I Like To Party Fucking Hard!

This season coming will be my third road season. This year I'm aiming for about 25 days of racing, including combine races and opens. A majority of those days will be wet, cold (I'm talking single figure temperatures), windy and otherwise brutal. At least one of those days it will be snowing - probably the day I volunteer to be a corner marshal. I will take a wrong turn at least once (most likely on a right turn - I'm a track rider, I get confused when turning right...) and ride a long way in the opposite direction until realizing my mistake. I will win races very rarely - not because I'm crap, but because in road racing your opportunities are very limited. I will be beaten by people both significantly younger and significantly older than me. In most races I will lose all feeling in my fingers and toes. I will be relegated or fined at least once for crossing the centre line. I will get changed in the back of my car more often than I care to remember. I'll eat breakfast from the service station next to Calder Park Raceway at least once, and regret it immediately. I'll rediscover which inner-city cafes are open after four on Saturdays.

And then, a little before the end of the season, I'll swear I'm only going to race track from now on.

So, am I looking forward to road season? Oh, hell yeah.

I Consider It A Measure Of My Humantiy.

It's not really fair of me to say that I'd been back training one day when I injured myself, when really the pain in my knee raised its ugly head the day before. I mean, it's obviously funnier to describe it that way, and that's why I'm running with it. Good humour means more to me than medical precision right now. I'm pretty fucking bummed. I know I complained quite a bit about starting back on the program, and getting up at 6am on Monday was a complete shock to the system, but I was kinda looking forward to it. It was all part of the plan, you see. I was going to take two weeks off, then start up training again and come back even stronger than before. But this injury, whatever it is, is not part of the plan. It's a setback, and setbacks do not feature in my goals for this year. Yep, pretty unimpressed.

Or That You Were Born In The Right Time Or Place.

Give It A Slight Twist.

This is currently the song I hear in my head before I go to sleep, and then as soon as I wake up. And you know what? In my head it sounds like fucking freedom.

Sycophants.

Oh man, today my two-week-break bliss came crashing down to earth with a thud. And there's still a good six days left. I still need to find the time to take Casey out to dinner, to hit Scooter up for a massage (before he leaves the country to take care of AIS cyclists in Italy... the jerk), to stay up late watching TV on DVD. But there it was, sitting in my inbox when I arrived at work this morning. An email from my coach, with the heading "program." So much pain in those two short syllables.

And then, this evening, I started on my new gym program, a program designed to improve my endurance for the coming road season. Twenty squats with twenty kilos on the weightlifting bar, then eighteen squats with thirty kilos, then sixteen with forty, all the way down to two squats with eighty kilograms on the bar (for the pedants: the weight increments go from ten to five at some point). Eighty kilograms. That's more than I weigh, and today I lifted it twice - after 108 'warm-up' squats. I then do a little bit of work on my arms and core. So, right now, I'm barely able to move. Tomorrow will be worse. It always is.

Some of you may be wondering why at this point. I guess that makes sense. But me, I never ask why. I guess this Bukowski poem - posted by Rapha Condor cyclist Tom Southam on his blog - nicely sums up my reasons. Even if Bukowski was a misogynistic asshole, even if his 'drink your way to the truth' schtick is 'pure adolescent narcissism' (to paraphrase Is Not magazine), he occasionally hits the nail right on the head.

Roll the Dice

by Charles Bukowski

if you’re going to try, go all the

way.

otherwise, don’t even start.

if you’re going to try, go all the

way. this could mean losing girlfriends,

wives, relatives, jobs and

maybe your mind.

go all the way.

it could mean not eating for 3 or

4 days.

it could mean freezing on a

park bench.

it could mean jail,

it could mean derision,

mockery,

isolation.

isolation is the gift,

all the others are a test of your

endurance, of

how much you really want to

do it.

and you’ll do it

despite rejection and the

worst odds

and it will be better than

anything else

you can imagine.

if you’re going to try,

go all the way.

there is no other feeling like

that.

you will be alone with the

gods

and the nights will flame with

fire.

do it, do it, do it.

do it.

all the way

all the way.

you will ride life straight to

perfect laughter,

it’s the only good fight

there is.

Fixed Frequencies.

It's a strange quirk of my training program that I see far more of my gym trainer than I do my coach. I'm in the gym twice a week, and between sets there's a lot of time for us to chat. Most of the time this consists of idle gossip about other cyclists and occasional dissertations on physiology, but on Monday he asked me when track season finished. I told him it had finished on Sunday, and that I'm currently in the midst of two weeks rest before road season begins.

Today I found myself with a new gym program. Put simply, it's squats plus core, with a sprinkling of arms here and there. This may sound counter-intuitive, but I went beyond questioning his wisdom a long time ago. There is no blinder faith than mine, and I'm being rewarded with race results and plummeting TT times.

He's a seventy-one year old pensioner, thin as a whippet, who occasionally breaks into song. He once danced for Australia in some international competition. He trained in the modern pentathlon and was the Hawks running coach. He was a jumps jockey. He can still outlift me. He worked most of his life as an exercise physiologist, specializing in rehabilitation, and can name more muscles than I thought I had. He's fit more into one lifetime that most people could in five, and when he talks I shut the hell up and listen.

The Worst Disease.

Nowhere To Run.

Last night at Brunswick Track Champs (round 1) I knocked two whole seconds off my kilo time. Yep. 1:08:672. And Jay Callaghan, who has taken me under his wing a little bit of late, reckoned it would've been even faster if I hadn't skipped the wheel three times in my start (apparently he was counting). Of course, I dug myself a pretty big hole in doing so, and as such didn't feature in the pointy end of the motorpace, but it's still nice to see those times coming down.

Gotta Find A Way.

You Would Like To Have One Too.

