We are a group of friends who ride bikes. Some of us are fast, some of us are slow, all of us are half-fast. In 2018, one of us rode coast to coast across the US. It was so much fun, he's doing it again in 2022! If we meet Sal Paradise, we'll let you know.
I met Tim Bucktoo and Lionel Barrymore for coffee to talk over our upcoming trip. The ride leader sent us the “Road Book” with GPS files for each day’s ride. I hadn’t looked at them. I knew day 1 was an easy warmup day in the foothills before day 2 with three major passes.
The “easy” day has 7000 feet of climbing over 84 miles. Day 2 of 86 miles includes 13,300+ feet of climbing. (Col de Marie-Blanque and Col D’Aubisque in the morning, with the Col de Soulor and Col du Tourmalet after lunch. I guess that’s four passes, but who’s counting?) Okay, I’ve done that. The Death Ride was 15,000 feet and 128 miles. The Horribly Hilly Hundreds was 11,000 feet over about the same distance. Does decreasing the distance by 40 miles make it easier or harder? But after those days, I rested and did nothing.
I didn’t climb two more HC passes the next day. Day three will be the Col d’Aspin and Col de Peyresourde. Four more passes greet us the next day, then three more the day after that before riding down to the Mediterranean on the last day.
What have I gotten myself into?
Once the tour ends, we plan a few more days of riding just for fun and to explore the area around Luscan, where we’ll be staying.
My friend Francis Hole reminded us that we are all TNS (Temporarily Not Soil). Fred Small in “Talking Wheelchair Blues” (Rounder Records, 1986) said that “some of us are called disabled and the rest of you, well the rest of you are just temporarily able-bodied”.
The university here has an annual program called “Go Big Read” (based on the slogan “Go Big Red” that every university that has red as one of its school colors seems to adopt for its sportsball teams).
Life has a funny way of aligning things. One day I was culling old papers and came across thumbnail book reviews I’d written for my student newsletter in 1998. The same day I read about the “Go Big Read” book for 2024-25. All were books on disability.
“Sitting Pretty: The View From My Very Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body” by Rebekah Taussig (Harper Collins, 2020) is a memoir of growing up disabled. The writer was paralyzed at age 3 by a spinal cord tumor. Her book is a lot like life – messy and contradictory. She lashes out against the media portrayals of people with disabilities (either heroic and inspiring, or depressed and useless) but also complains that “our stories continually reduce disability into something small”. She has those contradictory moments in her own life. She grapples with the internalized messages of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be disabled.
She writes of her childhood fantasies of growing up to be Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts but also that “I couldn’t imagine life beyond being my parents’ child”. She laments not knowing “how to imagine my disabled body into the stories I found enticing” without seeming to recognize that her fantasy is just as unrealistic for the vast majority of young girls whose bodies work “normally.”
The pervasive nature of ableism is brought home by her day-to-day realities. She searches for housing in a world where you can get on long waiting lists or look for place that’s “accessible enough”. To go to a party or a restaurant, she has to consider whether she can get in. If she can get in, can she use the bathroom? If she doesn’t work, her basic needs can be met by Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, SSDI, Section 8 housing. If she works, she needs to make either little enough to keep those benefits or enough to not need those benefits. With a disability you need reliable health care. That means Medicare or a full time job with benefits. What constitutes “reasonable accommodation” in a culture that values productivity above all else? Taussig asks “How many employees feel safe asking for something that seems to diminish their value in the eyes of the people evaluating them?” She wants to work, but full time work takes a toll on her body.
[Personal disclosure: I gave up a career in plumbing when I realized I could probably do it for 20 hours a week, but the toll it took on my body was more than I could handle 40 hours a week after injuries. In a system that has to quantify everything, I was declared 40% permanently disabled. Did this make me 3/5 of a person? In the context of a life that included hauling a 340 pound sewer cleaning machine in and out of a truck and up and down stairs, or lifting 140 pound water heaters onto 18 inch pedestals, maybe the answer is “yes”. In my prior context of unloading 100 pound sacks of rice and lots of 40 pound boxes of fruit, maybe. But after 6 years of school and tens of thousands of dollars, I was 100% of an occupational therapist.]
In a chapter titled “Feminist Pool Party” a friend reminds her that she is not trying to be “The Voice of Disability” while at the same time noting the book “isn’t just about you“. Here is, I think, the dilemma of any book written by someone in a marginalized community for an audience that extends beyond that community.
