One of the things I've learned is that if I pamper myself, I end up being sicker, longer. So, I've gotten into the habit of plotting, at the first sign of sickness, when to get back on the bike.
I can't always do it right away. On Wednesday night I got on the trainer, turned the pedals once, and got off. Nope, not happening. I was weak as a kitten.
Thursday was the day, though. I went to Kempton Baker's spinning class, equipped with Snausages, and a resolve to take it easy, be reasonable, just spin lightly, you're sick, don't kill yourself.
Fifteen minutes into the class, I was bereft of both Snausages (good job, Jack!) and resolve. I think I put in about a 75% effort. And on this day, Kempton was on some sort of hallucinate-or-die vision quest or something. It was definitely a high resistance, high cadence, endurance day. A consolidation day. For my classmates who were able to do the full 100%, I salute you. I had on my Sean Kelly face. And, yes, I was drooling.That effort, after being off the bike (and weak) for nearly a week, triggered the mother of all endorphin surges. That afternoon, I sat at my desk, intensely happy, with my mind skipping from memory to memory, a twining of music and cycling.
I have a bit of a crush on Kate Pierson of the B-52's. It's been said that Bessie Smith's voice could make a man get up from the audience, and walk onto the stage, without realizing what he was doing. Well, Kate Pierson's voice can make me get on a bike and ride and ride and ride til I've rid myself silly.
I remember first hearing the song Shiny Happy People, pairing R.E.M. with Kate. It was in Philadelphia. I was having my hair cut by Kevin Gallagher, father of my son's best friend, Ian, and husband of one of Nick's Montessori pre-school teachers. Kevin was an artist-turned-hairdresser; later he would take up bike racing. He and his wife Lisa ultimately bought a mansion on The Wall in Manayunk. Anyway, when I heard Kate's voice, I melted, absolutely melted.
Of course, R.E.M. has always had a very special place in my heart when it comes to cycling. R.E.M. was in my ears in the summer of 1985, the summer I spent in Chicago. It was a weird time. My then-wife was working at a summer internship at a law firm, and I was rail-commuting from Chicago to Ann Arbor for my job. For me, that meant working at home several days a week, so I was the primary caregiver for Nick, who was only nine months old at the time.
We were living in a basement apartment in a little neighborhood just north of Lincoln Park, a nice enough place. The owner had left his record collection, which enabled me to find Roxy Music's album Avalon, on which I wore out More Than This. But since I was taking care of Nick, I had to do some pretty crazy things to get my riding in. For instance, I used to get up at 4:30 A.M. so I could be on the road by 5:00, riding up toward Kenilworth. On the ride back down, I'd hit rush hour traffic. I fancied myself a sprinter in those days, so I'd motor-pace behind cars at 35 m.p.h., with no helmet (this was the age of leather hairnets), on Ashland Ave. I was in a rush to get back home by 8:30, so Nick's mom could head off for work.
The other thing I'd do was train at Northbrook velodrome. My genius plan was to set up Nick in a playpen in the infield, and then ride around. My plan had two flaws. First, I didn't want to make two trips from the car to the track (which was a bit of a walk away from the parking), because I didn't want to leave Nick alone in the car, or at the track. So, I'd carry Nick and the playpen and the bike and the floor pump, all at once. Second, Nick didn't want to be left alone in the middle of this huge field, seeing his Dad whiz by every 30 seconds. Poor kid. I think I scarred him for life. But I did learn to sprint at a top speed of 42 m.p.h. The national Veterans' Pursuit Champion was also training there, and he did a bit of mentoring with me. He got me doing 1K time trials, using sophisticated instrumentation to gauge my effort: "If you don't feel like throwing up, you're not going hard enough; if you throw up, you're going too hard."(Ed. note, post-fugue: What I called "sprinting at 42 mph" in this paragraph was actually just riding a track bike at a velodrome at that speed, taking advantage of the banking. It wasn't sprinting. Sprinting is quite something else, an art, involving at least two riders, calling on both strength and tactical skill. In this sense, I never sprinted on a track.)
