robertcocuzzo

[robertcocuzzo]

My father was born to be a rock star, but instead of picking up a guitar, he climbed onto a bicycle. “He’s the kind of cyclist you hate,” my mom tells people, laughing. At 64 years old, Dad still commutes to work through the city on a brakeless fixed-gear, weaving through traffic, flipping people off, and occasionally spitting on the windshields of anyone unlucky enough to cut him off. His riding style has deep roots; over the years, he’s been hit 19 times. That’s no exaggeration: Fourteen of the crashes were with cars, three were with trucks, and two were city buses. After one of these accidents, my mother called me into his hospital room. “You have to talk to him,” she said to me behind the curtain. “He can’t go on like this.”

Sitting on the end of his hospital bed, I made my case. I told him that he had a responsibility to our family to not end up a vegetable, or worse, a ghost bike on the corner of some cold city street. He heard me out and nodded, but I knew nothing was really going to change. Dad depends on the bike for his sanity. His commuting is less about getting to work than it is about the adrenaline rush of running with the bulls. He doesn’t drink, smoke, or eat meat; the high of the ride is what my father lives for. “I live in the big ring,” he likes to say. Taking that away from him, or ratcheting his riding down by even a pedal stroke, would only make him—and everyone around him—absolutely miserable.

Unfortunately, Dad’s riding philosophy didn’t always carry over into his parenting style. He did everything in his power to keep us safe, which sometimes meant showing up to extract me if I was out past curfew. Our family did things his way, with very few objections. If we got lost driving, the car would turn into a ticking time bomb. Throw in a little traffic, and Dad would launch into a string of expletives that could make my eardrums clench. My palms sweat just thinking about it now.

Cycling always calmed the seas between us. He taught me how to ride at an early age—straight to two wheels as I recall—and eventually presented me with my own fixie (complete with a front brake). On a bike he brought me into his world, whisking me with him through the city traffic like a trained assassin. I relished every second of it. No matter where my travels took me after I moved out of my parents’ house, I could always count on getting a spin in with my dad when I came home.

Then a year ago, my grandfather fell ill. In a matter of months, he went from an able-bodied giant who painted his own house at the age of 84, to a frail old man who could barely make it to the bathroom. It seemed to happen overnight.

Although he never said a word about it, my dad seemed unable to accept my grandfather’s decline. When discussions veered to end-of-life care, Dad let my mom speak for him, retreating to his bike. Perhaps he feared that acknowledging my grandfather’s mortality would force him to look down at his own place on life's escalator. Maybe he couldn’t accept that no matter how hard he pedaled, no matter how many crashes he miraculously walked away from, Dad couldn’t turn back the clock—mortality would always be out of his control.

Dad’s thinking wasn’t far from my own. For most of my life, I had thought of him in Hunter S. Thompson’s own terms: too weird to live, and too rare to die. But the reality was that our days together were, and had always been, numbered. Like all fathers and sons, we only had so many more adventures, so many more rides, so many more memories we could make together.

That’s what gave me the idea to go to Italy.

Despite how adventurous he is on a bike, Dad isn’t much of a traveler. He has a phobia of flying, and the last time he left the country, Reagan was in office. Yet Dad always fantasized about traveling to Italy to visit the tiny village of San Donato, his grandfather’s birthplace. His father, who was now in hospice care, never got the chance to visit the village, and it was one of his biggest regrets.

“Let’s do it, Dad,” I said to him over the phone. “We’ll go in honor of Papa.”

Once when I was young, maybe 12 years old, my dad and I spotted a bunch of college kids jumping off an old railroad bridge into Cape Cod Canal. “Let’s do it, Dad,” I said, half kidding. The next thing I knew I was staring down 30 feet to the water, imagining my gruesome landing in the shallows. “You got this!” Dad yelled up.

Some twenty years later, he was still game to take another plunge. We each loaded a backpack with one change of clothes, one cycling kit, two pairs of socks, sneakers, and emergency sleeping bags, and then boarded a flight to Florence. The plan: rent bikes and ride to San Donato, some 425 miles away.

