothing to make a fuss about.”

Perhaps I love this book so much because the protagonist narrating the story is a journalist/writer turned cyclist at age thirty. I fancy myself a combination of those two, so I particularly loved this little soliloquy: “I believed that, while cycling, I would come up with thoughts and ideas for the stories I’d be writing the rest of the time. Fat chance. The rest of my time I spent jotting in my cycling logbook and keeping statistics on my distance and times, and while cycling I thought of nothing at all.

Ha!! 
Fear of heights, multiplied by my velocity. Don’t look to the side. The wind blows right through me…

Descents scare me, I’m the worst downhill rider here…

A sign. It says that the speed limit here is 60 kilometers per hour. My brain flashes a joke for my approval: point at that sign and waggle my finger at the others. Joke rejected.

Curves.

Yup. there we go.I think of coming down a mountain in Eastern Washington State in a small group ride from the The Bicycle Butler bike shop. Switchbacks and all, the pack flying. I was in my drops, aero, keeping up, and then--a switchback, I braked—out of instinct and self-preservation—I slowed, and I was dropped like a wounded bird from the flock.
...saw a rider meticulously peeling a banana with both hands on a downhill stretch at 65 kilometers an hour…
Comments like those about the “up-and coming Hinault” and anectodes of cycling history woven in the consciousness of the rider—the narrator—all in the course of a 150 km race make us as readers feel part of cycling history, part of this race in 1977

Who the hell goes cycling on a hot day like this?
The book’s opening will grab you, if you are one who identifies with the story, or if you are obsessive about any passion in your life. The narrator looks up from his gear at the spectators. "Non-racers…The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

Perhaps that’s the crux of it. When cycling becomes so central to our core that a life without it seems empty: there, I figured it out. That’s why I love this book so much.

Another rejection

Slider's Son garnered its second rejection this week. "Not enough historical detail" is what Calkins Creek said. George is baffled by that (maybe more than I am, even), so he's going to ask them what they meant by that. In the meantime, I'm going to spread in some more Depression-era details into the manuscript. I was mostly concerned with the character in the small town and making his life real. Guess I'll try to make the national news come home to roost more than it does already.

I have some ideas. I'm going to add some of them this weekend.

I wish I could get a book right the first time. Or second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth. Wonder what it means that I have to revise at least TWELVE times before anything gets published.

It mostly means that I should do nothing but write and maybe I'd get a book done WAY faster (and be with my kids, and be with friends, and ride my bike, and play with Freya--oh, yeah, and teach and grade papers).

Oh, well. I'm heading out on my bike to THINK in a few minutes.

October 7 Mankato River Ramble and other things

Today, I rode as a marshall for the Mankato River Ramble bike ride. What a blast! Great people, good ride, well organized event...just all around fun. I rode to and from the ride, so I got about 56 miles in. What a great day for a ride. 

Below: The FLYING PENGUINS (Jon Anderson at left--Jon is the first person who ever made me think I might be able to be a serious cyclist). 

I met some pretty cool new friends on the ride, too.

And bikes galore at the Rapidan park. Pie from Jenny at the Dam Store. Everybody was delighted.

And entirely unrelated, Tuesday night is the big meeting about the proposed frac sand plant in Lime Township. Now we realize we need to get the TOWNSHIP in charge of the planning...to be the planning committee or to appoint one, so the township can set the conditions for the use permit. Hopefully, a moratorium can be placed on its operation for a year....but that's not entirely looking hopeful.  More research needs to be done FAST!!!
Mankato Airport, Tuesday, Oct. 9, 7:30 p.m. EVERYBODY can come!

Lance Armstrong, cycling

I love this guy's perspective on the Lance Armstrong scandal.
He sort of epitomizes what I've been saying all along.
It's too late to make a deal out of this. He won seven Tours and didn't get caught then. How far back would we go to strip champions who have doped through history? More and more evidence about more and more world greats comes to light....where do we stop?

Once again, I compare Lance to Thomas Jefferson. Should we negate what Jefferson said about freedom because he owned slaves and heartily believed that slavery was wrong? Do we write Jefferson out of the history books as a result? It's a moot point.
Let the record stand and clean up the sport now. Even if lots of my die-hard cycling friends don't like Lance, nobody can dispute what Lance did for the sport.

