Up until now, I’ve been pretty quiet about cycling’s ongoing doping scandal. There simply isn’t much I can add to the myriad editorials and rants already out there on the intarwebs.

Then I stumbled across this article in Scientific American and I think it’s a brilliant read.

For the last year I’ve been feeling a bit like I missed my calling by not pursuing a career in cycling in my 20s. I feel like I have the perfect body type and stamina to do well at endurance cycling, but being that I’m in my mid-30s, that ship has long since sailed.

But after reading that article, I feel a sort of bittersweet consolation in that the peak of my cycling career would have coincided with the peak of doping. Not even Greg LeMond could stay competitive during that time:

Having won the Tour de France in 1986, 1989 and 1990, LeMond set his sights on breaking what would then have been a record of five Tour de France victories, and in the spring of 1991 he was poised to take his fourth. “I was the fittest I had ever been, my split times in spring training rides were the fastest of my career, and I had assembled a great team around me,” LeMond told me. “But something was different in the 1991 Tour. There were riders from previous years who couldn’t stay on my wheel who were now dropping me on even modest climbs.”

So I will continue to cycle on my own, for the simple joy of riding my bike, and leave the stress of eeking out each last drop of performance to the professionals.

Link to article.

On Saturday April 5, I rode the Shadow Tour 2008 Spring Stagecoach century.

Let me first thank the organizers, all the folks who volunteered to staff the rest stops, and the residents of Ocotillo and Shelter Valley for allowing us to descend upon their quiet community. How wonderful it is for people to dedicate their time to support cyclists like me on these crazy endeavors.

As for the tour itself? Two words: the wind.

The course was an out-and-back affair: 50 miles out and 50 miles back, with the option to turn around at any point. Going out, there was a constant 10-15 mph headwind (plus gusts to 25-30 mph)* that had me struggling to maintain a 10 mph pace. Occasionally the wind became a crosswind with gusts that actually pushed me off of the road — twice.

Generally, I was a solo rider. There was usually a pack of cyclists ahead of me that inspired me to catch them to draft. But since I don’t understand the meaning of taking it easy, I ended up moving ahead of each pack that I caught. I swear, I wasn’t trying to be discourteous. When I caught a pack, I would get in their draft to take a breather, then move to the front to a position to give the leader a draft. But they didn’t seem to keep up, so I’d leave them.

The second time I was blown off the road was after a pack of cyclists had caught me and I was drafting off of them. I figured that if I could keep up with them then I could at least draft until they dropped me. But the universe decided that I wasn’t fit to draft and sent a gust of wind that knocked me off the road onto the sandy shoulder. By the time I had recovered they were too far ahead to catch. It was me against the wind until the turnaround.

The ride back was great, given that the former headwind was now a tailwind allowing me to maintain 30 mph without much difficulty. The last 15 miles weren’t quite as easy as I had expected, as it seemed that the wind had shifted a bit and was more of a crosswind than a tailwind. At least it hadn’t shifted all the way around.

There was a moment on the way back, on an incline sheltered from the wind, where I was completely alone and the familiar howl of the wind was absent and it was completely silent. It was the first time I had heard complete silence in a very long time. Just me, my bike, a hill, and nothing but the universe around me. Heaven.

Well, enough of my yakkin’. Here are the stats, according to my cycle computer:

EDIT: Sweet! Here’s proof that I actually did this thing!

* EDIT: I didn’t want to boast about the wind, so I used data from accuweather.com. According to the Shadow tour site, the wind was 20 mph sustained with gusts to 40 mph.