“There. Route 22 takes us right into Siena,” Dad said, dragging a sweaty finger down the map we had pocketed earlier at the bike shop in Florence. “It’s a straight shot.”

It was somewhere before the last climb on our first day, and we’d already gone off course. I didn’t dare tell him that we were lost.

“Yeah, I see that,” I said. “But my route has us going 408 and then connecting with 22 right before Siena.” Dad scanned the map.

“That’s going to add another 20 miles,” he said. “What, are you taking us the scenic route?”

“Exactly,” I shot back.

We were hot, tired, and dehydrated. I could smell the fumes of frustration building in the air, and braced for my father to boil over. A day earlier, Dad had been dropped in a foreign land, far away from the routes where he knew every pothole by heart. I could see him grasping for some sense of control and security, and worried that the abrupt detachment of being abroad might break him. Instead, he folded up the map and slid it into his back pocket. He threw his leg over his bike, squeezed a long drink from his water bottle, and flashed me a crazy grin. “Ready?”

With that, our roles suddenly shifted. After decades of protecting me and commanding the lead—through city traffic, off railroad bridges, through the course of my life—my dad was turning over control to me. Now I was his sense of security. “Let’s do it,” I said.

Each day we ground slowly and steadily up thousands of vertical feet. We broke 6,000 feet over the 52 miles from Florence to Siena, then another 6,770 the following day en route to San Casciano dei Bagni, a third-century stone village overlooking Tuscany. Occasionally the climbs pitched at a torturous 20 degrees. With my heart punching my ribcage like a speed bag, I worried that one of these climbs could actually kill my father. (I wondered how much a good urn costs in Italy.)

“How you doing, Dad?” I asked over my shoulder on a particularly cruel climb.

“Good...man.” I heard, between breaths.

Cresting the top of the climb, I kicked out of my pedals and waited for him. He pulled up to me like a beaten stray dog.

“Well that sucked,” I said.

“Brutal,” he laughed. “Even my eyebrows hurt.”

Yet somehow Dad seemed to get stronger with each day. Meanwhile, my body began to break down. I was hauling a 20-pound bag off my seatpost, which forced me to climb each hill from the seated position or risk tipping. As the trip wore on, my knee began screaming with every pedal stroke. I gobbled ibuprofen like Skittles, but nothing dulled the bone-on-bone torture. Doubt crept in, and I began to play out a scene in my head: unclipping and telling my dad I couldn’t go on.

“No, you got this buddy, you got this,” I kept telling myself. “You got this buddy, you got this.”

“What?” my dad asked.

“Nothing, nothing.” I mumbled.

The agony raging in my knee paled in comparison to the mental torture of letting my dad down. He had turned the trip over to me and now I was thinking about quitting.

When the situation couldn’t possibly get more desperate, it did. The cable to my back derailleur snapped like a severed tendon and got sucked into the bike’s frame. We were 40 miles into an 82-mile day, with the crux climb of more than 6,000 feet looming ahead of us. My knee was throbbing, and now I had lost my ability to shift.

We pulled to the side of the road. Dad and I flipped the bike. We studied the frayed cable for a long time in silence. We were in the middle of nowhere, and he was thinking what I was thinking: This is where the trip ends. There were forty miles of steep climbs ahead of us, and my bike was stuck in the big ring. It was impossible.

When I was a senior in college, Dad moved me into my house off campus on a frigid fall morning. We strapped a mattress to the roof of his car and set off on the hour-long ride. About halfway through the trip, a loud thud began echoing through the car. One of the ties had come free, and the mattress was flapping in the wind. But instead of pulling over and refastening the ties like reasonable people, Dad and I just rolled down our windows and held the mattress by hand for the next 30 minutes in the biting cold.

I learned a defining lesson that morning. For better or for worse, my father and I share a rationale that is one part fiendishness and one part raw will. If the solution comes down to a matter of suffering, nothing is impossible.

