Katie Kelly

My friend consistently kicks my butt on every ride we go on. She can out climb me, out sprint me, out corner me in every way, unless she’s tired and I’m rested. Then we’re almost even.

She says that 42 is to old for road racing. Not with 30 year olds in the mix.

Someone slap her. I can’t do it, she’s my friend. But could someone? Please? Shake some sense into her.

Eight-eight is old. Like, when you get out of a chair and can’t hear yourself fart, that’s old.

I’m not 42, but I’m not 30 either, and I’m not sure exactly what happened, but all of a sudden, I’m not a kid anymore. I look in the mirror, and I see I’m getting little wrinkles. The braces are helping disguise my age, and I don’t mind that they’ve stayed on longer than they should. I’ll take anything that will give me a youthful appearance without requiring injections or surgery.

But I’m trying to understand at what age are we supposed to stop trying to get stronger, or accept that we just can’t compete anymore. Is there some magic number when it’s plainly pointless to toe the line?

And so I thought back to all the old people in my life, particularly my Grandma Cathy who took up lap swimming in her late sixties, and continued to swim ’til she she passed away at 88.

She even added on to her house, and built an indoor swimming pool, the kind that shoots out water so you swim in one place.

I tried it once, and beached myself. A garden hose was stronger than that current.

She swam every day for twenty minutes, but one day, she had noticed she had lost some toning in her arms. Let me be precise: whatever had been muscle there was now white, flappy skin. I suggested she do arm curls and tricep extensions with soup cans.

A few weeks later, she proudly pointed out some new definition. Let me be more precise: I didn’t look. Her arms scared me. I took her word for it and encouraged her to continue her weight training regimen.

She was thrilled to know that at 88 she could get stronger. She just kept getting better ’til she died, pretty much.

“Getting old isn’t for the weak,” she told me.

And so I’ve just decided, just now, that I’ll wait ’til after I’m dead to decide when I’m too old. Meanwhile, I’ve got a lot more training to do.

I’ll get to my Mt. Hamilton race report in a minute or a day or two. In the meantime, here is a ride report.

My ride report goes like this. Saturday was Team DFL’s Fairfax - Chileno Valley - Fairfax: a Tribute to the European Classics ride that I had read about on NorCal Cycling News.

The route was simple: Fairfax to Nicasio to the Cheese Factory, left on Hicks Valley Road, right up Wilson Hill, continue straight, left on Spring Hill Road,
left on Bodega, left on Tomales, right back up Wilson Hill, right towards the Marshall Wall, climb the Marshall wall, turn left to Pt. Reyes Station, have a
snack, continue past Olema, turn left up Bolinas-Fairfax, climb, drop back down to Fairfax, chocolate milk. Ninety-four miles.

I said, Are you crazy? I’m not riding 94 miles for chocolate milk when I can buy that on my own.

So I thought I’d at least start with them, and not worry too much about being dropped, just because Rachel Lloyd was doing the ride, too. This could be a growing experience.

So, anyway, there were were, climbing up Golf Course Hill, and I was thinking to myself, Self, you have arrived. This is painless. You are going to make ‘em
pay today, I can feel it.

And then someone said, “Hey, Rachel, why don’t you show us what you’re made of.”

A little while later, I saw the group softpedaling up ahead.

I’m fast forwarding past the part where Rachel showed us what she was made of.

So I attacked up that little rise, that little rise no one likes, because just when you think it should be over, you learn it really isn’t, and when Rachel went
by me, I saw her yawning.

At the time, I told myself it was her grimace of pain, but no, she was really yawning.

Then she sprinted through the entire town of Nicasio, and looked backat all of us like we were wimps, and all the boys melted, and I found my new hero.

And then we got to Petaluma road, and my riding companion said, “I’m turning left,” and I said, “Fine, whatever, I’m riding with the big dogs today,” and by the time I turned my head back to the road it was too late, they were already halfway up the hill to the Cheese Factory and I never saw them again.

This morning, I waved to the little kids standing on the pedestrian bridge over Paradise Drive as I rode by, in what was to be an endearing moment of the morning. This was going to start my day just right, the warmth of a child’s smile.

Then one of them spat at me. And then a rock hit my left arm. This changed my mood.

“I’m telling your teacher!” I said, before I had a chance to consider the weight of my words.

I rolled into the school parking lot, and told the woman waiting by the yellow school buses what had happened.

“Oh no! That’s terrible!” she said, like she didn’t really mean it.

“That’s him! That’s him! The blond kid in the red jacket!” I said, as his gang of kindergarten aged thugs walked down the stairs to the parking lot.

“I didn’t do it!” he said. He was six years old and he already knew how to lie.

“I didn’t do it, either,” said a member of his posse.

“I saw Kirk do it,” said a little blond girl, the informant.

“He did it! He did it” said all the other little kids. Maybe they weren’t that bad after all.

“Kirk, that was inappropriate,” said their teacher, Mrs. Aimawimp.

“Inappropriate?” I said. “That’s assault with a deadly weapon! I could have been killed!”

“Tell her you’re sorry right now,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” said Kirk.

“You’re only sorry that you got caught!” I said. “Do you realize that if you were an adult, you could go to jail? Have you considered the implications of your dastardly deads? What if that hit me in the head? I could be dead, on the pavement. And none of you would ever know. You’d probably run over me in your big yellow school bus, and wonder what that big bump was.”

