Post Surgery Week 13: Vine Street Criterium

Thursday, August 22

When I was 8 years old, I got my first bike.  It was a blue beauty, and special because it was brand new and a girl’s bike.  No hand-me-downs for me!  I had watched my big brother learn to ride, so I had a head start.  I used training wheels for just a short time, and then I was off, riding like the wind.

Well, as much like the wind as an 8 year old can ride.  The truth was, I rode all over town.  All. Over. Town.  Of course, you have to remember that these were different times, and the town where I lived until age 9 only had a population of about 200 souls.  Still, it was grand to be so free.

Something happened early in my biking career, and I fell in with a bunch of kids who liked to race.  The course was the block that was home to the town’s two churches:  one Methodist, and the other Christian.  The streets were crumbling asphalt, which meant that the corners were particularly treacherous with loose pebbles and sand and rocks.  We raced around and around that one block, and, inevitably, someone would spin out on the loose stuff, and there would be a wreck.  It never failed to happen.

Methodist Church, Henderson, Iowa

My first wreck netted me skinned knees and elbows, but nothing terrible.  What was terrible was my mom’s reaction.  She read me the riot act, lectured me on the dangers of racing, and forbade me from ever racing again.  I was sufficiently scared that I didn’t head right back out to play with the racers.

But then, time elapsed, and somehow I was out on my bike again, and somehow I ended up racing that same block with those same kids again, and pow!  I got into a bang-up of a wreck.  This time my knees and elbows were much further gone than mere road rash.  I was a mess.  I was scraped and bloodied and bruised.  I had pebbles embedded deeply in both knees.  My elbows were, well, don’t ask.  My friend Ann Phillips was there, and she lived just a block away, and her mom was a nurse, so that’s where I ended up.  Mrs. Phillips worked on cleaning me up with mercurochrome in their brightly lit kitchen.  I cried as she worked on me, and she tried to reassure me that it would all be okay, and she was going to call my mom to come get me.  That was when I blubbered:  “But my mom is going to kill me!”  Sure, it hurt like anything, but I was more scared of my mom than I was of the skinned up body parts.

Mom, baby brother Dave, me, Ann Phillips

But Mom was great, and kind.  I think she knew that I wouldn’t be racing anytime soon again.

And I didn’t race again on a bike.  For a long, long time.  I had no interest in it whatsoever.

But then, many years later, I moved to downtown Denver in 2000, and woke up one Sunday morning to find there was a bike race going on right outside my window.  I mean: Right. Outside. My. Window!  It was the Bannock Street Criterium, a race that has been held annually since the early 1990s.  A criterium, or “crit”, is a bike race of multiple laps on a closed course.  The Bannock Street Criterium course is a figure 8 configuration through what used to be my neighborhood.  I was a total newbie to bike racing of any kind in the early 2000s, so this was all virgin territory to me.  I went out on the street and watched as different groups - fast, powerful men;  kids;  women looking just as fierce as the guys; - flew by in different waves.  It was fascinating to see the changeup in position each time each different group went by.  It made me think of racing around the church block in Henderson, Iowa, in the 1960s.

It was shortly after that that I met Mick, the guy I would go on to spend eight years of my life with.  Mick was big into cycling, and into bike racing.  It took a few years before he convinced me to join him in a bike race or two, but they were all uphill races in the mountains that were too vertical to build up much speed.  I was never really frightened of speed on those uphill races because, well, even while I was racing, I was going at slightly more than a snail’s pace.

But in the summer of 2005, we happened to be spending the weekend at my place on the Sunday of the Bannock Street Criterium.  On a whim, he and I both decided to enter the race.  Now, I didn’t know a darn thing about racing a crit, but I figured that I would be just riding for fun, not actually competing.  I still don’t understand the ins and outs of competitive bike racing and all the “Cats” and ranking algorithms, and how you end up racing in which category.  But it turned out that there was a Citizen’s category for women, and so there I was, lined up at the start with 6 other women in my age group, and the horn sounded, and we were off.  Our race was 5 laps on the 1.5km course.  Not terribly long, but with that figure 8 configuration and all of the hazards of racing on city streets - manhole covers, cracks and potholes, etc. - it was a real challenge.

There are few details from that day that stick in my mind as firmly as the feeling that I got as I engaged in the competition.  Once I noticed that I wasn’t getting dropped from the outset, I just went into autopilot, and didn’t even notice that I was getting into the race.  About halfway through the race, though, we went flying around one corner, and I realized that I was on the edge of my ability to stay upright.  Whew!  I was 8 years old again, back in Henderson, and I was racing around the church block.

Something about that visceral memory of the wreck and being scraped up and ouch:  well, the speed on the corners pretty well scared me, and I backed off a little.  I didn’t fade entirely;  in fact, I kept with the group enough to finish third out of the seven of us.  But, oh, how that race brought up memories!  It was fun, and it was exhilarating, but at the end of the day, I found I really didn’t have enough confidence in my skills to want to race another criterium, and I didn’t want to invest in the road rash that I figured would come with trying to get up to speed in that realm.  My criterium racing days were pretty much over after that one race.

What does any of this have to do with my knee surgery and my recovery?  Well, last Friday at PT, I asked Karen what she thought about me going for a bike ride out on the streets rather than on my trusty trainer.  She turned this right back on me:  “How do you feel about it?”  Well, the answer was:  I wanted to do it, but I was really, really nervous.

Which is how it came to be that early Sunday afternoon, Ed and I went out to the garage and pulled my town bike down off the wall.  I just bought this bike last fall, and between weather and work and travel and other distractions - like knee surgery - I had only ridden the bike home from the store and then parked it.  It’s a sweet hybrid bike, a beautiful blue baby.  It was brand spanking new, and it’s a women’s specific designed bike.  When I rode it home from the store, I thought I was on my original blue beauty.

Ed made sure that my tires had good air pressure, and I donned a helmet and gloves.  It was finally show time.  I sat on the bike and started to roll down the alley.  

Oh. My.  

I had forgotten how wonderful it is to roll along on a bike, just floating along.  This hybrid bike is built out of steel, so it’s pretty heavy, and that means it has a lovely smooth ride.  

We got to the end of the alley - Ed was riding alongside me - and turned east.  This was still going slightly downhill.  At the corner, we turned right onto Gaylord where it’s slightly uphill, just enough that I had to shift and actually put some (nascent) muscle into the machine.  We turned right at Vasser, then right again on Vine, going slightly downhill again, right in front of our house.  When it came time to the turn in to the alley, I kept going straight, and caught Ed by surprise.  “So you’re going further???” he asked.  Damn straight!  Around the block I went again, and then again.  Ed finally reined me in:  he was afraid, rationally, of me overdoing it, and having yet another setback.

So we ended the great Vine Street Criterium of 2019 at just 3 laps.  But, good heavens, did that feel fantastic.  My legs had to work more than they had worked in weeks - no, months.  It was good to feel them offer up that effort.  It was, no doubt, smart to limit the ride to just a few laps around the block.  But, trust me:  this criterium is going again soon, and longer and, well, maybe, just a little bit faster.

At the end of the Vine Street Criterium of 2019