“I have an idea,” he said, perking up. “If we can get it in the easiest ring, you can climb the hills and then coast the rest.”

“Basically make it a singlespeed?”

“Exactly.”

He popped the spring out from the derailleur with a hex wrench. “Spin that,” he said. I cranked the pedal by hand while he manually shifted the gears until it was in the easiest ring.

“There,” he said, wiping his greasy fingers on his jersey.

I flipped the bike and reassessed: I now had one gear, one good leg, and one long-ass day ahead of me, but my attitude had shifted. Our hands were holding the mattress again, and we weren’t letting go no matter how cold it got. I threw my aching leg over the bike, squeezed a long sip of water into my mouth and shot him a grin.

“Ready?”

“Let’s do it,” he said.

One night during the trip, I received a text message from my mom, asking if we could call my grandfather. His condition had worsened and she was worried that we wouldn’t get back in time to see him. Dad had tears in his eyes as he spoke to his father 4,000 miles away. “I love you, Dad,” he said meekly, before turning the phone over to me. Papa’s voice was weak. “Are you taking care of your father?” he asked.

“We’re taking care of each other, Papa.”

Finally, after nearly two weeks of filling our jersey pockets with candy wrappers, emptying bottle after water bottle, and soaking in the Italian countryside, the village came into view. Nestled in the mountains of Abruzzo National Park, San Donato looked more magical than I’d ever dared imagine. A ray of sun pierced through the clouds and coated the village in a light that I can only describe as providential.

As we neared the town, I told Dad to take the lead so that I could take photos of him approaching.

“No,” he said abruptly. “I want you to lead us in.”

I pushed forward and the street narrowed into the grip of ancient buildings, leading me to the city center. Old men sat in the piazza, drinking cappuccino and smoking cigarettes. I coasted past them towards a tall stone monument in the center, erected in memory of those lost in World War II. As I clipped out of my pedals to get a better look, I spotted it, right at the top. A lump lodged in my throat. I waited for my dad to pull up alongside me. "Look," I said, nodding upwards.

He narrowed his eyes on the monument and immediately welled up into tears. We stood there silently, reading our last name in the stone. “You’re the best,” Dad said, his voice trembling. He pulled me in for a hug.

As I’d become aware that my grandfather was nearing the end of his road, I’d prodded him for words of wisdom. I was hoping that he would bestow some life lessons that he’d amassed over his 86 years. But no matter how I asked the question, it always came back to one simple answer: Family. Keep the family together.

I now understood more clearly what he meant. Family can seem like a foregone conclusion. Something that you’re just born into and accept as your reality. But that’s really just about genes and blood ties. True family takes time and effort to nurture. It’s about getting lost and pulling together, instead of being pulled apart. As with many lessons in my life, and that of my father’s, it took a long bike ride for us remember that for our family to stay balanced, we have to keep on pedaling.

Originally published on Bicycle.com

[robertcocuzzo]

For the last two months, I’ve been touring Tracking the Wild Coomba around the country. To keep track of all the memories, I started a Vlog. Give ‘er a gander...

[robertcocuzzo]

NOVEMBER 3: Boulder, CO

[robertcocuzzo]

DO YOU KNOW THE MUSHROOM MAN?

In the Blue Hills south of Boston, where the woods are just thick enough to hide the city’s skyline and drown out the din of passing cars, you will not see Chef Daniel Bruce. You will not see him ambling around chestnut oaks and white pines in search of the 28 edible mushrooms he can identify by sight and smell. You will not see him dropping to his knees and brandishing a kitchen knife to retrieve one of these mushrooms from the roots of a dying tree. You will not see Daniel Bruce, because the first rule of being an expert mushroom hunter is not to be seen. That is unless he chooses to be, as is the case today.

