Neubergthal Cycle Mensch: CX 2013 Race #6

Back in the day we high school boys would, each of us on one occasion or another, try to tell each other these stories about the super-duper incidents and events we'd experienced or witnessed but couldn't quite communicate using words, and then end this failed storytelling with "You had to be there." I feel that way all the time when trying to explain to people at work, who have never seen a cross race, much less ridden in one, why I had a good race, or a not-so-good one, or why I think it's completely okay to keep on racing with (virtually) no hope of winning a race - in fact, that I feel that placing eleventh is a win for me. It's exactly like "you have to be there" in order to get it. You have to be at a race, to get some sense of it. But to really get it, you have to be in a race.

Southern Cross was awesome! You had to be there! What else can you say to explain it all? That's what I'm thinking as I'm standing in the doorway of a colleague's office and trying to answer his question, "How was your race this weekend?" (He's just bought a cross bike. He likes it. He wanted to try a race this year, but he couldn't this weekend because of family matters. I believe him, I really do.) So, since he's asked, I start to explain about the twelve times riding up the hill, or describe the six times you had to get past the sand - was it faster to ride it? or run it? and that you split the difference and rode it three times, and then decided it was faster to run it for the last three - or explain the race wisdom of always dropping into the faster gear when your "go harder even when you can't" cx soul demands it, rather than giving in to the "take it easy" betrayal suggested by your mind and body's screams asking you to shift up for a break. Even as you're saying all this, you see that he's looking back at you like a nineteenth century portrait, you just know there's no way to do this right. He's just holding position. He wasn't there. He has no idea. He can't, because he's never been there.

I believe that if Martin Heidegger would have ridden a few cx races, he may have had an easier time explaining and illustrating his version of being in, or dasein. When you ride a cross race you are existentially compelled into the fullness of yourself in the world. You are involved in a moment. You participate fully in it, and then the next one, and so on, one moment after another. You are driven into the breathing in, the solitary gasping, pumping and running and pushing and heaving of yourself into and against the world. On your own on your bike during a cx race you are completely present. You are your own existence and you are lost in it within the world. You can hardly tell the difference between you and the hills you climb or the wind you flout or the barriers you hurdle. You can only be involved in it all then. You can only be aware of yourself there. It's absolutely hellish in its beauty.

But there you are. And when you stop there are others who are there too. They are with you, and they have their being too, and you have yours, and you are being there together. And it's eye-cryingly marvellous. Stick-in-the-eye-cryingly marvellous. For once you've been there alone, you can be there with the others who have been there too and you can all say bullshit to a bunch of this empathy crapola. You can heckle the hell out of me if you've been there.

What could be more appropriate than the damned cheering on the damned as they navigate the winding road into their own hellish haven of self-discovery? So bang a gong!