Championships AND Champions

This weekend, Lars Boom worked his ass off and rocked his way to a Dutch National Cyclocross Championships win. In true euro-cross style the course was snowy and muddy as hell, the field was in top-form and Lars' victory is not to be under-appreciated. Proving, however, that he is not to be outdone by his rival, Sven Nys stole the spotlight by returning from a sub-par start and shedding dudes like Bart Wellens and Niels Albert to win the National CX crown in a country that really matters: Belgium. Now I suppose this really isn't fair, it's not Lars' fault where he was born. And you know...  The Netherlands is, (or are or whatever) pretty nice and all what with the legalized prostitution and those "city" bikes and everything. But Belgium gave the world Waffles. So, you know, suck it Netherlands.

Sadly, Nys had to take time out of his much-deserved victory celebration to reprimand a few of his fans for literally pulling Niels Albert from his bike at a critical section. This level of rabid behavior is unfortunate and sick and I am HUGELY impressed that Albert got back on and roared to a ninth-place finish. Then he performed like a true champion with grace and humility when, after expressing sadness at the behavior of the [douchebags] he said: ”But chapeau to Nys, he deserved to win.” That shit is classy and a true departure from the too-oft heard whiny-bullshit in the pro peleton.

To the Velodrome!

What's the best way to gauge the extent of fitness degradation experienced over the course of three entire months spent virtually off-the-bike? Head to Boulder's indoor velodrome with 10 other dudes, the likes of which include a few current and former PRO cyclists, your boss, coworkers and Velonews' own Ben Delaney. Then, after a little more than a quick rundown of shit one should never, ever, under any circumstances do on the track, jump on said track with said people and pedal like hell.

I've been told that BIC has a steeper-than-average learning curve for a velodrome -- because of its very short length and steep banking -- as I do not have any other track experiences to compare it to, I can only say that the first moment, the "oh jesus, am I going to stick, or am I going to slide off of that fucking wall and crash" moment at the Boulder Velodrome is pretty intense. Maybe its not so bad on bigger tracks, but who cares? That is one fun joint.

BIC is a 142 meter wooden track with 45-degree banking. It looks like this. Lap times can often run in the sub-15 second range (the current record stands at about 7.5 seconds). It is, at higher speeds, very slightly dizzying. The experience is something of a cross between a criterium and a ride on an old wooden-tracked roller coaster (with no brakes).

I am -- for the record -- basically unfit. Three months is more than enough time for muscle and cardio systems to assume I've decided to let myself go. For the most part, I hung on. Abstaining from hard effort drills, content to rip around the track as fast and as smoothly as possible. Also, due to some very solid advice from some very solid and helpful guys, I was able to do pretty well at NOT embarrassing myself. *Best piece of advice? "'Stick' and 'Stay' mean exactly the same thing: Don't fucking move" or rather: Hold your line. Also, thanks Joe for insisting I get rollers so many years ago, and for forcing me to ride on them. Balance -- it just so happens -- is important.

The only injury I sustained was a small scratch on my wrist, when, like a rookie instead of a seasoned professional mechanic, I clipped my wrist on the chainring as I hurredly removed my pedals from the rental bike on my way out the door.

The List of Things that I am Afraid of:
- Sharks
- Bears
- Girls with only one name
- Earthquakes
- Steven Spielberg using his vice like grip on big budget scifi to rape another classic movie franchise.
- Riding a bike up a 45 degree wall (in a very straight line).

So I am confronting said fears (just the track bit really). We can go flick off bears at the zoo some other time.

Two Years

730 days ago I woke up sober. I have managed to stay sober since then. That makes today my birthday. There will be cake, preferably chocolate. With cream cheese frosting.

Exactly two years ago -- and for a long time before then -- my life was in absolute tatters. Desperation, depression, panic and quiet denial were all I knew. Hope was at best a distant memory. I generally regarded solitude, comfort and serenity as oblique and beautiful ideas as far removed from reality as really poorly written science fiction. Inner peace, I fathomed, was something you could only achieve in death and maybe not even then.