Another thing I'd do to squeeze in some training was to ride the rollers during Nick's nap-times. My brother-in-law had given me a pirated copy of R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction, and Maps and Legends was the perfect song for the rollers.
On weekends, everyone would head up to Kenilworth. On both Saturday and Sunday, well over 100 cyclists would converge on Kenilworth Cyclery, and take over the roads north of Chicago for an informal mass-start race. We'd all ride out together, and then when we got to a certain point -- I believe it was just after we crossed a highway overpass -- the race was on. There were some high quality riders there. Once someone pointed out a guy in a 7-Eleven uniform and said it was Alex Stieda. Was it? Who knows? But it was plausible.
It was in these Kenilworth races that I first realized that bike racing would never be my day job. I was in a group of three, trying to bridge from the peleton to the Category I and II riders up head (who for us, were "the break"). I was burying myself to make it work, but after a few minutes, one of the guys sat up and said to the other "well, we've just been blocked." I was humiliated and broken. 
Think: Charlie Brown, leaving the stage of the school Christmas pageant, after Lucy calls him a blockhead, and all the other kids laugh at him in eerie unison.(Editor's note, post-fugue: What do you think of this as a jersey design?)
But even if that was the beginning of the end of my dreams of bike racing greatness, it was still a shimmering time. In Cuyahoga, Michael Stipe reminisces:Bank the quarry, river swim.I don't know what this means (any more than I know what any of what Michael Stipe sings means). But, whenever I hear this, I feel the magic of hot rural summers in the Midwest, before suburban sprawl, when kids had time to learn and explore the world around them. The summers of Bloomington, Indiana (where Carol used to teach and ride), of Breaking Away.
We knee-skinned it you and me,
We knee-skinned that river red
I know these summers. I started cycling in Ann Arbor. I remember how wonderfully easy it was to get out to Dexter on Huron River Drive, and from Dexter to Parker Road, flat as a pancake, surrounded by farmers' fields as far as you could see. Where you'd encounter more tractors and horses than cars. If we were ambitious, we'd ride Dexter-Chelsea Rd., hoping for the Amtrak to go by so we could race it into Chelsea. The Cat II's would then ride on to Silver Lake.
The two Cat II's I remember are Angelo Chinni and Wild Bill Corliss. I was saddened to learn that Bill died recently in a bike crash. He went down at the back of a group a cyclists riding in Utah, and then was hit by a truck. But Bill was making a living in cycling, working as Director of Development for Specialty Electronics, for Bell Specialty, and as a mentor for the Park City Bicycling Academy. 
I can still remember when Bill got his brand new frame from Mark Nobilette . He was like a kid at Christmas! (Trying to remember what Bill rode before that, but I can't. Ed. note, post-fugue: Bill's brother Greg has filled in this gap -- it was an Eisentraut) I'm not sure what happened to Angelo. He was a very nice, and obviously very talented, kid. He was a protegé of Mike DeEstrada, a tough (and quite raunchy) little veteran with a heart of gold who lived out west in Jackson, but who was one of the centers of our racing community.(Ed. note, post-fugue: It's no surprise that Bill ended up mentoring for PCBA. He was a natural mentor. I remember we were on a training ride he was leading, and he was looking after a couple of new guys. Inevitably, someone picked up the pace on a hill, and we followed. Bill caught up to us and told us that he was hanging back because one of the new guys had lost his lunch. I, being: 1) oxygen-deprived, 2) not familiar with the expression, and 3) just not that bright to begin with, earnestly offered to go back and help Bill look for it.)
If I didn't head northwest on Huron River Drive, I'd head up north on Pontiac Trail, and cut west on Eight Mile Rd to Whitmore Lake. At a certain point on Eight Mile, there was a farm dog who'd come whipping around the corner of the farmhouse, angling toward the road, to intercept me. That was my sprint training. I know this is also a scene in American Flyers, but I swear, I used to do this, this is not a "manufactured memory." And to go Kevin Costner one better: once, just as I thought I'd gotten away, my rear tire punctured. Thank God it didn't roll (we all used sew-ups then), and I was able to keep up enough speed til he lost interest. This happened! (We had all learned the value of riding on a flat when Roy Knickman won the Junior road championships in a sprint after his rear tire rolled on the last corner before the line.)(Ed. note: The dog: I let him get away.)