You want to ride the Tour de France even with performance-enhancing drugs? You think you could do what he did?  Let's let him be a hero.

Harvest and Cycling, my autumn treasures

Autumn has a way of making us pensive, don't you think? Of course, it makes us aware of the passing of time. This year, it's all the more true: my son is getting married in a week, and my grandson turned one year old this past week. But I don't feel old. I just feel as if I'm gathering more information about the world inside. I can only, only hope that makes me a better writer.

I get up a little slower when I've been sitting on the floor, but otherwise, I still feel as physically capable as ever. Maybe I'm fooling myself. But then again...I had a happy realization while cycling last week. I love watching the long shadows during an evening ride in the fall. What I don't love is that dark comes so quickly. Twice this year, I've squeaked home on my bike in the throes of darkness. A couple near misses. Time to mount my light for safety--just in case.

But watching my own shadow, I snapped this self-portrait.  I remember how when I started riding fifteen (!!?) years ago, the guys' long shadows were so smooth; their long shadow legs looked like smooth, fast pistons stretching out, up and down the ditches as we passed. Mine looked awkward and certainly not smooth by comparison. Last week, I watched my shadow and made this happy discovery: lo and behold, somewhere, somehow in the last decade and a half of riding, my own cadence has become smoother. My legs looked like pistons, too. I'm going to relish that realization.

Then again, there's the beauty of harvest. It's sad to me because it means soon the fields will be bare and brown-black although there's a certain beauty of bounty in that, too. It also means the long Minnesota winter is too soon upon is.

The harvest itself fills my heart so full that sometimes I think it will burst (to embrace a cliche). Riding my bike alongside tractors, golden beanfields, or a combine like the one in this picture I took last week reminds me of the richness our soil still holds (IF we take care of it). The smells and sounds wash over me with memories: walking out to Dad's combine in my Halloween costume to show him my ghostly self before we went trick-or-treating; riding rounds in the combine with him, working aloud on my Confirmation memory work; just riding, my forehead pressed against the glass window (exactly as Lainey does in Jake Riley: Irreparably Damaged), watching the grain or corn wash like a wave up into the combine header.  And those glorious last autumns at home, when both my brother Bill and Dad were out in the field and they trusted me to do the chores all by myself. I felt so useful. What a good thing to feel.

There was the night when I was probably sixteen when I drove the Cub Cadet into the hog lot with a cart full of 5-gallon buckets of feed, and realized I couldn't back it out without the cart twisting sideways.  I was utterly stuck. What did I do? I emptied the buckets, fed the pigs, and then straightened the cart behind the little tractor by  herking it around by hand so I could back out. I don't think I ever told Dad or Bill about that and here I am, publishing it for the world. I still can't back a wagon or a cart to save my neck.

But I can ride my bike down county highways, flanked on both sides by golden, browning fields of grain and corn, and breathe it in, and be glad to be this tiny part of the plenty of the earth.

Tour de Suisse...once again, almost famous!

So I've been out of the loop for two days, helping Josh and Emily work on their house. Tonight, I checked on the Tour de Suisse, only to find out that Cancellera (one of my favorite riders) won the prologue in Lugano, Switzerland! We (students and Kurt and I) were in Lugano just a couple weeks ago. I took this photo from Lugano, looking across the bay--look! It's the same mountain in this photo of Cancellera's winning ride! But wait. Eek.

Blogger cuts off the photo; Cancellera's not even in the picture the way blogger crops it! So check it out here if you're interested. Here's a youtube of most of the ride--the crazy fast turns on a downhill ride. Scaryfast.

Death in Italy

Wouter Weylandt, a Leopard-Trek rider (my new self-proclaimed favorite team for the year in pro cycling) crashed and died today on stage 3 of the Giro d'Italia.

I feel a strange kinship...since I'll be going to Italy by the end of the race. Such a sad, sad day for cycling.

Here's the premiere of the trailer for Chasing AllieCat!