Easy like a Monday Morning
During the night my wife has been beating my legs with an iron bar — either that or I haven’t recovered terribly well from my Sunday ride. My legs are aching. A lot.
It’s Monday morning and I’ve just wheeled my bike out of the house. The children have given me a cursory wave, there’s a bowl of granola sitting heavy in the pit of my stomach and the dawn light pierces my eyeballs.
Yesterday’s ride was hard. Not a race, not a century, but long and hilly enough to give me aches and pains in some surprising places. It was thoroughly enjoyable, in a masochistic kind of way. All good. Today I’ll ride into work easy. That’s what my training plan says — “easy commute.” Hence the granola; it’s not a problem to shovel rolled oats down one’s throat shortly before an easy ride. I’ll keep the gears low and practice my souplesse. I’ll look pro.
My commute is 10 miles through southeast London into the office district of Victoria, close to Buckingham Palace. One unfortunate aspect of my route is that it begins with a hill. It’s not Mont Ventoux but it’s enough to get the heart and lungs going, and because my muscles are cold I always struggle to maintain a decent tempo. On this particular morning I’m feeling fairly good as I start the incline — considering I have a liter of lactic acid sloshing about in my calves.
Then…disaster. Someone overtakes me. He is, at least, a “proper: cyclist. Full kit, decent bike. But still I’m upset. When the red mist clears I can rationalize the situation. It’s okay, I’m just warming up. Perhaps I might get back to his wheel on the descent into Greenwich, then go hard away from the lights at Deptford…and so it begins.
I can’t help it. I don’t want to be beaten. Every time I ride through the city, carving my own little niche through the densely trafficked streets, I want to move smoothly, quickly and most importantly with utter nonchalance. It’s not cool to look like you’re going hard on the morning commute. Unfortunately I’m not the fastest cyclist in London, not by quite a margin, so being overtaken is a very real danger. Which means I have to sprint away from traffic lights, keep a watchful eye on those around me in case of a sudden attack, and generally keep it in the big ring when the sensible thing to do would be to shift down. It’s straightforward enough to tap “easy commute” into a training plan, sticking to it is much harder altogether.
Cyclists gravitate toward wilderness, understandably so. It’s beautiful, rewarding and safe. The city, choked with traffic, seems a barbarous environment. Yet in the city we can participate in a huge game, with thousands of other players, all aboard two wheels and all trying to scheme our way to work every day. To be successful in this game, riders have to judge their pace to hit traffic lights as they turn green, take shortcuts, win sprints away from the lights, assess and avoid traffic — or use it to their advantage.
Bicycle messengers reign supreme in this game; they make a living at it. In the late-1980s a group of messengers in Toronto created alleycat racing, an informal form of competition that replicates the working life of a messenger. Competitors race between checkpoints, using any route possible. At the checkpoints they undertake various challenges, ranging from drinking a shot of alcohol to answering trivia questions.
My kind of racing, taking place twice a day on the Lambeth Road, is even more informal. That is to say it takes place almost entirely in my head. Rapha-clad bankers? Trendy fixies? Gym bunnies on Boris bikes? I will beat you all. And I will attempt to make it look effortless.
On that Monday morning when my plan said to spin along easy and practice souplesse, did I show restraint? Of course not. I blasted into town. Arriving at the office soaked in sweat and feeling sick, I congratulated myself on a good little training session. Who needs recovery rides anyway?
