Cross Zen

• The course of true love never did run smooth.

  I'm really not qualified to speak on the topic of any type of Zen, let alone the Zen of cyclocross. I'll leave that up to Team TATI's resident theologian. On second thought, perhaps that duty should go to our resident philosopher, a fellow who strikes me as having a fairly centered center. Philosophy PhDs are generally an odd bunch, and this might perhaps explain their propensity to become dedicated cyclists -- or at least that's my conclusion based on a very tiny sampling of the philosophy doctorates I've known. Maybe it has something to do with this matter of centering.

  It looks like TATI might add a second rider with such a degree to the roster. The humanities doctors will still be far outweighed by the scientists on our little team, but I imagine that his addition will materially improve the quality of small talk on longer training rides. As someone with the scientific mind of a fifteenth century French peasant, I often find riding out to Willow Springs with the Tatitos can make my head explode. So one can only hope.

  But I can say that before ever really loving a person, I possessed a visceral, if irrational, love for cyclocross. I was a thoroughly talentless child: unable to maintain a rhythm, tone deaf, color blind, frail, clumsy, and knock-kneed. In some societies, I imagine that I would have been drowned before the age of five -- or at least sold in exchange for a donkey or a bag of rice. But I kept trying, and I'm glad I did, because cyclocross got me through adolescence. While my classmates were wasting quarters at the video arcade, I was practicing barriers until midnight. Instead of hugging a wall, resonating with the beat of Hall & Oates, at a miserable junior high school dance -- I would spend Friday evenings getting my own high, literally, gluing tubulars at the shop. The surfers had smooth, uniformly golden skin and balanced musculature; my strict Pritikin diet kept my chest inverted, ribs akimbo and four hours a day in the cycling uniform ensured a year-round crazy tan... but I wouldn't have had it any other way.

  There were obstacles and challenges back then for sure -- just as there are now. As a youngster, a case of the sniffles might mean the difference between first and second. Today, it's the osteoporosis and joints so calcified that they click, that worry me. But one thing is for certain, and it's something that I never would have imagined ten years ago. And that is that here, in what I once considered the least interesting metropolis in the world; flyover central; flat-as-a-pancake; why am I in the Midwest?; Daly's playground Chicago, I've discovered a not only a richly diverse cyclocross community, but also a coterie of like-minded riders within blocks of my apartment!

  The scene here is very young, but memory is short. I can't really get on board with the longing for the sepia toned days of yore, before the Portlandization of the Chicago cyclocross scene, racing in anonymity, when real men shouldered aluminum bikes with carbon tubulars up the tiny hillocks that pass for run ups in the CCC. I might not really know what to do with a zipper dollar-bill hand up, but if it turns a sparse crowd composed of shivering spouses into a raucous throng of dizzy, mildly intoxicated spectators, I'll use my teeth.