“If we ever got lost in here, we’d walk out twenty pounds fatter,” the chef says, while holding back a branch from smacking me in the face, “there’s more things to eat in the woods than you could ever imagine.” The morning sun is trickling down through the fall canopy, scattering puzzle pieces of light on the ground that Bruce seems to be putting together with his eyes. Wearing dungarees and white New Balance sneakers, he hardly looks the part of an outdoorsman revered for his encyclopedic knowledge of wild mushrooms. Yet as we climb deeper into this world of decomposing limbs and leaves, Bruce’s sixth sense for foraging comes alive with childlike zeal. He begins breaking trail with long, powerful strides, bounding up molehills and down gullies, through thickets of tangled thorns and muddy bogs. He moves with agility surprising for his 6’1” build, a rare crossbreed of Squanto and Sasquatch unleashed. This is the Daniel Bruce few get to see, away from his stainless steel domain at the Boston Harbor Hotel where he has served as executive chef since 1989.

 “Each species of mushrooms likes to grow in different areas,” Bruce explains, poking two fingers into a decaying stump and examining its broken-down bark. “In that I mean soil acidity, the type of tree, altitude. Then you have to know what time of year they grow; like right now we have four or five species we could find. It’s all legwork after that.” Indeed, Bruce’s extensive mushroom IQ represents decades of legwork. Each mushroom in his repertoire he collected, cut, put under a microscope and studied alongside Audubon books and foraging guides. This is how he spent his childhood in the backwoods of Maine, where he grew up with no electricity, no running water, no indoor toilet, and certainly no television.

Bruce’s father was (and still is) a registered Maine guide who fled the “rat race” of a town of five hundred in New Hampshire to a town of fifty-six in Maine. Still considering it too crowded for his liking, he then moved his family a mile and a half down the road, effectively taking ten percent of the town’s population with him off the grid. “I was a junior prom baby,” Bruce says. “My mom was sixteen and my dad was seventeen when they had me, so my parents were sort of like brothers and sisters in a way.”

With their annual income around $5,000, the Bruce family of six lived largely off the land. Young Daniel was sent to school with sack lunches of berries, baked beans and pickerel sandwiches. “We had to lug our water in from a mile away,” he says. “It was a pretty unusual upbringing, but it was fun. I loved going into the woods and finding these things. It was like a treasure hunt.” Everyday he foraged for pussy willows, alder berries, fiddleheads, wild raisins, ramps, and later in his teens, mushrooms of all kinds. “I’d bring all this wild stuff to the table, but none of my family would want to eat it, except my sister,” he says, “and she’s still alive so it was all good.”

Today’s target is a mushroom called Hen of the Woods, which Bruce tells me grows at the base of oak trees this time of year. While each mushroom has a Latin designation of which the chef is well versed, their layman’s names sound more like characters from The Lord of the Rings, characters you can also start seeing if you eat the wrong kind of mushroom. Velvet Foot, Pig’s Ear, Man on Horseback, Painted Suillus and Bare-toothed Russula are just five of the five thousand mushrooms in North America that foragers will crawl through poison ivy to eat or identify. “I’m not a mycologist, I’m a bounty hunter,” Bruce says. “I know the mushrooms I like to cook with and that’s what I go for.” None of the mushrooms he forages, however, end up at his restaurants. They are strictly for friends and family.

As we descend deeper into the woods, Bruce gushes survival tips and fun forest facts, what I imagine his father must sound like when guiding clients on the hunt. “See this fiddlehead fern? You can use it to wrap a fish and keep it fresh,” he says. “And these pussy willow shoots, when they’re very young, the inner bark can be boiled like pasta and eaten. There was a time when the outer bark was used to make tea.” He tells me that the Hen of the Woods mushroom has been proven to limit or reduce the growth of tumors, and can actually enhance the effectiveness of chemotherapy. “A friend of mine had a brain tumor and he swears that part of the reason he got better was because I used to make him this little broth with Hen of the Woods,” Bruce says. “That’s the mushroom we’re trying to get right now.”