There are no echoes of that lost-empty outlook now. These days, the world seems a brilliant place to be. Sure, its occasionally shitty for everyone. People are still just people and, people are often assholes. And bad things continue to happen to people who cannot possibly deserve the wrath of man or nature or god or whatever. All that is exactly the same and perhaps it always will be. It's my outlook that has changed. I no longer rail endlessly over the raw injustice of the world, content to sit miserably on my ass as though my self-righteous rage might somehow forgive my own sins. I like to think, instead, about what I can change. I like to think that when I'm lucky enough to wake up in the morning, I may have the opportunity to help someone in some small way. And sometimes that opportunity does come, even if all I can do is smile. Because sometimes, someone will smile back, and while -- in the scale of the universe -- a stranger's smile is tiny and inconsequential, I was there to witness it. And that is good enough for me.

Today has been a good day, and as its now 11:20pm I think its safe to say I'll make it to 731 days sober. Which is only two days away from a prime number. So I got that going for me, which is nice.

Updates

The addict that I mentioned in my last post disappeared again only a day or two after we spoke. Back to the street, to an ugly and very scary life that is much worse than I had been led to believe (and I had been led to believe it was pretty bad). This is both the fault of the lies inherent to advanced addiction, and to the sad-sick denial present in this individual's caretaker (this is all-too common as well). I expect a great deal of dishonesty and denial from an addict, from any addict. It is the plain-and-simple nature of the disease. But I underestimated this one.

The thing is: It doesn't matter. Had I known, I wouldn't have said much differently. I wouldn't have used the examples of the immediate and not-so-immediate past as weapons. And this person wouldn't have listened any more carefully if I had. Denial is -- in the case of addiction -- FATAL. Not "scared straight" fatal. Not "it won't happen to me" fatal. Just plain, goddamn fatal. Every time. Always.

The message, however, isn't a dour one. The message is one of hope. It just so happens that I am not Suzie-fucking-Sunshine. I am, at my very core, a cynic. And I do struggle sometimes to find the very decent nugget of humanity in mankind-at-large. But addiction is an awful bastard. And you can't beat it back with sadness, or depression, or fear. You can't cure it with voodoo, or denial, or happy thoughts. There is no reprieve for half-assers. To beat this cancerous illness that turns our bodies and our minds against us, the weapon is hope. I have seen addicts and alcoholics that find sobriety, but without hope, fail every time. Without hope, the road ahead seems too long, too dangerous and too hard. I found some, once, at a rehab center in a cold valley in Estes Park, in the middle of December, and I cling to it with all of my tenacity. I found it. It is mine. I will not let it go.

With that in mind, I received word on Saturday, that "George" is currently sober, out of the hospital and living temporarily with his son in Chicago. There has been some talk about a trip to Colorado.

Sometimes, I have to go looking for it. And sometimes, hope finds me.

The Gift of Hope: A Short Story about a Friend

In sober circles—when it is important—we use only our first names to maintain anonymity. This does, of course, cause some confusion with more common names and can lead to irreverent surnames and qualifiers being used. My favorite Bruce for example, is familiarly known as Lawyer Bruce. Because he’s a lawyer, and the other Bruce is not. My friend Jim, is Big Jim, or sometimes just Big. Because, well, he’s biggish. The old-timers had handles like "Boxcar", and I suspect they used up all the good nicknames.

Because of this easy familiarity and in order to further protect the anonymity of a friend, I’m going to change his name. I will, in this entry at least, call him George.

George was breathing with the aid of an oxygen tank when I met him. He could barely stand, and needed a wheel chair to get about for the first half of his month in our recovery center. His physical health was perilous to say the least. He was surly. His silver hair always disheveled. He was occasionally ill-tempered and closed off. He was every bit the death’s door alcoholic, and I liked him. He is the brother of a friend of mine, although I did not know it at the time. From Chicago, he brought something of the guarded, gray, windblown city in with him. He had some trouble with the program of recovery (this is not abnormal for addicts in a treatment center) but towards the end of his stay, I felt confident that he had a very good chance of making it.

