Categories: Racing

The Perfect Amount of Dumb

Spartacus doing what he does best: dishing out pain.

I find professional athletes – cyclists in particular – an impressive bunch. They are hard, disciplined people who ply their trade in some of the most atrocious conditions imaginable. To become professionals, they have to be good at what they do, and smart enough to learn how to continue succeeding despite the gaps between the top of the sport continually narrowing. They have to learn to live right and train right. They have to listen to their coaches. They have to learn to control their mind and to override the signals their bodies are sending. They need to be smart enough to read an ever-changing race and smell the right moment to make their move; disaster and glory can be separated only by a split-second reaction born out of intuition mixed with experience and intelligence.

But the best athletes are also a little bit dumb. Men like Fabian Cancellara, Jens Voigt, or Tom Boonen; these are the men who flog themselves for hours on end and, when their bodies are about to break, dial it up a notch and lay it all out on the road. A smarter man would, under those circumstances, say, “You know what? This is nice, but I can also go less hard.”

Not asking that sort of question after dropping the flashlight deep in the pain cave is the perfect amount of dumb.

frank

The founder of Velominati and curator of The Rules, Frank was born in the Dutch colonies of Minnesota. His boundless physical talents are carefully canceled out by his equally boundless enthusiasm for drinking. Coffee, beer, wine, if it’s in a container, he will enjoy it, a lot of it. He currently lives in Seattle. He loves riding in the rain and scheduling visits with the Man with the Hammer just to be reminded of the privilege it is to feel completely depleted. He holds down a technology job the description of which no-one really understands and his interests outside of Cycling and drinking are Cycling and drinking. As devoted aesthete, the only thing more important to him than riding a bike well is looking good doing it. Frank is co-author along with the other Keepers of the Cog of the popular book, The Rules, The Way of the Cycling Disciple and also writes a monthly column for the magazine, Cyclist. He is also currently working on the first follow-up to The Rules, tentatively entitled The Hardmen. Email him directly at rouleur@velominati.com.

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View Comments

unversio says:

Mar 21 2013 at 3:54 pm

@Cyclops

As dumb as I am you'd think I'd be hella fast. But alas...

(Kirk Lazarus voice) "Like the dumbest mother fucker that ever lived."

note: there was no way to resist this post
Chris says:

Mar 21 2013 at 4:45 pm

@the Engine

Ever wonder how many people around you have even been mildly out of breath in the last year?

I suspect a large percentage of the people around us spend a lot of time out of breath. They're too fat and unfit not to.

I'm not convinced that the ability to crank it up a notch when you're on the edge has anything to do with dumb. Surely the dumb ones are the ones who say "this is getting a bit difficult, I'll sack it in and let someone else dot it"

Frank was much closer to the mark with this.

"The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts."

I love the fact that you and @Dinan view burying yourselves from such polar opposites, one of you likens it to shitting themselves, the other to sex. Does it make us seriously deviant that we all understand that we're talking about the same thing?
the Engine says:

Mar 22 2013 at 4:32 am

Was looking for something at work and by pure happenstance came across this:

When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking. "” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
PeakInTwoYears says:

Mar 22 2013 at 7:15 am

@the Engine Who doesn't love Conan Doyle? As an old riding partner of mine used to say and still says, "Riding makes everything better." It is a bit like sex: sometimes it's friendly and casual, easy fun; sometimes it's rather more serious. And in both cases, it's fucking awesome.
Buck Rogers says:

Mar 22 2013 at 7:43 am

@PeakInTwoYears

@the Engine Who doesn't love Conan Doyle? As an old riding partner of mine used to say and still says, "Riding makes everything better." It is a bit like sex: sometimes it's friendly and casual, easy fun; sometimes it's rather more serious. And in both cases, it's fucking awesome.

Dude was an ophthalmologist as well. What's not to like???
the Engine says:

Mar 22 2013 at 7:56 am

@PeakInTwoYears

@the Engine Who doesn't love Conan Doyle? As an old riding partner of mine used to say and still says, "Riding makes everything better." It is a bit like sex: sometimes it's friendly and casual, easy fun; sometimes it's rather more serious. And in both cases, it's fucking awesome.

I'm sure that somewhere in the Canon is a reference to Holmes writing a monograph on "Why Cycling is Fucking Awesome".
Chris says:

Mar 22 2013 at 8:14 am

@the Engine More likely he wrote extensively on his experiences of PEDs. The guy was a major league doper.
the Engine says:

Mar 22 2013 at 9:02 am

@Chris

@the Engine More likely he wrote extensively on his experiences of PEDs. The guy was a major league doper.

When I wrote that I was going to make a Baroque reference comparing Holmes being on the juice to a cyclist active in the pro-peloton now but I couldn't make it work
Chris says:

Mar 22 2013 at 9:11 am

@the Engine There may be a few dopers in the peloton but I wouldn't have thought there were many whose mental capacity could be compared.
the Engine says:

Mar 22 2013 at 9:45 am

@Chris

@the Engine There may be a few dopers in the peloton but I wouldn't have thought there were many whose mental capacity could be compared.

Yeah - that was the circle I couldn't square