The Tour

Beth and Bruce are excited about the Tour de France. Beth is very enthused since she got up three hours early to watch the thing (memo to Beth: if it takes three hours to walk to your tv you need a smaller house). I’m only kind of excited by the tour. Sure I’m hoping Lance gets the record or at least I’m hoping for an exciting race (best race I ever saw: Laurent Fignon loses to Greg LeMond in the final time trial when Greg introduced aero bars, spectacular drama). This year, like most others, drug rumors are swirling. Many folks believe, sans evidence, that Lance Armstrong juices more than the Florida Growers Co-Operative. This makes Lance mad.

Accusing someone of juicing is par for the course when you’re getting regularly destroyed by the competition. Mymac blogs are not competitive but if they were I’d probably be accusing Beth of using every steroid under the sun, it’s just not possible for someone to be that much better at writing than I. Of course that’s crazy talk, Beth really is that much better than me. The fact that she takes ibogaine to enhance her creativity… Oh wait that’s not true… As far as I know.

The point I’m trying to get at here is: losing, especially when you give maximum effort, is an unpleasant thing. There is a tendency to blame some external factor for personal failure. That guy cheated, the refs were against me, etc. Reality is usually otherwise, you generally get outworked or out thought. At least that’s my take, it may be that I’m horribly unlucky but I suspect I’m merely incompetent.

Wow, what a nauseating tangent. Back to the tour. Sure I like the tour and all but I hate the by product. For the next month or forty five days there are going to be all kinds of biking idiots on the road. They are going to be dressed in full regalia: bike shorts, yellow jersey, etc. These people are idiots and should be shot. Perhaps not fatally, that part is negotiable. but they should be, at least, maimed.

Here I’m not talking about people who commute to work via bike, or people who ride every weekend. I’m talking about the total package idiots who go out and spend thousands of dollars on the gear to mostly look cool. They’ve got the Litespeed, the shorts, the aero bars, the index shifters, the yellow jersy with sponsors chuckling, the pedals, the shoes, the frame pump and two dozen water bottles. They spend all this money and ride, what, two days a year? For that kind of investment they could by a Murray and a freakin’ plasma TV.

I used to ride my bike to work (8 miles each way) and every year around this time I’d be in jeans (no shorts where I worked) I’d blow by some wannabee in full gear. See there was a long hill on the way to work and it killed me the first few months I rode my bike. After a time I could have handled it in a fixie. They gear crowd had the newest, lightest, bikes but I never EVER got passed by the pro wannabees.

Enough with the worthless drivel. What is important is the takeaway message: Every pro biker that wins eats more steroids than the Nebraska football team, if you’re not cheating you’re not trying. Or maybe the take away message is that the people that lose alway accuse the folks that win of taking drugs. No that wasn’t it either. I remember: you can’t buy skill. It’s not the shoes, it’s not the bike, it’s not the racket it’s you.