BACK TO BASE TRAINING

It’s that time of year. I don’t just mean the holidays, quite the opposite, it’s base training again. Although I must admit that shopping at Christmas is starting to look more and more like a points race at the Velodrome. There’s a lot of pushing, bumping and eventually someone slides across the floor.

No, I mean the long, slow miles where your legs become sandbags, it’s cold, your bike clothes are always damp and you spend half the day consuming Gu’s and Shot Blocks. Sort of like a toddler- wet, sticky and tired.

None-the-less, I find myself back on Benedict Canyon. I know I am on Benedict because I recognize my tire groves from last year when I rode up and down 846 times. The highlight so far this year is that I found myself nearly becoming a new accessory on a BMW.

The short story goes like this: Benedict at 10AM is full of LA commuters trying to get from the valley side of the mountain to the city side. Add to this motorcade, three separate areas of single lane road construction and you’ve got trouble brewing.

Meet “Trouble”. There I am trying to descend in and out of a skateboard’s width of road shoulder when traffic finally starts to roll. I slide in just in time to see the BMW in front of me slam on its brakes. I thought “this is it, I’m going over, I’ll be a roof rack in one more second!” To my remaining disbelief I managed to stop but in doing so, the rear wheel flipped up and under I went.

For a blurry moment I think, “ Am I Christmas shopping?”

So, now I’m lying across the road in my team kit like sponsored road kill, and all I can hear are car horns blaring across the canyon. I have created something far worse than the economic crisis: I have taken away the commuter’s small window of opportunity to grab a double shot, café grande at Starbucks before hitting the office.

What ever happened to “Are you hurt?’

I am blessed however because the woman in the BMW is so pleased I did not hit her car, she helps drag my bike and I to the curb, where I can continue to lay on the pavement and no longer hinder traffic. Ahhh, the love of humanity, makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside doesn’t it?”

I finally regain my center of gravity and climb on my bike to continue down the canyon, my hip screaming with disapproval at having been slammed to the ground. At the bottom of the hill I find out my training partner has just narrowly been missed by a Fed Ex truck.

And so goes base training. Talk about starting from the ground up!