Then I noticed all eyes were on me, with mouths and eyes wide open. I decided to bid them farewell because there was nothing more I could say.

I just want to say that one of the most upsetting things that could ever happen is when you’re just about done revising your Mt. Hamilton Race Report, so that all the words make sense and you have all the commas in just the right places, and then your computer freaks out and the screen turns white, and you get an error message that says, “Your computer is imploding now. Click OK if you would like to scream outside your window, or Cancel if you’d like a stiff drink.”

I’ll try again tomorrow I guess.

By Christopher Connolly

(Mental Floss) — Susan B. Anthony once said, “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” A woman on a bicycle, the equal rights champion observed, presents “the picture of free and untrammeled womanhood.”

Susan and her fellow 19th-century women had been severely trammeled their entire lives. Forget the glass ceiling; women in those days were trapped under the glass floor. Battles like “equal pay for equal work” were decades away. The Victorian woman’s cause was more along the lines of, “We’d like to leave the house, sometimes … please … if it isn’t too much trouble.”

Read the whole thing.

These are just some random things that I like, in no particular order.

• Russian Language and Culture Blog. It’s just my favorite blog. I spent four days in St. Petersburg several years ago, and ever since I’ve wondered, and I mean no offense, is it possible to live in Russia and be happy at the same time? This blog answers that question and more.
• Coffee. This goes without saying.
• Italian. I’m only on lesson four, but now I can say Non credo che sia giusto (I don’t think that would be right), complete with arm gestures, and I think that’s cool and will one day be useful.
• Riding my bike in conjunction with working at home and flex time. I do believe this makes me very lucky.
• My job. See item above.
• The San Anselmo Coffee Roastery. This combines several of my favorite things into one complete social package.
• Lauren Haughey’s Blog. She’s just so dang honest and funny and she writes these stream-of-conscious posts about pot and dildos and stuff, and she’s a real life mom at the same time who races bikes in kneehighs.
• Riding the bus on Wednesday evenings to Ross Commons. I take the bus over there, and meet up with my friends who actually enjoy running for rather long periods of time, and then we go out to eat afterwards, and someone gives me a ride home. How I met these people is a funny story, actually. I used to run myself. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I had already been living in Marin for maybe six or seven years, but after my grandmother died, I had no social life whatsoever, other than friends who lived in San Francisco and liked going to bars and stuff, which isn’t so bad if you like staying awake all night to trick yourself into believing you’re not lonely, but once I hit thirty-something, I needed a new outlet, and running would be it for at least a couple of years, until I somehow got brainwashed into completing an ultra marathon. I hadn’t even tried a 10k before, but if you hang out with these people long enough, they make ultra marathoning (50k or more) seem “normal.” So I ran this ultra marathon, the Cool Canyon 50k to be exact, and I only turned my right ankle maybe twenty or thirty times, so I walked, limped, and then crawled a great deal of it, and a friend thought I needed medical attention and called the paramedics, but they time they got to my locale, I’d already crawled onwards to the finish, and I did finish, in 6:45, and about two weeks later, I decided that racing bikes might seem more sane. So that’s how I started cycling, actually. Much easier on the joints, but I should also admit that Mary Fagan and Trish Wallace had also started cycling, and although they were and are much faster runners than I could ever aspire to be, on the bike I could kick their hollow boned butts. So that was another motivator. Well, meanwhile, then I got distracted, although I dare say it was a very worthwhile destraction, and I started going to SF quite a lot, like I was almost living there, but paying rent in Marin, and it was becoming very stressful for many reasons, with no end to this pattern in sight, and I lost touch with all my friends at Ross Commons. And so I stopped going to SF, got back on the bus, and there were all my friends. It’s like they were waiting for me all this time. Which reminds me, we’re having a potluck tonight, so I better get moving.

He rolled up in front of me at the intersection at the bottom of Camino Alto grade in Corte Madera.

“Excuse me, would you mind telling me what all that commotion was about?” he said.

“I was asking you to stay to the right, so I could get around you safely,” I said, because you were cornering with your inside foot down and you were all over the road, and if you crashed, it’d be disastrous for us both, I didn’t say.

I did get around him, but I am guessing that he did not appreciate my comuniques. Or the blond pony tail or that my voice is four octaves higher than his and that I love my cat and I love getting my toenails done. There are certain people who do not like to be passed by people who like getting their toenails done, and you can tell who they are because they lecture you with their own made up rules about riding etiquette at intersections.

“Okay, let me explain something to you.” he said, nose flaring. ”I don’t ride for you. So that’s your first problem right there.”

I did not feel like explaining the whole concept of slower traffic staying right, and basic cornering principles, because it would mean having to converse with him, and, since we’d be sharing the same road for who knows how many more miles, that would not be optimal for the end of what had been a spectacular ride with some good friends to Pt. Reyes Station and then down the coast through Muir Woods, before heading home for ice cream and a nap.

Before the light turned green, he had already sprinted across the intersection, a manuevre which I guess was supposed to indicate his swiftness.

At the next light, he almost fell over trying to unclip his foot.

I wouldn’t have helped him if he did.