Throughout it all he never stops moving, but pinballs from one promising grove to the next like a bloodhound on the scent—until he comes across our first find. “Here we go, see that?” I don’t see anything, just leaves, trees and grass. “That right there.” Still nothing. He kneels and pulls out a kitchen knife and points it to the earth. “That is a coral mushroom.” Finally I see it, a golf ball-sized fungus that looks more like a sponge than anything Mario or Luigi would eat. Bruce severs the mushroom at the root and then raises it to his nose. A glimmer of satisfaction flashes in his eyes. “This will go great in an omelet,” he says. “Let’s keep moving. We’re on the right track.”

The tradition of eating mushrooms stems back before Christ when Egyptian pharaohs believed fungi held supernatural powers of immortality, and fiercely forbid commoners from picking them. Over four thousands years later, mushroom hunting is still a cutthroat business. “There are a lot of stabbings,” Bruce says nonchalantly. “Foraging is very proprietary in a way. Everyone thinks they own the spot, but, hello, we’re on public land. No one owns these places.” Even as Bruce gesticulates with his 10-inch kitchen knife, it’s hard to imagine a duel breaking out over a piece of fungus. Less hard to imagine, however, is the horror of a casual dog walker bumping into Bruce as he lumbers through the woods with a mini machete in hand. But then again, if he’s hunting for mushrooms, Daniel Bruce is pretty much invisible. Only amateurs bump into dog walkers.

“Okay, look at this, but do not touch,” Bruce says, carefully clearing away some leaves with his blade. “This is an Amanita mushroom, otherwise known as a Destroying Angel.” I look down the blade of Bruce’s knife expecting to find a grotesque boil oozing puss and venom, but to my surprise it’s the most innocent looking mushroom I’ve seen all day, cute even. Standing two inches tall with a clean white cap and stem, the Destroying Angel doesn’t seem worthy of its doomsday moniker, and yet it’s one of the most deadly mushrooms known on the planet. “You usually get really sick, and then you feel better, then three days later your kidneys and liver shutdown,” Bruce says. “It’s not a good way to go.” Without a liver transplant, victims enter a hepatic coma and die shortly thereafter. The few who have survived the Angel’s wrath describe apocalyptic diarrhea, vomiting and constipation six to eight hours after consumption. All this from a mushroom you could picture in the produce aisle of Stop & Shop.

While hot on his trail in the woods, it can be easy to forget who Daniel Bruce is outside of mushroom hunting. It can be easy to forget how he rose up from the dish pits in rural Maine to become one of Boston’s most celebrated chefs. After his parents divorced and his mom took a job waitressing at a local restaurant, sixteen-year-old Daniel got hired as its busboy. But he wanted to be in the kitchen. So when a pot-washing position opened up at the town’s only fine dining restaurant, he took it. The restaurant’s owner, Florence Blaisdell-Sterns, recognized the teen’s feverish work ethic and fledgling interest in cooking and helped him get a loan to attend Johnson & Whales. After cooking school, Bruce’s work ethic caught the eye of a visiting chef from Italy who invited him to Liguria—it was Bruce’s first time on a plane—to apprentice at his restaurant.

Two years later, Bruce returned to the States fluent in Italian, French and Old World cuisine. Positions at New York City’s Le Cirque and 21 Club followed, and then the Boston Harbor Hotel called in search of a driven young chef for their brand new hotel. Bruce was a perfect fit. He’s been there ever since, nearly a quarter century running three restaurants, three bars and all the hotel’s in-room dining. In 1990, he founded the Boston Wine Festival, a three-month bacchanal that takes place at the hotel starting in January every winter. While Bruce’s Cinderella story finds its way into a few pages of his cookbook entitled Simply New England (due on shelves this holiday season), you’d never know about his meteoric rise from talking to him. If Daniel Bruce’s genius as a chef and forager is matched by anything, it seems to be his deep and genuine humility.

