The 2012 season. Where We Went. What We Saw
Even when I was in junior high already knew I was going to
A&M. I had a poster of Aggie bonfire
on the wall in my room. I’d put a 33 1/3
rpm record of the Aggie Band on my little record player (cassette tapes were
still the stuff of science fiction) and work out with my little plastic-coated,
concrete-filled weight set and dream of playing football someday for the
Aggies.
Corny but true.
I had hopes of doing real well racing in the Men’s C
category this year – at least better than last year. But statistically, it was not to be. In four of the seven road races I finished in
exactly 13th place. The points for
individual rankings in the “C” category extend down to - you guessed it - 12th
place. There were entire weekends where
I travelled, raced my guts out all weekend and came home with 0 points, the
exact same number as the Joes who didn’t even make the trip. When
one studies literature one learns to pay attention to numerology to extract
messages and themes. And for me, the
message was, “Hey, Mark, doing collegiate
cycling full-bore has been OK for you this season, but don’t kid yourself. Don’t think there’s some great future in this
for you. You’re not 21. You’re not a guy free from family
responsibilities. An occasional
race? Great. But every weekend, all weekend?
Not great. Not for you.”
On a personal level, though, I can take solace in the fact
that the C’s were a much stronger, faster group this year than last year. And I can honestly say I got better, faster,
safer and more capable on the bike this season.
I can even sprint some now, which is harder than it sounds. To sprint you put your hands in the drops and
get your butt up off the seat and try to just about twist the handlebars
off. You’re really racing with your
whole body and pushing yourself as hard as you can go and this is at the end of
the race when you’re totally smoked. I also got better at getting around corners at
speed, which is a critical skill for criteriums. I never thought I’d be able to stay at the
front of a criterium averaging nearly 25 mph for the whole race, but I did that
this year. Last year just the thought of
racing a crit would dump a huge load of adrenaline into my bloodstream, but
this year? Time for the crit? Aight, let’s
race.
The road season took a heavy toll on all of us in many
respects. To race the season and do a
couple of pre-season prep races ate up seven out of nine weekends between Feb
25th and April 22nd.
On the out-of-town weekends you leave early Friday afternoon, race twice
on Saturday and once on Sunday and get home late Sunday night exhausted with a
bike to clean, laundry to do, and schoolwork to be done. The race that we hosted and I helped organize
March 3rd and 4th was a huge process that I started
working on about eight months before the event.
The physical toll was not light, either.
We started the team’s training for road season with a 100-mile ride on MLK
Day. We managed to have a huge wreck
just outside of Lake Somerville that resulted in two broken collarbones, a
facial laceration and various skinned up body parts. During the season’s races we had mishaps that
resulted in one concussion and two people skinned up from wrecking in the
gravel, one dislocated collarbone and one broken scapula.
So what did we all get out of this? Well, we were forced to do things that made
us uncomfortable for the good of the team, something I think is more and more
rare. We sometimes had to race in a way
that blew ourselves up but made a faster teammate more successful. We had to get our faces out of our smart
phones and surrender our own agendas to the collective will, which is
significant because college is, in essence, a selfish enterprise. I
get admitted to school, I choose my major, take my classes, make my
grades, get my degree, probably meet my spouse and get my job.
People did things that impressed and surprised me. A couple of guys who were in the background
for most of the season rode like superheroes at the conference
championships. When Cale Maupin started
to dig for the final sprint at the LSU road race I confess that I sat up and
watched him instead of putting my head down and digging, too. It was so great to see that I turned into a
spectator. We did a crit in a driving
rain in Oklahoma and nobody backed down or sat in the van with their lip stuck
out. We were promised some pretty bad
weather up in Wichita Falls but nobody said, “No, I’m not going, the weather’s
going to be bad and I’ve seen the video of the rainy crit up there from two
years ago ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0LHzRZWuEU
). We woke up in Baton Rouge on the morning
of the road race to a downpour of biblical proportions and everybody just got
on the van and didn’t complain (actually, nobody said a word – it was quiet as
church on that van).
Equally remarkable to me is how well I was accepted and
embraced by my teammates. You know, college
is a special, magical time and it isn’t made more special by having some crusty
old dude hanging around who is as old as your dad. But my
teammates have become my great friends.
Proof of that good vibe is the fact that I was able to baptize several
with nicknames that caught on: “Bobby
Jindal” Ehrmann, Chris “The Man with No Tan” Roscoe, Brett “Zhil-bear” Gilbert,
Nicole “The Critter” Sharp, Andrew “Hannibal” Lechner (although Austin Throop
also nicknamed him “Tres Leches” which is really good), “Austin Powers” Throop,
“Zane Grey” Lybrand and my personal favorite: Shawn “Biggie” Small. I even gave nicknames to people from other
teams: John “The Governor” Connolly and “Famous” Amos Zimmermann from UT and “Mean
Girls” (the MSU Women’s team).
So, of course I plan to race again next year, which, unless
something goes dreadfully wrong with my dissertation, will really be my last
season. I just won’t race as much. There’s just no way. I turn 49 this summer, which would make my
racing age 50 in 2013 (your racing age is how old you are on Dec 31 of that
calendar year). That means next year I’ll
be able to race collegiate and compete in the Senior Games.
Now that’s the bomb. . . and groovy, too.