“The Complications of Kindness” is almost a stand-alone essay about the self-serving kindness of people who “mean well”; the sort of kindnesses that get heavy play in social media and announce “isn’t this a great person?” The knight in shining armor helping the damsel in distress – even though she is not in any distress – like the joke about the Boy Scout helping a little old lady across the street even though she didn’t want to cross the street. Does this person need or want your help, or are you “helping” in order to feel good about yourself?
On that note, we return to those reviews (lightly edited) I wrote 26 years ago; books still worth reading:
“Living in the Labyrinth: A Personal Journey Through the Maze of Alzheimer’s” (Diana Freel McGowin, Elder Books, 1993). In her most lucid moments McGowin describes what it feels like to live with Alzheimer’s Disease. She chronicles a trip to her husband’s office to drop off his lunch…a trip that ends a tank of gas later after driving places she still can’t remember; a trip that uses up four hours that are forever lost to her. Highly recommended.
“Over My Head: A Doctor’s account of head injury from the inside looking out” (Claudia Osborn, Peripatetic Press, 1998) chronicles a doctor’s denial, then gradual acceptance, of the way her life is forever changed by a traumatic brain injury. Osborn shows us how a person with a head injury develops compensatory strategies to get through the little moments of the day, and what happens when those strategies go awry. [One of the reasons that I cite my time as a patient among my best training to be an occupational therapist.] Very readable.
“Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract” (Marta Russell, Common Courage Press, 1998) is worth it if only for “Russell’s Index”, a Harper’s Index-like list of disability facts and figures…but there’s much more. Russell delivers a scathing indictment of the current state of affairs for people with disabilities in the US. A scholarly book, the chilling facts are well-documented in extensive notes…Russell discusses eugenics, poverty, the myth of rampant fraud by recipients of entitlement programs, Mother Theresa’s ties to Charles Keating of S&L scandal fame, corporate welfare, the inherent weaknesses of the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), and ends with “Manifesto of an Uppity Crip”. An important book.
“Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence” (John Hockenberry, Hyperion, 1995). A beautifully written, intensely personal memoir by one of the journalists I admire most. Hockenberry was a Middle East correspondent for National Public Radio and delivered stories that no one else got. Little did I know at the time that he was doing it from a wheelchair. Hockenberry goes after those who take up grand causes and ignore daily realities…He puts a human face on the arguments developed by Russell in “Beyond Ramps”. He talks about embarrassment, self-loathing, racism…he leaves no stone unturned. This book made me cry and made me laugh out loud. If you read nothing else about disability, read this.
“Still Me” (Christopher Reeve, Random House, 1998). At times it reads like a typical Hollywood memoir; at other times he gets right to the point of his experience with quadriplegia. His facts may not always be accurate, but that’s not what to read this book for. Read it to see how a man goes from being the movie Superman to living on a ventilator with a C1-2 spinal cord injury and how he becomes a national spokesperson for SCI research and how even a phenomenally wealthy man can be frustrated by the “medically necessary” bugaboo with insurance reimbursement.
[A note on the title: Beyond the obvious pun, I wanted to point out that mobility aids enable us. Batman has no superpower. He has super tools. I can go a lot faster on my bike than I can with just my legs. I can do it more efficiently than I can in a car (in terms of calories burned/mile). (One calculation puts it at the equivalent of 912 mi/gal.) (These calculations ignore the benefits to personal health and look only at energy efficiency. Think also of the energy required to manufacture a car vs a bike, the energy to transport it from point of manufacture to point of sale, and the energy involved in maintaining each.) I had a lot of patients who refused to use mobility aids (or even grab bars in the shower) because it would make them “look old”. A lot of them were (like me) already old. No one is “confined to a wheelchair”. A person becomes mobile via a wheelchair.]
The Giro d’Italia time trial ended in Perugia on Friday. That makes Friday Sir Roland Hanna Day in my book. In his honor:
BTW, Tadej Pogačar won the time trial and strengthened his overall lead, with the race headed toward the mountains. Then he won the mountain stage on Saturday.
I found out it’s okay to drink pickle juice right out of the jar. (For those who aren’t familiar with this, pickle juice as an electrolyte replacement has become a thing in the past few years…though my sister was drinking it nearly 70 years ago.) It will be magically refilled overnight.