Morning is giving way to afternoon when Bruce gets a call from one of his sous chefs. After hours in the woods, the cellphone looks foreign pressed up against his ear. “O.K., yeah, get the fish ready for me and I’ll be there in 45 minutes or so.” I suddenly realize that we’re not in the shire anymore, and more importantly, I have no clue how to get out of the woods. How long have we been walking? How far have we walked? The two of us have been in a trance, dotting from one tree stump to another with no discernible direction. “I could stay here all day, but I have to put out two brunches at eleven,” Bruce says, slipping the phone back in his pocket. “But we can’t leave until we find a Hen of the Woods.”

With the clock ticking, the chef kicks the hunt into overdrive. He scans the tree line, looking for dead oaks and races from one to the next. “Nope, not this one.” My hopes for finding this fabled mushroom are beginning to dwindle fast, perhaps an indication that I would be the first to perish in a survival situation, but Bruce is unfailingly optimistic. “We’re getting close, I can feel it.” And then, as if he planned it, Bruce calls over, “Check this out!” Sure enough, there in the clutch of a regal chestnut oak sits a Hen of the Woods in all its fungal glory, ripe for the picking. Bruce looks over each shoulder to make sure no one is watching, then lowers to his knees, draws out his knife and cuts the mushroom with all the care and precision of a master chef. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he asks, holding out the growth of fungus. “Beautiful” never seemed an appropriate adjective to describe a mushroom, but here in the woods, in the quiet, in the presence of a man consumed by his passion, “beautiful” has never been more fitting.

[robertcocuzzo]

THE NATURAL

                 Number 250 emerged from the water first. The crowd cheered as he stormed up the beach, then jumped onto his bike and pedaled off behind a police escort. The spectators then turned their attention back to the water’s edge to await the next triathlete. They waited and waited. Finally after nearly two minutes—an eternity in swim time—the next competitor hustled up Jetties Beach in hopes of catching the front runner that had just dominated the first leg of the Nantucket “Hero” Triathlon. He would try, along with many others, but in the end, no one could beat the leader Beau Garufi.

At twenty-two years old and standing at a sturdy 6’1”, Nantucket native Beau Garufi has the look of an athlete who was born with bulging biceps and a six-pack—and now he has the résumé to match. In Nantucket’s first Olympic-distance triathlon, Garufi not only bested a handful of top ranked triathletes, he even beat out the lead relay team. In other words, he swam and ran and cycled faster than a three-man team, where each member of that team only had one event to complete. So after swimming .75 miles and then cycling twenty-eight, Garufi still ran faster than someone running on a fresh pair of legs. This feat becomes even more baffling when you consider that Beau Garufi had never competed in a triathlon before.

What he had competed in was swimming. His record times still line the walls around Nantucket High School’s swimming pool like permanent fixtures. While he entered the water at an early age, it wasn’t until he was seventeen that he started honing his stroke. He put down his baseball glove and hung up his soccer cleats to focus entirely on swimming. “I knew that I couldn’t do all three sports at the level I wanted to, so I picked swimming, dropped everything else and then started training by myself all year round,” he says. “I’d go to Whalers practice, and afterwards I would stay until the pool closed…I knew what it took to be one of the better swimmers, but I had to do it by myself.”

All the extra laps paid off when he earned a spot on the UMass Amherst swim team, a D1 program of which he eventually became, appropriately enough, tri-captain. Last season, Garufi missed nationals in the hundred-meter breaststroke by .14 seconds, a minuscule margin that clearly scathes him to this day. After his victory this past July, recruiters for the US Triathlon team reached out to him, and he was invited to compete in the Age Group National Championship in Milwaukee. Out of 2,650 racers, Garufi came in 57th overall, and 19th in his age group. The performance qualified him for the 2014 International Triathlon Union’s World Championships in Edmonton Canada, where plans to compete as a member of team USA.

“Even for an individual with an extremely athletic pedigree like Beau’s, a first time win in an Olympic distance triathlon is a phenomenal achievement,” says Nantucket Triathlon founder Jamie Ranney. “I’d say that Beau has a very bright future in triathlon should he choose to pursue it. Whether he can rise into the ranks of the paid professionals that compete in long course races…remains to be seen.”

