There are certain things in life that are easy. It is easy, for example, to forget all the things you have ever done and think yourself a swaddling baby child. It is easy to slide backward in a criterium. It is easy to let your nose fill with water as your head bobs just above the surface.
There are easy things, and there are difficult things, and discerning the threshold at which one becomes the other is like finding the sliced end of the tape when it sticks to the roll, slick and gloss, thin.
How easy to write that I am trying my best! How easy to say that I began the week with a cold, that I am allergic to cats, that I stand at a counter forty hours a week. But these things don't matter. The easy things never matter. It is the impossible moment that defines what we are, and all too often cycling insists that I am soft, jiggly, like hospital tapioca. What is life but a boot at your throat always, and when cycling stops being a means of escape, is it just an extension of the life we have made so taxing?
What is important? What is really important? These races are like holding desperately to a rope. Your knuckles whiten and your brow furrows. You do not want to give up. But as your fingers peel, and you readjust for what is to come, you wonder: is it too late? Was it ever early enough? Why afterwards are we so sure we could have stuck when in fact we did not?
I'm not sure there is even really a way to explain what you feel as you start a race like these, knowing that most of the real "big guns" are not even present, that these other ladies' horsepower is sufficient to lay you flat and sad. Is there a way to tell what it is to be thick with rainwater, the road between your teeth, watching for manhole covers buried beneath miniature lakes?
All of this is probably superflous, and that is probably where my problems come from. There can be nothing but your foot on the pedal and your sweat in your eyes, I guess. I will try harder tomorrow!
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