Well, I've had a little more than 24 hours to absorb and process Floyd's most excellent adventure. I've waited to post to really get my head around what he did on stage 17 of the tour. I struggled to try to comprehend it even as I celebrated his phoenix-like rise from the ashes of his previous defeat.
I remember a race a couple years back when another guy and I took off from the first click. It was a pretty flat course with just a couple of climbs. He rolled off and I decided that I'd go because I knew a lot of the guys were a lot stronger than I was. I figured a few others might bridge up and we'd make a race of it. We stayed clear for 30 miles before a strong group made it up to us and I managed to hang with them for another 30 before my legs blew and I ended up finishing seventh. It was a cool feeling being in the break and taking the KoM points in the race. It was cool that the other guy in the original break (a Cat 2 master's racer) called me a super strong rider and I felt great even though I didn't win. I've always tried to race that way. Sure I'd like to win but more than that I always want to make it a real race where everyone haas to work and suffer and give what they have. I'm not the kind of guy who likes to sit in and wait for the field sprint or try to make the final climb and then do something. I always want to force the pace and make the selection; even when it's not in my best interest to do so. To me, it honors the competition.
So, in a way I really understand what Floyd was doing. Win or lose, he was going to make the race and force a selection. If he wasn't going to win the race, he was going to have a hand in deciding who did. I really admire that. I see a lot of racers who race for a pack finish when they know they can't sprint worth a damn just so that they can say they didn't get dropped. I'd rather blow up a race and get tailed off the back than sit in. I think that's been Levi's mentality this year as well. What's so amazing is that Floyd's huge gamble paid off. It never would have worked in a one-day race or a week long stage race but he knew the other guys were tired. He gambled that they couldn't keep up the pace he wanted to set and that they'd let him go. They gambled that he'd still be tired from the previous day. He won, they lost. I remember how cooked I felt at the end of my 60 mile breakaway effort and how I limped in for my finish. I remember what it felt like when my strength left me and I still had 20 miles of rollers to get through on a 95 degree day. I remember the sheer exhaustion and fatigue I felt in the final seven miles whent he road just went up and down constantly and I was caught and dropped by two guys to put an end to my hopes for a top five finish. To tell you the truth though, I remember how alive I felt after I got off the bike and the other guys stopped by to tell me how impressed they were by my effort and my courage. Half the field didn't even finish and I had not just survived but had made the race. I even got mentioned in a couple of the on-line team journals posted by riders in the race. Of course, no one knew my name, but there was admiration for "the guy in the New Zealand Standard jersey".
Watching Floyd power through the finish line with a fist pump that reminded me of another epic ride in the Alps inspired me. As I was cooling down from a hard intervals ride on the rollers I was reminded of why I suffer and why I toil. His anger and triumph and overcoming his failure of the day before reminded me what was good about sport and what was good about cycling. For a few hours on Thursday morning I didn't think about doping or Jan Ullrich and his contract with T-Mobile or the fall of Discovery or anything like that. I thought about the power of the human spirit and the strength of the human will to overcome the obstacles of mountains and heat and yesterday's disappointments. I thought about the searing heat of Floyd's passion to win a race and how all of the rest of the world melted before it.
I wish I could bottle that somehow.
I met with a student who is trying to decide whether to come back to school yesterday. He's a good kid with a good heart who should be able to do well at college. He has the brains and the ability but he has no passion. He doesn't really, deeply desire anything and so school has been a disappointment for him and he wonders what he should do. How do you teach that kind of passion? He doesn't need to be Floyd or Lance or Dave Zabriskie who've come back from more crashes and setbacks than I have or can even imagine to reach the highest places in their sport. He just needs a little bit of the passion that brought them back right now. How do I take that passion and get him to have it? He knows my life and sees my passion for cycling and for my faith and for my profession and for my wife but they are things that reside in some other world for him. He's come and watched me race and seen me push through broken bones. He's eaten in my home and listened to me talk about our God for more than two years and he is still just a passenger. I can see him standing there on the other side of some great divide with a quizzical look on his face wondering what's going on across the divide. He see it and wonders about it and had no comprehension of it beyond a vague understanding that there's something missing in his life. I wish I could teach this guy and others to stop sleepwalking through their lives and to live passionately; to take the risk of losing something in order to gain so much more.
I'd like to work this into my first day class introduction but I don't know how a group of postmodern, cynical students will respond. In a way, I don't care. I have to be authentic to who I am and to what I believe. But I wonder if this world and this culture has taught them to be dismissive of such passion because they've been hurt too many times in the past by those who were supposed to care and then abandoned them or left them by the side of the road on their way to somewhere else. On the other hand maybe they need to see passion realized in a way that is positive and affirming, loyal and sacrificial. I've always thought it is interesting that we call Christ's final days in Jerusalem His passion. His passion for His children led Him to the Cross and with it He redeemed the world. Too often I think I shy away from showing my passion because I don't want to go to the Cross myself. I don't want to die to my own needs so that I can live in such a way that my passion burns away the dross of the world around me. I struggle because I'm afraid of the hurt and rejection I might feel when really I need to live passionately with, in and for my God because He wants to live passionately with, in and for me. He will not reject my passion; even though my students might. He will understand it even when they don't.
Anyways, I've rambled on enough. Floyd was awesome and I'm inspired by him. I hope he wins tomorrow. For the first time I'm not being the mathematician, as they say in Europe, and trying to figure the odds of who's going to win tomorrow. I want Floyd to win. I want him to put a Lance-style beat down on the other guys. I want to see him step up to that podium tomorrow in the Yellow Jersey and show the world that passion is stronger than failure and disappointment and broken hips and all the rest. I want a picture of his fierceness to hang in my office and over my bike to remind me that I only get one shot at doing this.