Beyond raw talent, Garufi seems to possess the soft-spoken demeanor that is exceedingly rare amongst today’s athletes. He strikes me in the same way that reporters used to describe Bo Jackson: humble to the point of shy. “I guess I just love competing,” he says of his motivation. “I don’t have to be here [in this interview] right now. No one has to know about me. No one knows me when I’m out running or biking by myself. I just want to do it.” But Beau definitely knows Beau, and he is keenly aware of his abilities and where they could take him. “As far as I’m concerned you put the limitations on yourself,” he says, “so I try not to think too much about where I will end up. I just want to take it as far as I can.” In the meantime, Nantucket will just have to wait and see how far and how fast Beau will go.

[robertcocuzzo]

SOME 300 MILES NORTH OF BOSTON, THE MACHIAS MOTOR INN HAS NEVER BEEN SO BUSY. It’s December of 2012, and the parking lot is lined with pickup trucks, trailers, and boats, while their owners check and recheck their gear. They’re gathered at this rural outpost in Downeast Maine in pursuit of a highly profitable, highly dangerous, highly curious catch: sea urchins. The Japanese delicacy urchin roe, commonly known as uni, has become the new caviar for many foodies, appearing on the menus of Boston’s top sashimi eateries, such as O Ya, Oishii, and, of course, the dish’s Back Bay namesake, Uni Sashimi Bar. Although these restaurants and others see only a tiny fraction compared to the bounty sent overseas to Tokyo, if you’re eating uni in Boston, it most likely came from Maine’s Bold Coast. And while the urchin itself offers little more than a bite, the story behind that bite is a mouthful.

Read more at http://bostoncommon-magazine.com/dining/articles/fishing-for-uni-off-maines-bold-coast

[robertcocuzzo]

A LESSON IN HUMILITY

THAT OLD BASTARD FED ME MY HEART. PLAIN AND SIMPLE. NO EXCUSES. HE HAD ME BEAT, HANDEDLY. AND HE DID IT WITH A SMILE.

Allow me to backpedal.

When I climb onto my bike most days, I enter a very different headspace than most. My world distills down to my legs and my lungs and the beautifully simple machine I’m perched upon. On a good day, I feel ferocious. I become part of the bike. My toes point to the ground, my knees tilt to the frame, and my body becomes an engine.

In the city, I relish in the chase. I love spotting another cyclist on the road’s horizon and hunting them down mercilessly. It’s almost primal. When I find that doe, that sheep, that piece of meat I’m chasing, I lower my hands into the drops and let my spine slide in between my shoulder blades and I become a lion. My lips curl over my teeth and I couldn’t tell you if I’m breathing or not. All I know is the road, the person, my legs, the road, the person my legs, the road, the person, my legs, and on and on.

Once I pull up on his back wheel, I toy with him. I steal his draft and build up an energy reserve. Now I’m looking for the right moment to pounce. Never pass going down hill. That’s for chumps. Rarely pass on the flats. That’s too predictable. Always pass on the climb. That’s where dominance is made.

Five pedal strokes uphill and I throw it into the big gear and pull out into traffic and crank. This is the kill. But kill him softly. Don’t taunt your victim on the pass. Wait. Wait. Wait for fifteen pedal strokes and then when you know the deed is down, turn your head and look over your shoulder.

That look, that’s what it’s all about, that look. It’s that look that Lance gave Ullrich in the Pyrenees after dropping him with vengeance. It’s that look that is all at once modest and cocky. It’s that look that says I am stronger than you, and now you are just a memory of mine.

And that’s what I was thinking when I pulled in behind an old-timer today. His bike was a relic. His shifters were mounted on the frame, and there was a mudguard waving off an old screw over his back wheel. He was rail thin, his legs looked like breadsticks.

Easy kill, I thought.

Like so many times before, I tossed it into the big gear and pulled around. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and now look. But there he was, right on my back wheel, looking up at me with a grin. This was the first time I’d seen his face. With an unkempt salt and pepper beard and wearing a retro helmet, he looked like someone who probably donates to NPR and drives an old Subaru. I must have gone 60% on the pass. Let’s loose him.

