From January, 1990 at 7-Eleven Camp

Easy Day

I took my bike up to Santa Rosa toward the end of January for a visit to the 7-Eleven training camp and a ride or two with the guys.

I maintained a veneer of cool assurance for all to see. Totally casual, I faked confidence that I could hang with the boys on the Sonoma County hills, and could finish pro-length training rides without CPR or oxygen support apparatus.

If you remember, last January I visited the Coors Light camp and rode with that team, including the pre-comeback Greg LeMond. I did not survive long on my ride with the Coors Light guys, as faithful readers will remember.

LeMond, happy to be on his bike and with his (US) team, evidently felt frisky. He went right to the front and dropped what I would call the hammer. In pitifully few uphill moments I went out the back.

As rumor has it, I wasn't the only casualty on that ride; far better men than I watched helplessly as the back of that pack got progressively smaller.

This year I resolved things would be different. I put in my usual maybe 150 miles/week through the fall and winter. I rode the 63-inch fixed-gear in the East Bay hills, building strength and leg speed, raising my hammer index.

I rode club training rides and often did not get dropped. I raced three freezing cold, wet miles up San Bruno Mountain near San Francisco on New Year's morning and finished the same day I started. Hey, guys like me call that fitness.

I doubted, however, that the men on the 7-Eleven Pro Racing Team would call that fitness. But it was all I had. At 10:00 Tuesday morning, January 22, I walked my bike past the poolside mechanics' area to roll out on an Easy Day with the guys.

Yes, with Steve Bauer, Urs Zimmermann, Sean Yates, Davis Phinney, Andy Hampsten, about 20, total. Twenty guys everyone's heard of. Twenty guys whose photos you see in magazines, snarling, baring their teeth as they contest mountaintop stage finishes.

And me, aging columnist, X-ray photos of whose bared teeth you may someday see featured in Dental Disasters Magazine.

An easy day for the Slurpies is four hours. Hard days are seven or eight hours. Don't ask me about the hard days; I did not have the nerve to hop on my bike at 10:00 with 20 lean guys dressed in green, white and red, all on new Eddy Merckxs, and know I wouldn't be hopping (hah) off until 5:00 in the afternoon.

Training ride speeds are high but not god-awful hard. I suppose none of the guys felt he had anything to prove. The pace and manner of riding were so smooth (Slurpie smooth). The perceived effort constant over the hours. We rode between 18 and 23mph over the beautiful, rolling Sonoma County roads, me and most of the 7-Eleven Professional Racing Team.

Sitting in that bunch is like traveling first-class on the finest express train. It's what you've always wanted from a bike ride but were afraid to ask for.

Go ahead, I’ll understand: stop reading and eat your heart out. You can finish the story later.

We rode in a two-abreast pace line, the front two taking long, easy pulls, sitting up there sometimes for miles at a time. We rolled out in the big ring and stayed mostly in the big ring except for several steepish climbs that had guys out of their saddles. Had them standing up but not hammering, not on an easy day, but climbing fast enough to have me breathing hard.

Once, near the top of one of those hills (maybe I dreamed this - but it seems real) Bob Roll pushed me a little when I drifted back. Got me back on. Just the once.

Mostly I sat in that big group and felt totally confident: all was well. No one was about to fall down or get surprised or do anything foolish. I liked that feeling. I started to get used to the speed and the steady mile-eating pace. My legs felt loose, warm and strong; they liked it. I realized I was smiling.

The roads we covered were flatter than those around my home; I could sit in the saddle and turn the 17 or 15. I began to feel good, racing good. I looked up the line of men, at Alex Stieda and Steve Bauer and Nathan Dahlberg and Jeff Pierce.

How bad is this, I thought to myself. So I asked Nathan Dahlberg. Nathan, How Bad is This? He said he felt that riding those scenic byways in the company of almost two dozen agreeable guys - and getting paid for it - was not so bad, really. Not terrible. Those New Zealanders understate everything.

I tried to remember that in a few weeks, these guys would have to suffer, to earn their pay in cold, wet early season racing. Maybe some of them would wonder, then, if it was worth it. Maybe the guys for whom form was slow in coming, or who got sick or who simply hadn't the talent some of the others have, maybe they'd wonder if it was worth it.

But I couldn't keep myself concentrating on what was going to be happening later, after the training camp broke up and the guys packed up their bikes and flew away to wherever Och (team manager Jim Ochowicz) had decided they belonged next.

I couldn't keep myself from thinking that I was riding that perfect road with the finest US-based team of racing cyclists ever assembled. And some of the finest guys. I looked over at Urs Zimmerman, knowing Urs was happy as he could be to have joined 7-Eleven, happy to be left alone, some days, to ride off by himself for eight or nine hours, happy simply to be here.

Zimmerman and I had chatted for a mile or so, back a ways, about journalists and Swiss people and American people, traffic, stuff bike riders talk about. You know. His English is just OK so far and I don't speak any of the other four or five languages he speaks. So conversation's kind of an effort.

But not all conversation. I looked over at Zimmerman, his handlebar inches from mine as we rolled along on the Easy Day. I took my hand off my bar and made a gesture, sweeping my arm up and across the scene as if to say, Look at All This. Isn't it Wonderful?

Urs Zimmerman grinned at me in all languages and no language at all. It is.