Has Been

I used to be quite good at cycling. I wasn’t the best there ever was, but I was good enough that I knew that at most club rides, shop rides, group rides or triathlons I could hang with pretty much anything that most other people could lay down. There was the occasional exception - like I said, I wasn’t the best there ever was - but it was the best feeling in the world to have someone accelerate away from me and be able to dig in and follow… and then answer with an attack of my own. I once rode a century in comfortably under 5 hours. I once averaged over 22 miles per hour for a 58-mile time trial. No world record, but I had earned some swagger.

Then, over 3 years ago I stopped cycling. It had stopped being fun, so I just hung up my bike on March 10, 2012 and started doing other stuff. And there my bike hung in the garage collecting dust until recently, when I decided that I wanted to start riding my bike to work again. I took my fixie down off the wall, took it to my local bike shop, described exactly what I wanted using all the right jargon, and took home my revitalized little fixie a few days later.

I was enjoying riding to work, but the quickest way to get there was on a bike trail (I know, I know, I HATE bike trails… but it cut 10 min of traffic lights off the trip!), and that damned trail had a lot of tight turns. On a fixie, tight cornering can be kind of sketchy, because you can’t really control where your pedals are at any given moment (since you have to pedal constantly), so there’s always a risk of scraping your pedal on the ground when you lean into a corner. So I took my racing bike down off the wall a couple months later, and walked back to my local bike shop.

This is where our story begins.

When I came to pick up my racing bike, they had forgotten to put new tires on. He first took me over to the super-skinny racing tires. “Aw, there’s no need,” I said. “I’m just going to be riding this thing to and from work.”

The guy stopped and looked at me with disgust. “You’re going to have the best commuting bike on the road,” he said. But what he meant was, that’s too much bike for a commuter bike, you dumb bitch. I hate Silicon Valley where people use top-of-the-line racing bikes just to go to and from the farmer’s market. It’s true. I’ve seen $5000 bikes locked up outside the bar with a cable lock less than a mile from this bike shop. But that’s not me. The $30 U lock in my hand was for the fixie I bought on Craigslist for $300. I wasn’t about to lose a $100 lock if my cheap-o bike was stolen. I know that you don’t lock up carbon. Duh.

“Oh, I know,” I said. “This bike has had its racing days, but now I just want to pull it back out because it’s kind of sketchy cornering on some of those tight bends on the bike trail on my fixie.”

His contempt grew deeper upon hearing the words ‘bike trail.’ “Well, actually, there’s a difference between a single speed bike and a fixed gear…” he started.

“I know,” I cut him off. “I ride a fixie.”

“That bike I fixed up for you a few months ago? I put a freewheel on it.”

“No you didn’t,” I said, starting to feel my blood boil. “I would never pay for that. It’s definitely a fixie.”

“On a fixie you can’t coast,” he corrected me patiently.

“Believe me,” I said. “I don’t mess around. That bike is a fixed gear.”

“Oh sure.” He gave up.

I was apoplectic. Not only had he accused me of riding a lamer, less skill-dependent bike, he had also accused me of being too dumb to know the difference. It was like saying to someone who had bought and fixed up a ‘69 Mustang, “Oh yeah. That ‘89 Toyota Cellica with the Duct Tape holding up the ceiling upholstery is yours, right?”

He had heard me use the language. I had dropped details about my riding history, including that I used to race, that I knew all the names to all the parts, and I remembered my bike’s entire maintenance history. And yet something about me still gave him a strong impression of no fucking clue. In his head I was no different than the woman who came in right before me to have air put in the tires of her beach cruiser, and paid an additional $75 for them to blow the dust out of the grooves in her handlebar grips. It made me want to challenge him to a throw-down right then! I railed about it to anyone that would listen for days.

A few weeks later, I was at work (my job now is as an executive assistant to a venture capitalist rich guy). In setting up a meeting, another assistant in the company mentioned that her boss couldn’t make a certain time because he was the chair of a big east coast charity ride that would be going on that day. Joking, I said, “Your super secret assignment, [Assistant], is to find out who rides faster: me or your boss.”

“Haha, you’re killing me over here, Claire,” she said. “Boss is quite an experienced bicycle rider, and he does it quite a bit, so I’m sure he is very fast.”

Dismissed and denied!

This bugged me for the rest of the week. He’s a cha-ri-ty rider! Just because he rides a lot doesn’t mean that he’s fast! I’ve ridden with plenty of straight men over 40 who ride their bikes every weekend - slowly - just so that they can have a big brunch afterward. And so their bellies grow. Again, the assumption is that there’s no way I could actually be, like, fast. Or know what I’m doing. Hahaha, Claire, you’re so funny. You think you can take on the boys. But when I used to ride, I DID take on the boys. I rode faster than John Kerry, remember?!

“Why does it bother you so much,” Richie Porte asked me when I was still seething a few days later. “Why does it have to be a competition?”

I’d asked myself the same thing. Am I just a spandex-clad Napoleon? Isn’t getting this belligerent when my dominance is challenged the sign of a weak, insecure person? Why can’t I just focus on myself and let other people do their thing?

“Because,” I said, “these guys are smarter, richer, more powerful and better connected than I could ever dream about being. They never have to take no for an answer with anything. I know, because it’s my job to figure out a way around every rule that the rest of us have to live by. But that’s what they’ve worked for their entire lives. But that’s just in their context. I have spent my entire life working toward something else, and in that realm, I want to be powerful and successful. I don’t care that people ignore my emails and treat me as if I’m invisible when I’m seating meetings in the VC context, because that’s not what my life is dedicated to, it’s just what I do from 8-6 every day. But when people dismiss me sight unseen at something that I really care about… something that I feel I’ve accomplished something in… in my context because I am unimportant in their context… that makes me feel like I don’t matter. I don’t need their approval, but I do need to know that they are not superior human beings.

When the world comes to an end and we’re all surviving on our physical wherewithal, I want to believe that I would be the VIP.