It was a great summer of training, riding, racing--I was done with the charade of graduate school, in which I learned that I'm much more of a history buff than a historian. I also realized that year that if I wanted to teach in the public school system I would have to spend another year or so learning stuff that I thought I already knew. These were necessary lessons that diverted me from a life of academia and enabled me to satisfy the urge to own a bike shop out of my system. A couple more years of that and I realized that it was just retail, and I didn't want to work on weekends, or fix other people's bikes, or sell.
So instead I became an architect, which means that I (sometimes) work on weekends, sell professional services, and grind along like everyone else. I'm paid to draw and solve problems, sometimes getting to design some pretty cool stuff.
So back to descending. The skill required, the lack of fear, the ability to trust centripetal forces and coax your center of gravity into the right position, to clamp your knees onto the top tube to quiet the shimmy at 45 MPH+, to quell the gnawing thoughts that just one stone can turn your knifelike profile into an uncontrollable wobbly mass of skin on pavement, all of these qualities I don't quite have nailed down. I do most of them well, but not well enough to make up time lost on a climb, which is guaranteed, since it's even harder to lug two bucks worth of body mass around on a bike these days. My mind is weak, and I can't convince the rest of me to take those chances anymore.
Which is why watching Jens Voight's crash in today's tour stage so chilling. Probably the hardest man in the sport today, he was helpless when body and bike conspired to collapse under him while thundering down the Petit Saint Bernard. I've never seen anyone SKID ON THEIR FACE at 55+ MPH. I hope to never see that again.
He's a tough dude. He'll be back. Not in this race, but soon.
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