The OU Collegiate Race Weekend
Early in the Men’s “C” collegiate cycling* road race at Norman, Oklahoma last weekend I remembered the saying that you never step in the same river twice. Things were happening in this race that wouldn’t have happened last year. Most collegiate "C" road race courses are loops of a ten to fourteen mile course repeated three or four times to get to the requisite distance of about 40 miles. Last year’s C’s would do the first lap almost as an exercise of courteous familiarization. Once we had all seen the course and gotten warmed up, the fastest guys would attack on the first sharp turn of the second lap, establishing a break between them and the slower riders and the result would play out over the remaining thirty or so miles. Not this year, though. A real strong rider from Arkansas, who we’d never seen in a previous race, sprinted off away from us and established a good hundred meter buffer very early into the first lap. “This guy didn’t get the memo,” I thought. So we raced hard to get up to his wheel and pull him back in, expending a lot of energy in the process. The sprint and pull-back process repeated itself for much of the race but we and the UT riders** worked together to pull the guy in, along with some other fast individuals, without actually helping them. Eventually, Bobby Ehrmann, one of our guys riding a heavy aluminum bike with a triple chainring on the front, got the win in the final uphill sprint. He didn’t get it cheap, either, since he pulled at the front of the pack for most of the last five or six miles. We averaged 21.6 mph over 40 miles of a hilly windy course, which I considered to be pretty fast for C’s even though it’s the fastest speeds, and not the average speed, that matters in road cycling. A similar process went down in the Men’s B’s and one of our guys, Ben Baxter, got the win in that group.
Our Saturday was not done, though. We still had a 9-mile time trial that we’d do as two to four person teams. I went with Cale Maupin and Binbin Lu and we did real fine for never having ridden together as a team. 22.2 mph on road bikes after having ridden 40 miles a couple of hours earlier was pretty dang decent. Our first Men’s C team got third place but they rode so well they would have placed second in the Men’s B division. Our Women’s B team tore up their group and won easily.
The bad weather we had been promised for Saturday showed up overnight and by Sunday the criterium course had turned into a slick, puddle-ridden mess. The criterium is all about fast cornering, so the rain was most unwelcome. A big puddle stretched across most of the final (fastest) turn and little shallow rivers cascaded down the finishing stretch. It was an adventure, catching a face full of water rooster-tailing off of the riders in front of me, but I managed a respectable top-ten finish.
The most impactful part of the weekend for me may have been the experience of being in charge of getting nineteen collegiate cyclists safely up there and back with all our bikes and gear. In any group of people that sets forth to do something, you generally have three sub-groups of people: team players, tourists, and terrorists. The terrorists try to blow up everything constructive that goes on in the team. They complain. It’s all about them. They’re unrelentingly negative and they leave no doubt as to whether you’d have been better off leaving them at home. Team players, on the other hand, are looking for ways to help. They want to solve problems instead of pointing out problems or being the problems. Team players help load and unload the trailer in the rain even if they don’t race for another two hours. They’ll share and they’ll help and they’re positive. The tourists are just along for the ride. They’ll follow whoever seems to be the most interesting, and if they start to follow the terrorists your team is in big trouble. In the past couple of weeks of leading the team on road race weekends, I can confidently say we have no terrorists.
Not one.
And we have very few tourists. Just about everyone is a team player: looking for things to do to help the team. And no one wimps out of anything. Our two D racers knew they’d get hammered in the team time trial going against other teams with three and four guys, but they wanted to compete and they rode. I wouldn’t have blamed any new rider for looking at the rainy criterium course Sunday morning and saying, “I think I’m not doing this.” At least one guy raced that course still skinned up from taking a fall the week before. But nobody backed out. Everybody competed.
The more I get to know my teammates the more impressed I am with them. Austin Throop is talented enough to do anything and already knows he wants to be a high school teacher. Biggie Small is on his way to law school. Kristen Kjellberg may be governor of Texas someday if she gets tired of being a veterinarian. Ben Silva, who spent his Christmas break working in clinics in Cuzco, Peru, is on his way to med school next year. Several PhD aerospace engineering students. One of them, Chris Roscoe, got injured so badly racing last year I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had never raced again. After all, he's here to be a rocket scientist, not break himself on a crit course designed by The Three Stooges. But he’s back and even faster this year. Thomas Gilbert (like Cher and Madonna he just goes by one name: Gilbert) won the “D” road and criterium races last week. Nobody had to tell him to move up to “C” this week. He wanted to do it. And he got 4th in the “C” criterium. I put him with a “B” team for the team time trial, and just before they took off, he thanked his teammates for the opportunity to ride with them. And he did great.
Nicole Sharp told me that during the team time trial, she looked around at the work her teammates were putting out and through her own discomfort of effort it occurred to her that there was profound beauty in what they were doing.
That beauty of human excellence is what the ancient Greeks called Arete, which could be interpreted as, “reaching your highest human potential.” Paul used the word in his letter to the Philippians when he said, "Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence (arete), if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." In addition to being noun in the Greek language, Arete was also a goddess in Greek mythology. Prodicus told us in the 5th century B.C. that Arete, along with her counterpart Kakia, appeared at a crossroads to the hero Heracles. Kakia offered Heracles wealth and pleasure. Arete offered him glory and a life of struggle against evil. Heracles chose the path of Arete.
And so did we.
On a windy, rainy weekend in Oklahoma that will not be recognized or remunerated.
We chose Arete.
*There are Men’s A, B, C, and D and Women’s A, B, and C categories, with the A’s being the strongest riders and the “D’s” being mostly inexperienced cyclists. A very few of the A’s wind up riding professionally and the D’s, as the NCAA commercial says, go pro in something else.
**in the collegiate cycling universe the Aggies and Horns are friends