These things, and many more, I remembered, sitting at my desk Thursday afternoon, as my memories overcame and overpowered me.
And now, a confession. I was happy to revisit these memories, so happy I was crying. I sat at my desk smiling, with tears streaming down my face. Luckily, I could pass off the sniffling as after-effects of my sickness.
By the end of the day, the surge had passed. Now I am on the mend. But it's been awhile since I've thought about these parts of my life. You know what? I have no regrets.
Except maybe leaving little Nick in that playpen in the infield of Northbrook velodrome.
12 comments:
Hi Thanks for the kind thoughts about my brother Bill , but I wanted to point out that he was killed in Utah , not Colorado as mentioned in your post.
Regards,
Greg Corliss
Thanks, Greg. I never did have a good sense of direction.
I said a lot in the posting, but I'll say it again -- Bill was a really special person. I was no great shakes on a bike, but he took a lot of time mentoring me. I am very, very glad that he got to spend his life doing something that was very important to him.
Bill's family has set up a bicycle advocacy fund. Please donate if you can:
Contributions to the "Bill Corliss Cycling Advocacy Fund" may be made at the following location
Bill Corliss Bicycle Advocacy Fund
Frontier Bank
PO Box 981180
Park City Utah 84060
(435)615-BANK (2265)
I've been thinking about Bill Corliss a lot these past few days. Some fragments of memory are coming back.
First, a disclaimer. Although Bill was a very prominent person for me, I was just one of many people who passed into Bill's orbit. To him, I was an acquaintance. To me, he was a few steps up from that -- a bit of hero.
First time I saw Bill (at an organization meeting of the Univerity of Michigan cycling club, run by Marion Hoyer and Frank (Franz) Demerath), he was scruffy, with a beard. This did not look like the images of the Bernard Hinaults and Greg Lemonds I had been seeing in magazines. But it was winter, and he was in cross-country skiing mode. As the spring came, the lean, clean, angular Bill would emerge.
I remember that Bill had a very good friend who was often with him -- an extremely talented Cat II (I think) who was really nice, really quiet, and kept a really low profile. I think his name was Rick Levine. I remember him ofter training in a white, unmarked jersey.
I've been trying to picture Bill in a jersey. The image finally came to me last night. I believe Bill was a Schwinn Wolverine (Mike Walden's organization, based in Detroit, which was moving a very young Frankie Andreu up the ranks at the time). He definitely was not in the Ann Arbor Velo Club (later, the Great Lakes Velo Club). Later, I think he may have joined the team sponsored by the second bike shop in Ann Arbor, Multigear. I seem to remember Bill, Marion Hoyer, and Lee Kalmbach (a sardonic, funny Cat III with a wicked sprint) riding for Multigear.
Only once did I see Bill angry. I think there was a touch of rivalry between Bill, on the one had, and Angelo Chinni and Mike DeEstrada on the other. Or maybe that's just what it seemed like to those of us with much less ability than those three. Anyway, it was at the weekly Tuesday evening Research Park criterium training session, just south of Ann Arbor. I was in the pace line, in the (simulated) bell lap, with Bill and either Mike or Angelo ahead of me, fighting for a wheel. Some harsh words and threats were spoken -- what we today call "trash talk". I cowered -- what do you do when your heroes argue? Anyway, within a matter of minutes, after the sprint, Bill and Mike (or Angelo) were talking amiably, patting each other on the back. I was dumbfounded.
But I've come to understand that at that level, harsh words, spoken at a moment of intense physical exertion, are one of the necessary forms of social interaction that establish control and limits, allowing a group of people riding inches from each other at 30+mph, making snap decisions, to survive. So what I was seeing that day was not Bill losing his temper; it was Bill exhibiting a life skill for the peleton.
