Heft on Wheels: A Field Guide to Doing a 180 - Hardcover

Magnuson, Mike

 
9781400052400: Heft on Wheels: A Field Guide to Doing a 180
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1400052408 ISBN 13: 9781400052400
Verlag: Harmony Books, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

A competitive cyclist describes his years of overeating, drinking, and smoking; his decision to lose weight and break his unhealthy habits; his biking club training; and his triumphant rise to a racing-level cyclist.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MIKE MAGNUSON teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale, and has written for Esquire, GQ, and Bicycling. He is the author of two novels and a memoir.

Aus dem Klappentext

A few years ago, the closest Mike Magnuson thought he would get to participating in a sporting event was sitting in the local bar, slamming pitchers of beer and watching the NFL playoffs on TV. He was thirty-eight years old, smoked a pack a day, drank a case or two of beer a week, and carried 250 pounds of weight on his five-foot-ten-inch frame. Getting on a bicycle for a peddle around the block could have been dangerous in his condition, let alone trying to keep up with a group of racer-fit riders for forty-five miles at a clip, but that is just what Mike decided to do. He was sick of it all―the booze, the cigarettes, and the heft. He could have been seriously hurt. But he wasn’t. In Mike’s words, he was merely “handed his proverbial fat ass on a platter” three times a week and kept coming back for more. <br><br><b>Heft on Wheels</b> charts in hilarious detail every curve in Mike Magnuson’s 180-degree journey from the big guy at the back of the pack to the lean, mean racing machine setting the pace for the group. Along the way we meet his friends, colleagues, and family and learn how even a healthy obsession can have its uphill climbs. For a start there’s the starvation diet and the nicotine patches, not to mention the skin-tight XXL cycling outfit and the insanely unrealistic goal of completing the Bridge to Bridge Incredible Cycling Challenge―proudly billed as “100 Miles of Pure Hill”―within the year. Yet, through it all, Mike never loses his sense of humor (though after having a quick conversation with God on one particularly grueling hill, he does believe he has come within spitting distance of losing his mind).<br><br>Filled with triumph, heartbreak, and hilarity, <b>Heft on Wheels</b> is an unforgettable book about getting from one place to another, in more ways than one.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A truck will hit me.

I'm forty years old, the age of doom coming on and regret setting in, et cetera, but hey, I'm not caught up in all that. I'm happy. I'm not overweight anymore. I don't drink anymore or smoke anymore, and, imagine this, I'm not depressed anymore. I'm completely having a great time being healthier now than I've ever been and totally stronger, which is unbelievable sometimes to me. I mean, I expected, when I reached this age, that my athletic life's peak would occur on a Sunday afternoon in January, slamming pitchers of beer and eating peanuts and watching the NFL playoffs with my buddies at the sports bar, but I didn't go that way, I guess, or I didn't stay that way.

Instead, a couple of years ago, I spent twenty-five hundred bucks of my professor's salary on a race bicycle and started showing up three nights a week for a fast group road ride here in southern Illinois, at Carbondale Cycle, and three nights a week the group handed me my proverbial fat ass on a platter, which stood to reason. Back then, I smoked a pack a day and drank a case or two of beer a week and did shots of tequila or bourbon or kamikazes or you-name-it regularly at the bar with my graduate students. I weighed, suited up in a skintight XXL cycling jersey and shorts, 255 pounds. Five feet ten inches tall, 255 pounds. I shouldn't have shown up for group ride in that condition. I could have been hurt. Seriously. The group was just too much, too fast, flat-out beating the crap out of me every time. It's a miracle I didn't have a heart attack or a stroke or something trying to keep up.

I kept coming back for more, though, because I needed the crap beaten out of me. That's right. I needed atonement. I'm sure my associates at the bar in those days would agree. And, ah, how atonement comes with the group riding out of Carbondale on Dogwood Road into the mobile-home-littered hills and chip-and-seal roads of the Shawnee National Forest and hammering for forty-five miles, pounding over the hills, working inhumanely hard to spit each other off the back of the draftline and make each other suffer the way dropped cyclists have always suffered, like dogs. Man, back in my heavy days, I'd think if I could stay within sight of the group, even for short sections of the ride, I'd be scoring an extra-large moral and metaphorical victory. I win, I'd think, just because I'm participating. The big unhealthy man rides with the local fit fast road-bike group and gets dropped, the inspiring part being the odd truth: He doesn't get dropped as badly as you'd think he'd get dropped. Isn't it terrific the big guy can even stay close to those little bike racers?