At the Austral the other night I was chatting to my coach about my program for this month. He said I'd finally finished my base training (at which point I exclaimed, "That was base?"), and it was time for me to ramp it up. "There's only one thing," he continued, "When did you last have a break?" I thought for a while, then told him that it was about this time last year. "Well then, after Bendigo I'll give you two weeks off."

Of course, I'll still be in the gym three times a week. But other than that, between the 14th and the 28th I will be available to see bands, go out to cafes, come to dinner and attend parties. Hit me up.

A Shepherd's Sling And Five Stones In Our Hands.

So, the Austral is this weekend. It's a race I have ambiguous feelings about, even though - or probably because - I've never raced it before. Still, in these serious wheelraces with serious money attached, the outcome has usually been determined before the race has begun, and due to the distance the Austral is run over - two kilometres - there is even less chance for the middle-and-limitmarker punks to come crashing in and spoil the party. The best thing about racing handicaps is that anyone has a chance to take them out (something WW seems to instinctively understand), but all of CSV's efforts over the past month or so have focussed on the 'stars' appearing. I'm starting to feel like pack fill and I haven't even strapped on my shoes yet.

So I'm down to race, but don't expect much. I'll probably get B grade, will probably ride off somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100 metres in the big race, probably have odds of around 25 to 1, and probably do fuck all. The saving grace, for me, is that the Bendigo Madison weekend isn't far away, and that this year I'll be there with bells on. Hopefully in some decent form to boot.

My Steering Wheel.

Last Wednesday my Grandma died, so I didn't go to the gym that night. The next day I went out to my coach's place and did a mock-time trial on this compu-trainer thing, which meant about an hour at 92% of my maximum possible effort. The next day was a day off, so I had no real idea how much either event had taken out of me. The answer was, apparently, a lot.

The Victorian Madison Championships were in Ballarat on Sunday, so The Man and I stacked our gear in the car and headed out on Highway 8. We were, as per usual, late. I managed a win in B grade and Sean didn't disgrace himself in D. But come the Madison we were both spent. Before racing we'd both agreed - without hesitation - that once we went three laps down we'd pull out. With former World Cup Madison winners racing that occurred in the first fifty laps. After about eighty had gone by I told Sean I was done. After about eighty five he was too, so we pulled out. Other teams went ten laps down, eight laps down, ridiculous numbers down, but we were the only ones to call it quits. When asked why we had pulled out, Sean simply explained that, "We just didn't want to get it pregnant."

On Monday I went back to the gym and totally destroyed myself. Tuesday I packed the bike and Casey into the car and drove up to my parents' house, heading out towards the Grampians for an hour and a half of tempo. Wednesday I crawled out of bed early and did a session on the trainer, then slid into a borrowed suit (thanks McKenny!), packed up Casey and hit the road for another couple of hours, heading into the depths of the Mallee. We reacquainted ourselves with my lost cousins, shook hands, kissed cheeks, reminisced and tried not to cry. We rustled up some hommus and rice crackers for lunch, ignoring the multitude of temptations offered by the CWA ladies of Woomelang. We convinced my sister to feed us dinner at her house in Bendigo on our way home and my youngest brother to drive the rest of the way from there. We pulled back into the house, finally, at eleven, so I missed the gym again that night.

Then today I went back to work.

Down And Out, Losing Ground.

As we grow older,
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living -


TS Eliot.

I'm A Big Talker.

I grew up in a country town called Stawell, on the final southern fingernail of the Great Dividing Range. Three corners of the compass were surrounded by lifts in the landscape, from the sandstone cliffs of the Grampians in the west to the ambitiously named Pyrenees in the north. Between the northern and western points, however, was a great sweep of flat Wimmera plains, leading onto an even greater expanse of flat Mallee plains. One could continue walking in that direction and encounter only undulations in the landscape for nearly a thousand kilometres, finally reaching the red dirt jags of the Flinders Ranges over in South Australia. Looking west over the town from Big Hill, in the centre of it all, then turning your back on civilization and respite to take in the nothing emptiness to the north. Things came rushing in through that vacant space when the wind swung around, like tastes of dust on the tongue, or bushfires in the summer.

My Dad’s family are from out there, concentrated in a small town called Woomelang in the heart of the Mallee. I was up there over Christmas a while back. A lot of the extended family were there, and presents were being handed out. My Uncle Alan and Auntie Mandy were presented with a huge, square gift that turned out to be suitcases. Mandy looked excited, Alan looked away.

“Now this means, dad,” my cousin Kirsten proclaimed, “that you have to actually use them.” I didn’t really know what she was talking about. Later on, in the car on the way home, I asked my own dad about it. “Your Uncle Alan,” he began, “hasn’t left the farm for more than a weekend, ever.”

Their family – and I guess mine too – have been in Woomelang for four generations. The farm that my Uncle Alan and his kids live on is where he and his brothers – including my dad – grew up. The house where they were raised still stands; weatherboard and corrugated iron overcome by weeds, rot and rust. The new house – clean brick veneer encircled by deep verandas – stands a short walk away. There Uncle Alan raised his own family, who, while doing the dishes, would glance up for a moment and find their family history staring at them through the window.

As a kid I’d always liked him – he was always loud and funny, which is nearly always enough when you’re young – but now, as an adult, something else was emerging. Beneath the bluster, beneath the dusty Mallee dryness, he was so attached to that plot of land, those red dirt paddocks and empty dams and stunted Mallee Gums, that he couldn’t be away from it for more than two nights.

I Think I'm Going To Cry.

Sorry for the lack of posts, folks. I've had no internet other than phone internet (which is only marginally better than no internet) since before Australia Day, when some jackass with a jackhammer jacked his way through our connection. More coming soon. You have my word.