The trouble is, nobody who does what I do for a living is happy-go-lucky. I don’t bomb down a hill at 70 miles an hour with a smile on my face. If you want to win something, you’ve got to have single-mindedness, and it’s all too easy to wind up lonesome while you’re at it. A race is an exercise in leaving others behind, and sometimes that can include the ones you love. It’s a delicate problem, one I’ve yet to solve. For instance, one day I took my son bike-riding with me. I put him in a little trailer and hitched it to my bike, and we went pedaling off. Luke said, out of nowhere, “No more airplane, Daddy.” “What?” I said, turning around. “Daddy, no more airplane. Stay home with me now.” “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” Spending life on the seat of a bike is a solitary exercise, and things go by in constant accelerated motion. Speed is a paradoxical equation: a thousand small, dully repetitive motions go into the act of going really, really fast, and you can get so fixed on the result, on the measurements and numbers and cadences, that you miss other things.