When George left our treatment center, a few days before me, he was able to move about freely, and talk without oxygen. He had reestablished contact with his children, and he had hope and a plan for the future.  He smiled—often. He told crass jokes with enthusiasm. And he was looking forward to a planned move to Colorado. He was and is my friend, and I will always remember his coarse sense of humor and rough-and-tumble mannerisms. Not long after he returned to Chicago, George began drinking again. It was a matter of weeks before he was homeless, destitute, and unreachable. A couple of months found him tied to a hospital bed. Virtually dead. Unrecognizable as his former self.

It has been nearly two years since I saw my friend, and while he is still alive, I do not know if he would know me, or if he could remember me or the conversations we shared. Last I heard he was in some type of hospice. A wrecked shell. And I do not know him.

I miss my friend. And while I am thankful for the opportunity I had to get to know him, the tangible loss of his presence is painful.

I spent the better part of my Sunday talking to an addict about my age who had just returned home from a drug related disappearance. It can be difficult to maintain an optimism for recovery under the circumstances and with such a high rate of relapse. And it may seem strange to draw hope from a friend who did not make it. But that’s the way it works. George didn’t make it, but he came close, and I still remember the swell of joy and admiration I felt when he became himself again, if only for a short while.

There is hope for us all. I think.

Baxter The Stand In

Another week gone by without a new post. I'd feel terrible if I weren't so damn busy all the time. The new job is taking up -- no joke -- 40 hours of my time, per week. Yup, straight up full-time, yo. That coupled with the hours and hours of school work and a wicked case of the bike doldrums, and I'm wrecked. So here's Baxter to cheer you up in the meantime.

The Rebirth of a Student

I've suffered as a sub-par student for much of my academic career. Poor organizational habits were a contributing factor, as was a frankly bad attitude towards education that was caused by a sort of aimless life-view. The principal cause of my absentee education, however, was the inevitable lack of motivation and skewed outlook that accompany the denial and depression inclusive to my hard-drinking lifestyle.

The last time I attempted to return to college and finish my degree, I never even attended my first class. I registered, paid, picked up my student ID, signed up for two courses, one classroom and one on-line. Then, not-surprisingly, I didn't show up for the first, second or third day of class and so-on. I couldn't even manage to log in to my online course from the relative comfort of my own couch.

I remember -- with startling clarity, given the general fogginess surrounding the period -- sitting at the kitchen counter in the sunny, early afternoon. My small, white Mac open to the course login page. A very full tumbler of cheap gold-brown whiskey sat just to the right of the keyboard -- not the first of the day... At some point between adolescence and semi-adulthood, I had forgotten, probably intentionally, that one isn't supposed to fill a rocks glass to the rim, only stopping just shy of the lip, squeezing every last drop into what one's wounded psyche could qualify as a "serving." Sometimes I listed slightly as I poured, spilling whiskey, or gin or occasionally vodka across the counter. Sad, lonesome rivulets of wasted alcohol dribbling away like my future...

I was staring at the comics and magnets and photos stuck haphazardly to the refrigerator in front of me, sipping whiskey, oblivious to the notion that most people, normal people, happy people, might think twice about drinking straight whiskey before eleven AM. Something snapped or popped, or rather, shifted back into its broken home and I decided either that there was no point in even trying to study, or that I might as well wait a few hours (probably a little of both) and I gave up before I even began. I shut the computer and wandered from the sunny kitchen into the dark, closed-in basement to empty what remained of a bottle of Canadian Mist in front of a glowing TV. Not your model student.

That echoes my original college experience as a student at DU through some unlikely miracle of GPA sleight-of-hand, luck and forsaken kismet. Attending class only sporadically, very occasionally completing homework on time, and failing fantastically to note any correlation between brazen alcohol abuse and grade-killing apathy. I made it two years -- sort of. The clarity and focus I’ve gained through a rigorous personal inventory and active participation in A.A. and other sober activities has helped me to cement my goals in my mind. Where I previously floundered, I now have a clear perspective. Before I didn’t know what I wanted, now I am sure that I want to graduate from college. I am plainly and intensely motivated.

I have to admit how incredibly surprised I was when I recently entered my third week of classes at Regis University, to find that I'm actually a college student. I'm reading, doing my homework, writing papers, paying attention to deadlines. Its shocking, but I'm actually STUDYING. Thank God for third chances.