The Dirt Field

The race season starts today. My sixth road season, fourth as a professional. Where has all of the time gone? I remember being brand new in the peloton, brimming with overconfidence and naïveté. Now I can pin a number in my sleep, speak fondly of races that no longer exist, and roll my eyes with jaded fatigue at the idiosyncrasies of this cycling world.

And yet each season begins the same: wild hope cautiously guarded. You spend the fall and winter training alone, long hours on short, cold days. There is no easy way to compare yourself to your peers in the winter (well, Strava, but no). You self-motivate, work hard and then harder, and wait for the big reveal come the first race. Maybe I’ll have made some gains, you say to everybody glibly, while secretly hoping to blow everybody and yourself away at the first event.

It doesn’t actually work that way. If you come out hot in February, you might as will book a beach vacation for May, because your legs are going to be out of town by then anyways. Training is a gradual build and early races aren’t a good time to peak.

But that doesn’t stop the furtive optimism. Who doesn’t want to crush it at their first race and roll back to the car feeling awesome? If that’s not secretly in the back of every racer’s mind, they should consider doing centuries instead. Of course I want to destroy worlds with my legs today.

To keep things interesting, it’s a 14-mile flat out and back time trial with Evelyn Stevens starting 30″ behind me. I hear she’s decent at TTs so I’ll probably pedal a little harder so we don’t get to hang out too soon. (Self-deprecation as both expectation management and defense mechanism.)

Secretly I’m hoping to not see her until I’m halfway through a recovery drink.

Until then, it’s breakfast and coffee and packing a race bag. My stomach is in knots and I’m marinating in what I’ve come to see as typical moody, emotional, pre-race anxiety. That it’s the first race carries a bit more weight than the other fifty starts that will come this year. What to expect? How will it feel? Am I ready to race? Prepared to start another season?

Ready or not, it’s time to begin.