Chapter 13

The life of a professional cyclist, even at the elite levels I finally had found myself at in my later career, is, to not put it too politely, pretty screwed up! First, even on the really big professional teams, you live a life that most monks in a monastic order would find hard to live for long. Pretty much everything you own fits into a single bag, and you don’t own very much that isn’t part of your trade. You live in hotels, or team training ‘barracks’ most of the time. And your days off are spent sleeping and training ... or is it training then sleeping?

Even what you eat and when you eat it is all backwards. Say it is a race day on ‘Le Tour’ ... You start the day off with pasta, and rice and grilled chicken and what most people eat only when they go to an all-you-can-eat buffet during the transition from serving breakfast and lunch. After that, you go to the warm-up area where you eat only stuff that squeezes out of a little packet, actually named “GU”.

Once you get on the stage you are burning energy at a phenomenal rate and if it is a long enough stage you actually get to ride through something called the ‘feed zone’. Joy and rapture, trust me! Here a domestique gets the glamorous job of trying to balance a pile of little cloth bags, called “musette bags”, as well as having water bottles shoved under their jersey so that they look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Then they get to try and deliver these rolling lunches and such to other team riders, all while still racing. So, here you are trying to sort through a musette bag for your lunch (as well as for the stuff that you actually ‘like’ to eat) and riding along at about twenty-five or thirty miles an hour in a peloton of other riders all trying to do the same thing and not get hurt.

Next, you have no real home or even a place to call home for much of your career. You travel so much and everyone seems to envy you all the places you’ve seen. And when you beg off, saying “Aw shucks, it’s not that glamorous”, they all think you’re downplaying it ... when in fact, even on the grand tours you really don’t get to see much at all. You are so busy trying to not get hurt, or dropped, or gaped, or just plain ridden into the ground that you really don’t ‘see’ any of the ‘beautiful countryside’ that all the fans see on TV. I’ve ridden in several Tours de France, and never once seen enough of France to fill a postcard.

Another thing no one on the outside of this bizarre sport seems to realize is that cyclist are sort of like the greyhounds they resemble. You’ve all heard the joke about owning a retired greyhound, right? They say you own a sixty mile-an-hour couch potato! There is an unwritten rule of cycling: Never stand when you can sit, and never sit if you can lay down. So, as soon as you get off your bike after a training ride, or a one-day classic, or a stage in a grand tour what you’ll really see, if they ever let you onto a team bus, is a bunch of boneless riders sprawled all over the couches and seats of the bus! Most of them fast asleep!

So, all of this leads up to the members of your team being your only real family, as well as your only real friends. You form a very tight group ... and you also get on each other’s nerves just a touch. So, there are good days and, as Lance now says, great days! But there are no bad days allowed in cycling! Having a bad day in cycling can really be a career limiting event! Having your coach announce in front of the entire team that you need to go back to drug control is a really bad day! No one actually looked at me as Johan said these words to me after training one day. No one wanted to meet my eyes, like I had some sort of sickness that was transmitted by looking me in the eye. No one said anything, but the subtle shifting said it all...

So with a very heavy heart, I headed over to the vampire trailer ... sort of like off to the gallows. And so, it was that I took a last breath of untainted air, exhaled, squared my shoulders and entered the lair of the vampire, ticking over and over in my head what could have gone wrong.

The interior of the vampire trailer was not a place that any of us wanted to spend much time. I had been in my share of them and my sole goal was to get out as quickly as possible with as much of my pride, and hide, intact as I could manage. To be honest, none of us spent a lot of time admiring the interior design. This was a place that could end your career ... and cast a cloud over the rest of your natural-born days.

And so, it was that it took me a bit to recognize the quiet voice that said, “Um, Hi Nate!” But when I did look up, it only took a second to recognize Melody’s smiling face.

“Surprise!”, said the love of my life, and the absolute last person I expected to see here, and then my world dissolved into a kaleidoscope of emotions!