Thanks to Rivergirl for the imageA bit of cyclocross to get to Paoli for coffee after the storm. I forgot to pack a chainsaw.First day out on the water. A German Pilsner was waiting on the opposite shore and fueled this return trip. Cottonwoods dead ahead.
So says Chance the Gardener (misunderstood as Chauncey Gardiner) in Jerzy Kosiński’s “Being There”. Chance was played brilliantly by Peter Sellers (nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe) in Hal Ashby’s film adaptation. I recommend both book and movie.
I was invited on a ride today. The forecast (as of yesterday) was for morning thunderstorms. Tim Bucktoo thought we could get a ride in after noon. By this morning the forecast showed a brief window between 10 and 2 without rain. I decided to pass.
By 8 AM it was darker than it was at 5. After a brief deluge it cleared up for a while but rain was back by 2. By then I was ensconced in front of a computer screen watch Giro d’Italia highlights. I like to watch. It is still raining as I write this.
For those whose interest in bike racing only extends to the Tour de France, there are multiple national tours. The biggest are in Italy (going on now), France (in July) and Spain (in the fall). There was a major crash in this spring’s Itzulia [Tour of] Basque Country. In the fourth stage, Remco Evenepoel, Primož Roglič, and Jonas Vingegaard were all forced to abandon due to injury. Wout van Aert was injured in a race in Belgium a week earlier. All of these injuries will have a major influence on this season.
Evenepoel, winner of the 2018 Junior World Championship Road Race, 2022 World Championship Road Race, 2023 World Championship Time Trial, and 2022 Vuelta a España, is out with fractures to clavicle (collarbone, surgically repaired) and scapula (shoulder blade).
Vingegaard, winner of the 2022 and 2023 Tours de France, is out with clavicle (surgically repaired) and rib fractures, as well as a pneumothorax (punctured lung).
Van Aert is a three-time World Cyclocross Champion (and runner-up 4 times), two-time World Road Race and two-time World Time Trial runner-up, silver medalist at the 2021 Olympics, and 2022 Green Jersey winner at the Tour de France. He is out with 7 rib fractures as well as fractures to sternum and clavicle (surgically repaired). While he has never raced the Giro d’Italia (but was planning on it this year), his status for the Tour de France is in doubt. He has won multiple Tour stages while never serving as team leader.
Primož Roglič’s injuries were enough to force him out of the race, but not enough to finish his season. He won the Vuelta a España in 2019-21, Giro d’Italia 2023, and Olympic Time Trial 2021. He is expected to contend in the Tour de France.
Tadej Pogačar, who sat out the Basque tour, is the current leader of the Giro d’Italia. He won the Best Young Rider award at the Vuelta a España in 2019, the same award in the 2020 Tour de France (as well as the King of the Mountains and the Yellow Jersey as overall winner) – which he repeated in 2021. In 2022 he won Best Young Rider at the French tour again while finishing second overall. He was second again in 2023.
Roglič and Pogačar are from Slovenia. American Sepp Kuss, winner of last year’s Vuelta a España, is of Slovenian descent. This makes me want to go ride in Slovenia. Is it the mountains? Something in the water? Inquiring minds want to know.
All of you readers who have broken a collarbone might be wondering about all of this surgery. You probably didn’t have surgery. What’s up with that? There is some controversy over surgical repair of a clavicle. I could go on for pages about this, but I won’t. (And I no longer offer the workshop that covers it.) The short version is that these guys make a living riding bikes and you can get back on a bike faster with surgery than without. To put it more crassly, they get paid a lot of money to ride bikes and the sponsors don’t want to pay them to stay home and recuperate. Surgery is cheaper.
The x-ray on the left is a well-aligned, non-displaced clavicle fracture. (If you zoom in, you can see a dark line in the middle, just above a rib. Look in the same area where the yellow line is in the middle image.) In the middle is a fracture with a large gap. The pointy end is pointing up and in danger of poking through the skin. The x-ray on right is the same fracture after repair. One can generally start moving the arm the day after surgery. This is not to be construed as medical advice to you.
As for “Being There”, you had to be there. Chance’s simplicity (he was raised watching TV and tending a garden, never seeing the outside world) is taken for brilliance by those around him. The clip in which he tells Shirley MacLaine’s character “I like to watch” seems gratuitous without context, so I won’t post it here. It is available on YouTube.
Half-fast Cycling Club 