Friday Follies ~~ The “Kick”

I discovered I was an endurance athlete, quite by accident.  It sort of started in junior high school.

As a kid I wasn’t a great runner.  I have never had a lot of acceleration.  Most kid’s games are based on acceleration.  Tag.  Baseball.  Keep-away.  I wasn’t good at them.  A junior high school coach got me started on running distance.  (Don’t worry, this post is about cycling.  Just be patient.)

Distance running was a revelation to me.  I always had something left at the end of the race.  So?  You can beat me in the mile?  Let’s go for two.  You got me there too?  How about a 5K?  If the race was long enough, I would eventually win it, through sheer will power.  I’d found a talent.  I could suffer real good.

That “something” I always seemed to have at the end of a race got me into early conflict with coaches.  You see, I discovered that, as the race neared its end, I could summon up those reserves, and kick!  I could put on a burst of speed.  And it was a blast!  The endorphins would kick in, the pain would fall away, my legs would become engines, and I could fly!  It felt absolutely fantastic.

My coaches would point out (correctly), that if I still had that much left, I should have been running harder all along.  But I wouldn’t listen.  I wasn’t really there to win, I was doing it for the kick.

I didn’t manage to find the kick on a bicycle until after I discovered gears.  My old singlespeed, coaster brake, clunker just wouldn’t let me get going fast enough.  But, let me get on a geared bike, and I could always find a way to develop acceleration.  I could upshift, put more meat on the driveline, and GO!  Of course, that was an incorrect method too.  It took me a long time to learn to stop being a “masher,” and develop a spin.  But that kick, once I found it, was always there.

It was a big race.  The biggest I’d ever been in.  It was a grand and glorious day.  My club team knew that, on the bike, I was a sprinter.  I’d been a good boy and carried water for others throughout the season.  But this particular race played to my strengths.  The course was flat.  Or mostly so.  So we decided that, if there was a way, the rest of the team would work to put me in position for the finish.

The day worked excellently for me, and terribly for others.  To begin with, it rained.  Not a sprinkle or a shower, but honest to goodness rain!  Pouring.  With occasional bursts of deluge.  Add to that, the road surfaces ranged between not good, and awful.  Just my kind of racing.

Among my chief competitors, the two strongest guys got sick, and the number three was a no-show.  There were crashes.  I’m good with crashes.  I can (mostly) stay up, and ride over chaos.  There were mechanicals, but none for me.  It was a suffer-party of the first order.  Splendid!

The pack had thinned.  I was riding with two team mates, in a group of about 15 riders.  I was watching the others.  They looked tired.  They looked beatable.

We were less than two miles out from the line, and the group’s organization began to break up.  My team mates did what they could for me, but they were pretty well spent.  I left them, and surged forward with about five other riders.  This was it.  It was on here!

The last part of the course included a long downhill, with a vicious turn at the bottom and then about a 500 meter straight to the line.  I saw three riders ahead of me, and I kicked!  It worked.

That was the only time I ever won a bicycle road race.  I placed a couple of times, but honestly, a good kick wasn’t enough.  Truthfully, I didn’t have the talent, dedication, and the size to be truly competitive.  Everything had to come together, that once, and it did.