I slid my torso in like a Swiss army knife and pound the pedals. The wind pulled tears out of my eyes, and I could feel the oxygen getting ripped off the walls of my lungs. My mouth went dry and I yearned for my water bottle. Just a few more seconds, and then I could ease up. This was a hard push, 90% capacity at least. The glance over my shoulder now was not one of triumph. It was meek. It was like peeking into a closet that might hold a monster. I turned my head and there he was, wearing that same fucking grin.

There was no purity now on my bike. My mind was everywhere. I went through my mental checklist. What did I have for lunch? Did I pump my tires? Did I grease my chain? And then the question crept over me like the big game hunter stalking the lion: Is this old man, this sixty-year-old man, as strong as me? 

And then I got my answer: He pulled around me in traffic and passed. He killed without mercy.

[robertcocuzzo]

That old bastard fed me my heart. Plain and simple. No excuses. He had me beat, handedly. And he did it with a smile. 

Allow me to backpedal.

When I climb onto my bike most days, I enter a very different headspace than most. My world distills down to my legs and my lungs and the beautifully simple machine I’m perched upon. On a good day, I feel ferocious. I become part of the bike. My toes point to the ground, my knees tilt to the frame, and my body becomes an engine.

In the city, I relish in the chase. I love spotting another cyclist on the road’s horizon and hunting them down mercilessly. It’s almost primal. When I find that doe, that sheep, that piece of meat I’m chasing, I lower my hands into the drops and let my spine slide in between my shoulder blades and I become a lion. My lips curl over my teeth and I couldn’t tell you if I’m breathing or not. All I know is the road, the person, my legs, the road, the person my legs, the road, the person, my legs, and on and on.

Once I pull up on his back wheel, I toy with him. I steal his draft and build up an energy reserve. Now I’m looking for the right moment to pounce. Never pass going down hill. That’s for chumps. Rarely pass on the flats. That’s too predictable. Always pass on the climb. That’s where dominance is made.

Five pedal strokes uphill and I throw it into the big gear and pull out into traffic and crank. This is the kill. But kill him softly. Don’t taunt your victim on the pass. Wait. Wait. Wait for fifteen pedal strokes and then when you know the deed is down, turn your head and look over your shoulder.

That look, that’s what it’s all about, that look. It’s that look that Lance gave Ullrich in the Pyrenees after dropping him with vengeance. It’s that look that is all at once modest and cocky. It’s that look that says I am stronger than you, and now you are just a memory of mine.

And that’s what I was thinking when I pulled in behind an old-timer today. His bike was a relic. His shifters were mounted on the frame, and there was a mudguard waving off an old screw over his back wheel. He was rail thin, his legs looked like breadsticks.

Easy kill, I thought.

Like so many times before, I tossed it into the big gear and pulled around. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and now look. But there he was, right on my back wheel, looking up at me with a grin. This was the first time I’d seen his face. With an unkempt salt and pepper beard and wearing a retro helmet, he looked like someone who probably donates to NPR and drives an old Subaru. I must have gone 60% on the pass. Let’s loose him.

I slide my torso in like a Swiss army knife and pound the pedals. The wind pulls tears out of my eyes, and I can feel the oxygen getting ripped off the walls of my lungs. My mouth goes dry and I yearn for my water bottle. Just a few more seconds, and then I can ease up. This was a hard push, 90% capacity at least. The glance over my shoulder now is not one of triumph. It’s meek. It’s like peeking into a closet that might hold a monster. I turn my head and there he is, wearing that same fucking grin.

There is no purity now on my bike. My mind is everywhere. I go through my mental checklist. What did I have for lunch? Did I pump my tires? Did I grease my chain? And then the question creeps over me like the big game hunter stalking the lion: Is this old man, this sixty-year-old man, as strong as me?

And then I get my answer: He pulls around me in traffic and passes. He kills without mercy.