The More Things Change
To study abroad is to take one’s current educational setting and turn it on its head. Often, of course not all the time one can hone a new language, but the overall experience is to take in a different culture, cuisine, and climate. Frankly it’s to pursue life from a different vantage point than the college campus where a student has planted themselves for 3 or 3.5 years.
The cycling bug sunk its teeth into me in a big way just as I settled into college in Vermont. As I pounded through the hours of training and adjusted my academic schedule allowing it all to happen, the question was spinning in my head faster and faster — could I make it to the bigs?!
When it came to studying abroad, quite common at Middlebury, ironic as it may seem now given the international prominence of cycling, the prospect of studying abroad seemed like a hinderance to my plans to go pro. I soon realized that Middlebury was filled with extraordinarily bright people, so valedictorian status was unachievable. Instead, I wanted to put my head down, train my brains out, study to fill in the gaps, and earn that first pro contract.
As a result, my “study abroad” experience occurred when I enrolled for my winter/spring junior semester at the exotic and foreign — at least by Vermont’s standards — University of Arizona!
Sure it lies within our country’s boundaries, but Tucson, Arizona is about as foreign as it gets from Middlebury, Vermont. From culture to cuisine to climate, not to mention landscape, architecture, and the fact that the school’s undergraduate enrollment is more than 15 times that of Middlebury, Tucson was a fascinating and fun foreign experience for me.
Heck, you can fly to Europe from the east coast a heck of a lot quicker than getting to Arizona.
Fast-forward to last week which marks, ahem, 20 years since I set foot on the desert campus for the first time. Tucson has a gravitational force. It draws winter snowbirds, as much as it brings to town gem aficionados, ardent second amendment advocates, and of course lots and lots of cyclists. Under the guise of studying, and having been whipped into academic shape at Middlebury, I found the book work at the UofA a breeze.
Getting into physical shape came courtesy of Tucson group rides. Big Square was highlighted by a giant brownie at the gas station. Kitt Peak was a mindless out and back with a stunning ten mile climb up to the national observation telescope, Mount Lemmon was the keynote climb looming northeast of town, but at that point the road was under constant construction so you could only go half way up the 23(ish) mile peak. Long outings to Oracle in the north and Pistol Hill to the east, literally every single day there was the option to latch onto a group and instantly earn brand new friends for a few hours of the day.
This being the wild west, though, there’s no bigger ride than the aptly named Shootout.
It might have been half my life ago, but I remember arriving early to not miss the speedy and efficient group roll out of town which segued into the fastest group ride on the planet. I’m not sure that superlative has been vetted by science or what have you, but if you’ve been on the Shootout, you’d agree and if you’ve never been on the Shootout now you know it’s rocket-ship fast.
20 years ago, just like last week, my are teeth chattering in the pre-dawn air. Something to do with the humidity in the desert, 30 degrees to this New Englander felt like half that. The other portion of that eager anticipation for my half-my-life-ago-self, is watching the steady stream of pros roll to the ever growing group of riders who have spilled off of the sidewalk and are now well into the road. There’s no traffic on University Ave at this time of day, so it all somehow works. My black arm warmers are an anonymous black, but I remember the professionals, resplendent in their entirely matching kit, yes, even down to their team issued, wildly colorful arm warmers.
There’s also the lightning fast national team guys just a few years older, but definitely folks I look up to. Danny Pate and Mike Creed are chatting away, looking like they picked their kit off the floor with their eyes closed on their way out the door. A mismatched collection of pro kit cobbled together from their past three seasons, two different arm warmers, plus a smattering of red, white, and blue from a recent outing with the national team, they’re as haphazard as they are aspirational.
Fast forward to last week and, if you’ll just replace “high school girls” with “people on these group rides” the only thing at this point going through my mind is…
No matter how many times I try to scroll through my phone’s images, I can’t find anything worthwhile from my time in Arizona besides the following three gems. The first is of course a silhouetted landscape with token saguaros. The second is sitting directly by the field for a $5 spring training MLB game. In particular, that’s an image of 17 year pro as well as number 17 for the Colorado Rockies, Todd Helton, who with fascinating timing literally just yesterday earned his spot in the baseball Hall of Fame. The the third is a babyface yours truly cutting an inverse mohawk en route to buzzing my head.
That missing digitized timeline is thanks to a combination of digital cameras just coming into popularity around this time and a poorly converted entire album from one phone to the next that cannibalized many hundred early photos. That was a sad day which surely can be chalked up to a whole lot of user error.
Similar to scrolling through old phone timelines, very recently I’ve found myself taking a trip down memory lane looking at old race footage from two and three decades ago that have made their way to YouTube. The first hitting my radar is Pro, a full length documentary well ahead of its time showcasing the biggest one day race in America, “Philly” — the 150 mile Philadelphia International Championships, which served as the US national championships for more than three decades. Content before content was a thing, if you have followed cycling for ages or just recently that’s a great film.
The other rabbit hole of archival footage came courtesy of a recent, heartbreaking tweet from Adam Myerson, noting a passing of an absolute icon of New England cycling, Dick Ring. After his own career, Dick became the voice of bike racing all across the northeast, creating stories and entertaining fans season after season, year after year, decade after decade. Learning that news lead me into conversation with Tim Johnson last night as we exchanged Dick Ring stories from over the years. And then a historical excavation of the internet, finding archival videos many would have assumed were long lost to an earlier age, before a time of digital capture. A riveting final at Downers Grover from 1995, a 1998 reminder that cyclocross embracing billowing kit, and even a young Timmy J. interview are all just scratching the surface.
I encourage you to watch that video Adam passed along. And with any luck that’ll send you down a similar pandoras box, showing that the more cycling changes, the more it stays exactly the same.
May you rest in peace, Dick. Thanks for making thousands of cyclists feel like pros in their matching hyper colored arm warmers.