Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Will the real ....... please stand up?

Alex I'll take Team Tom's for 200....

I have friends on the team that are real characters that you cannot make up.  Truth is stranger than fiction, but in this case life is art and there is no imitation or artificial ingredients involved.  I am not going to use "real" names (to protect the guilty), and all people or persons can and should resemble actual people.  Please note that there were no animals harmed during the posting of this blog.

I ride bikes with a horse of a man, a draft horse that can run with the best of the thoroughbreds.  We will call him James.  I use draft horse, because James is all work.  It's not that he doesn't know better, he does.  He chooses to work.  There is no happiness greater than going to the front and working.  Working people over and pushing the pace all the way up to 11.  That's 11 on the volume, tell me that doesn't hurt. 

Pain is James' sidekick, he will bring him along wherever he goes.  Go on a recovery ride with James and he will introduce you.  James is very generous with his relationship with pain, he feels that everyone who he meets and rides or races with should meet his sidekick.  Comfortable is a word that is foreign to James and his friend, and they make sure that if you are around them that it is a word that you will never use as an adjective.

James is ADHD in the peloton, he can't just "sit in".  Sitting in is a death sentence, and weak.  Tactics be damned.  Full gas.  James has two speeds.  Drive the pace, and Attack.  Shelling half the field is a podium finish, seeing wrenched faces struggling is a joy.  Putting ones body in the red so that you can make other people suffer, is a job well done.

 James is an equal opportunity sadist, I've been personally "friendly fire" dropped by James not once -but several times.  If you get in a paceline with James, make sure he is not behind you.  James is magic.  He can make pacelines disappear.  If he is behind you in a paceline and when your turn is up, and you go to the back, it's gone. 
Vanished into thin air. 
You have just been dropped.

1 comment:

  1. In these moments I simply work the back door of the paceline, and scream HOME JAMES -- while I hold on for grim death

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