My tribe, your tribe

The road down the canyon on Manitou Ave is a gradual downhill, following Fountain Creek on its voyage from trout stream in Manitou Springs to drainage ditch in Colorado Springs.  The air is crisp and the sun is out and I’ve been promised via several weather sites that today will be warm and sunny.  Three miles down the road, I see two cyclists slowly coming back to me; the catch is just before highway 24’s on-ramp at the gas station’s green dinosaur.

‘Morning!’ to the first one, a man dressed in fluorescent yellow ‘please don’t hit me’ attire.  Does he look at me?  I’m not sure though I’m just inches away when I greet him.  No answer.  I move on.

‘Nice morning, eh?’  This time to what must be his significant other, identically attired in fluorescent yellow.  Her expression isn’t exactly vacant, but a slight grimace is poking through.  Again, no answer, not even eye contact.

I’m not sure why this bothers me, but by the time Old Colorado City’s shops show up, I’m thinking that it’s related to something I shared with my students the other night.  Humans, I said, have two distinct needs.  First they want to belong to a group.  Second, once they belong to a group, they want to exclude others from it.  I’m not sure these two fluorescent cyclists were proof of that second maxim, but I’ve noticed something over and over; folks dressed in cycling kit obviously connected with some team will greet and wave, almost without exception, and cyclists dressed in generic kit with no sponsor names or logos, often will not.  Being part of the former group, I know the work that has gone into being part of a team and racing in general.  One of my favorite quotes from the pack, heard years ago, was that in racing ‘you have to be really fit just to suck.’  So true.  When I see someone out training, we both are sharing a bond of training, pain, dedication, sacrifice that is  a large common ground for us.  Someone dressed in Performance gear out for the first time since the last warm day of fall, not so much.

After I get to the ride start, the group of assembled riders provide another example of this two-wheeled, instinctual tribalism.  The first thing to notice on this warm day even before the team jersey, does the rider have hairy legs?  On the first part of the ride, heading east on Boulder, a rider with hairy legs fails to clip in, swerves into the traffic lane and nearly gets hit by a car.  Everyone notices and for the rest of the ride he is a marked man, an interloper in the tribe.  In the paceline, everyone moves to be in front of him or at least three wheels back. 

Later, when we’re chasing to get back on after Link Hill (yes, I was dropped again this week—long story), I was working with five riders, including Mr. Hairy, and noticed that when he would pull left in the paceline, he would continue accelerating, gapping the rider behind and leaving him in the wind.  Very rude.  Of course, he didn’t know any better and I tried to explain to him what he was doing.  ‘Watch me, pull through and then downshift and let the rider behind get your draft.’  Such a simple idea, to think of the other rider in the wind.  Might even seem altruistic, except everyone needs to be strong to catch the group.  But knowing how to act in the group is also a sign of belonging to the tribe, knowing its rules.

I catch and get dropped a couple of times today.  There is still some funkiness left in the legs from the virus two weeks ago and they feel stiff and congested.  By mile 60, heading up the canyon on Manitou Avenue, I have to stop; I feel like I’m bonking.  What is it?  The food is the same.  Am I overdressed?  Did I work too hard taking pulls?  Did I do too much during the week?  Am I still sick?  I make the final climb up to our perch on Pilot Knob feeling completely knackered and lie flat on the floor for a few minutes. 

It was a beautiful day for a ride.