But metaphor only goes so far in this world. Two hundred fifty-five fat drunken pounds: You ride road bikes with people who are a hundred times as fit and a hundred pounds lighter, they kick your ass. It's that simple.

Two years, twenty thousand miles of training and racing later, I weigh 173 pounds, and my lungs are as clear as my head is free of booze.

Speaking of metaphors, check out this one: If I used to go on group ride at Carbondale Cycle because I needed the crap beaten out of me, these days, I go on group ride because I possess the need and the ability to beat the crap out of others.

Let that be lesson number one.



So this Monday group ride in June, I'm the strongest rider. I'm not bragging or presenting myself as twice the man I really am. It's simply true. I'm the strongest. Another guy in town, my buddy Darren, we train together a lot and race for Team Mack Racing in the Masters 35-45 division and basically ride bikes way more than we should, he's much stronger than me and way more experienced and can and will obliterate me on the road whenever the situation warrants, like when I'm bragging about being the strongest rider on group ride, but shoot, he's not along for the festivities tonight. That means, and I vow to bear this responsibility with maturity and style, I'm the boss.

You can see me there, up front, in all my glory, setting the tempo and the vibe. I'm the guy in the Team Mack racing uniform--red, white, and pale blue--riding the battle-scarred Trek 5200 and wearing the loud red helmet and those stupid football-coach, sports-bar-goer glasses that I know look stupid but are important for me to wear, a small reminder of who I used to be before cycling. You will note, too, that I'm pulling our snaky dozen-rider group-ride phalanx at a comfortable, social, conversational pace, making sure we stay together and keep it mellow and have a positive experience in the early part of the ride, which isn't a corny thing to have, a positive experience.

I don't know why, incidentally, I used to think having a positive experience was somehow saccharine and wrong and inexcusable.

You know? Get over it. Be happy. Chat about this-and-that-type things, the awesome sunny weather, the big century ride coming up this weekend, the two-for-one sale on PowerBars at Kroger's. Have a few yuks. Let out a few not-very-serious groans. Cyclists are just so, so much happier than the drunks are at the bar. Cyclists are always saying awesome or exactly or that's cool or that's excellent, always praising each other's feats and encouraging each other to dig deep inside and find the thing that makes us work harder and care more and tune in to the frequency that makes us strong and happy and confident.

We ride east for the Carbondale town line on Dogwood Road, the roadside architecture beside which crumbles, along with the quality of the road surface, from new surgeon's homes to squalor and chickens scratching at the front-yard dirt. This is six in the evening, temperature in the high eighties, a golden slant-light behind us, not much traffic, once in a while a car up or a car back, no wind to speak of, couldn't be a better evening for cycling.

Out a ways, redbud trees and old scrub oaks, fallow fields, beat-up sheds and trailers and, near a long dirt driveway, a handpainted billboard warns of trouble afoot in our souls. The billboard depicts a sad-looking man reading a Bible with a skeleton figure leaning over his shoulder and making his life miserable; flames consume the background, but over the years the sun's faded them into cold white voids in the Old Testament distance. The scripture, from Ezekiel 18:31: "Why will ye die?"

Past the billboard, the road becomes a false flat rising over a series of badly filled potholes and, beyond that, around a rutted corner and down a steep S-curve descent at the bottom of which, what we've all been waiting for, the first sharp climb of the evening, the first attack of the night.

A cyclist at the rear yells Car Back, and the Car Back passes from one rider's voice to the next forward, all the way to the front, to me (ain't it cool it's me up front?), and I yell it, too, Car Back, to let everybody know I've heard the warning and will heed it. Our bikes make a whizzing noise, a popping noise over the chip-and-seal, tires over the loose pebbles, pebbles pinging the spokes, a loose shifter lever rattling here, a water bottle clattering its cage there, chains clicking through the gears' metal teeth, something low and terrified and heaving within cyclists' lungs. A car back.

It comes by, and cool, we're fine, the driver's one of us, a fellow cyclist, Christina, who just got done teaching a Spinning class at Great Shapes Fitness Center in Carbondale. She's heading home, a half-mile from here, at the end of a dirt road called Robin Lane. She's driving a huge 1991 Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon with a Yakima roof rack on it, the biggest model Yakima makes, big enough to hold nine bikes, rods extending a full foot beyond the roof on each side. Christina, she totally understands how to pass a group of cyclists; she gives us space. She slows appropriately and swings wide around us, and we're...

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Verlag
Harmony Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400052408
ISBN 13 
9781400052400
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
252
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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