Chapter 28: Boobs, Bloody Boobs

Meri

The morning set the theme of the day. Lydia and Mark couldn’t keep their hands of each other for any length of time. I wasn’t counting, but they had done it in the kitchen, in the sauna, in the living room and on the bike at least once. Yes, they had somehow managed to devise a way for Mark to bang her ass while she was pedaling on the roll. It seemed we had to add contortionist to the long list of Mark’s talents.

Alas, even the virility of a nineteen year old has its limits and by late afternoon Mark was completely spent. Floored by a single bottle of beer, he slept on the couch, snoring loudly.

Lydia

“Girl, the two of you might have overdone it a bit,” Meri told me. “You do realize that you have to sit on a bike everyday for the next two weeks? Having your ass destroyed isn’t exactly helping.”

“I’m a little sore, but that’ll be okay by tomorrow,” I argued.

“Had I not walked in on you in the morning I would have thought that you have sent your pussy into early retirement.”

“Most girls don’t like it up the ass and only do it to please their men,” I explained. “But I’ve read a small percentage of women can easily have an orgasm from it. Obviously I’m one of the few. I can’t explain it, but it’s an exhilarating experience, especially with someone who knows what he’s doing.”

“Well, so much is obvious,” Meri said and giggled. “But you better get back on your nutritional plan. You’ve been neglecting it and you are our only hope to win anything in that race. We have no chance on the general classification, but if you’re in top shape you could score the stage to Pic Nore.”

“No pressure then,” I said with a hint of sarcasm.

“I’m serious, Lydia. This whole race is a number too big for us still, but a stage win at one of the biggest tours in female cycling could open some doors to bigger races in the future.”

“Don’t count Femke out for the Prologue,” I reminded her, but Meri shook her head.

“Femke has the same problem that I have. We have ample muscles to drill a big gear, but we need half a mile to get up to speed. But the Prologue is only two miles long. Katrijn will probably do better in it than you or Femke. It’s basically just a sprint on a time trial bike.”

“Maybe, now that I’ve run my lover boy dry, I should get round to reading the road book,” I realized.

Meri just nodded with a serious look on her face.

Mark

On the next morning mom and Meri piled their stuff into the Nissan and set off towards Groningen to meet up with the rest of team. From there it was off to southern France for one of the biggest races for female cyclists – twelve stages in as many days.

Meri had told me to mark May 29th in my calendar. That would be the stage with a mountain top finish, and she thought mom had a shot at winning it. I wasn’t quite as optimistic. Unlike for the race in Belgium, all top teams would be taking part in this one, and it wasn’t a risky bet to assume that some of the favorites weren’t riding completely clean.

I did have faith in mom’s abilities, but even her climbing talent would account for nothing if other riders had boosted their hematocrit levels or were regenerating better between stages due to pharmaceutical help.

At least watching the race would take my mind off the fact that I was starting the last two weeks in the life of Mark Karrass. I would be leaving Emden for Hanover two days before mom and Meri would come back from France. I was to be prepared in the university clinic there, then flown to the Berlin Charité clinic for surgery and then be brought by helicopter, still anesthetized, to Hamburg for recuperation. That’s how much was involved to make sure none of the doctors and nurses would find out both my identities – the old and the new one.

It had been my dream for over a year now to finally get away from the fact that too many people knew whose son I was. I wanted to be able to live as her boyfriend, and ideally husband one day. However, the closer I got to reaching that goal, the more my nervousness grew.

The first three days of the women’s absence was pure boredom. I helped auntie Bea, but now that she got better and better every day there wasn’t much she needed help with anymore. There was nothing on TV yet as they needed an entire day to get there in the first place, followed by two days of training rides that doubled as reconnaissance missions to checkout the route of the all important mountain stage.

Finally the day of the start came and although the Tour de l’Aude was the longest-running and one of the biggest races in the calendar for female cyclists, no German TV station showed it. That meant I had to rely on Dutch TV again.

The Prologue was almost comically short. Two and a half kilometers were a lot when going up a mountain, but on a flat, wide road in the suburbs of Carcassonne it was a mad 3-minute dash to the line. Unsurprisingly, the spectacle was won by a track cyclist – Petra Rossner, who had won the Gold at Barcelona in the 3-kilometer pursuit. Katrijn, the team’s sprinter had put in a decent show in 7th position, but the rest of them finished anonymously in the mid field.

The next three stages were tailor-made for the sprinters, mostly flat. Although Katrijn was a more than just decent sprinter, she didn’t have a lead-out train, a sort of flat variant of what mom’s team had practiced in the mountains. A strong time trialler or baroudeur would pull a train of riders towards the front of the pack and one by one would peel off towards the finish leaving the lead-out sprinter to start the final dash for the team’s top sprinter on her rear wheel.

Mom’s team did have barouders and an excellent time trialler, but no lead-out sprinter, which meant the whole thing wouldn’t work. In the end they solved the problem by mom doing the initial pulling, then handing over to Femke and Shirin who made sure Katrijn came to the front of the pack where she was then on her own, hoping to get on the rear wheel of one of the other teams’ top sprinters.

Two out of three times it worked, sort of. Katrijn finished 7th and 6th on the first and third stage, which was respectable for a small continental team in such a big race, but for sprinters everything lower than 3rd is essentially a loss.

Meri was completely uninvolved in any of this, mainly because she finished minutes behind the main peloton on all three stages. For small teams invited to big races it was a sort of unwritten rule that they were expected to animate the stages, which meant going into breakaway groups. This was also a good method to get your sponsors some quality TV exposure.

As the designated baroudeur for the first three stages, Meri had done a good job, but with too many teams being interested in bunch sprint finishes the groups she went in were usually reeled back in, a good distance from the finish, at which point Meri would just sit up and drop back, conserving some energy for the repeat performance the next day.

The next stages were almost more of the same, just with hills. Shirin and Meri shared the duty of going into breakaway groups, but this time they weren’t reeled in by the pack, but overtaken by attacking groups of classic specialists over the hills. The entire team was buried deep in the mid field of the general classification by the time the individual time trial came along on stage eight.

Femke was the team’s ace in the fight against the clock, but this wasn’t a flat time trial. It constantly went either uphill or downhill, for twenty-five endless miles. She would probably still be in for a good position, but most likely mom was the team’s best bet here. Not that she was in the running for the top spots. Compared to some of the space age technology that the top teams rolled down ramp on, the time trial bikes of mom’s team looked almost ancient.

Mom hadn’t even bothered with a time trial bike at all, she had just asked the mechanics to nail the time trial extensions to the handle bars of her normal bike and that was it. Since they were all well down the order and the start was done in reverse order of the general classification, Femke was the last of the team to start with another fifty-seven riders yet to start.

She was racing against some pretty good intermediate times – set by my better half. The idea to use the normal bike had been a good one. While others struggled on the climbs with the cumbersome special bikes, mom had done her usual bit of stubbornly pedaling away at her preferred pace. She lost a bit in aerodynamic efficiency on the descents, but on the climbs she had a much easier time of it.