Another memory fragment from Ann Arbor. One of the people who started racing with me was this guy named Bruce, good friend of Frank Demerath, riding a black Medici. I can't recall his last name, but he was the spitting image of Freddy Mercury. In fact, given Queen's experience with bike-related music, it may very well have been Freddy Mercury. Yup, it was Freddy Mercury. But then again, I'm convinced that the guy who lives across the street from me is Eddie Vetter.
Anyway, Freddy/Bruce was with me on a rather fateful day. It was early season, and only he and I showed up for a training ride. It was bitterly cold. Very early in the ride, I narrowly avoided the "door prize": just after Bruce passed a parked car, the driver flung the door open, and I twitched the bike just enough to avoid the door by a hair's breadth. From that day, I wonder how things would have turned out if we'd come one that car at the end of the ride, instead of the beginning. Makes me shudder.
Freddy/Bruce injured his knee on that ride. I can't remember if there was an impact involved, or whether he hurt himself by riding in shorts on a day that was so cold, and on which we were caught in a severe snow shower. I believe he never did race after that day.
Just called the bank to confirm the fund is still active, and confirm the address:
Bill Corliss Bicycle Advocacy Fund
Frontier Bank
PO Box 981180
Park City Utah 84098
Note the zip code is different from that in earlier post,
Bruce Dykaar, that's his name. From http://www.aabts.org/newsletters/winter06.pdf:
To defend our club’s honor, a four-man AABTS team was fielded for the Second Annual “Big Mac Attack” Team Time Trial in 1983. This marathon event was a 175 mile non-stop race from Mt. Pleasant along scenic and winding old highway US-27 to the Mackinaw Bridge, in which
the competing teams rode tight pace lines at flat-out speed. Our AABTS team soundly defeated the Ann Arbor Velo racing club, and placed 2nd overall. The following year the Velo Club’s description in the Ann Arbor News Recreational Supplement was changed to read “racing and touring.” We also fielded a team the next year in which the Velo Club didn’t enter, and AABTS again placed 2nd overall, barely bested by the ringer Grand Rapids racing team composed of licensed Cat I racers. Our first year team members were Tom Rymanowicz (Bike Shop Owner), Jim Datsko (lawyer), Duane Thomas (Landscaper), Phil Howrey (Econ. Prof.), and Mike Muha - alternate (Computer Guy). The third year was the charmer, when Lew Kidder led a team with David Evans, Bruce Dykaar, and Dave Baty to a solid first place overall.
Another name from the past: Rich Grabowski. This kid came out of nowhere, and by the time I left Ann Arbor, he was a Cat 3, well on his way to Cat 2-dom. From him, I learned to always keep my front derailleur well adjusted. In the split second you have to react to an attack, to jump onto a passing wheel, you can't afford to fumble with a shift or drop your chain! He taught me that in a paceline, you jump first and think later. By the time you realize an attack is under way, and decide you're going to follow it, it's too late.
Ted,
It was very nice (and very nostalgic) to read what you have written about summers, riding and racing in the midwest in the early to mid 1980's. You have a talent for writing about and conveying the wonder of those experiences.
When I clicked on the link and read about Bill, I was very saddened. He was an amazingly strong rider, and I was always impressed with him. I remember watching him ride away from us in the Barton Hills workouts we would occasionally do. He was lean and light and could shoot up those steep grades with a grace that concealed the effort we all know it takes to climb quickly.
It is also fun to read about "The big Mac Attack" and how the AABT club tought us a lesson in longer distance endurance. I remember riding that race one fall (the first and last time I ever did it) and thinking the day was going to start cool and then get warmer. I wore lycra (back when lycra was sort of "new") and it got cold instead. It rained and was in the 50's. It was miserable. If I remeber right it was Myself, Rich Grabowski, Joe Gross and Ted Chesky (is that you?) who made up the Velo Club team. We finished third behind the AABTS and the Grand Rapids team (with Jeff Ensing - who I beleive was a national road race champion one year or so later).
Thanks for capturing the memories.
-Angelo Chinni
Angelo! Angelo! Great to hear from you, man! As you can tell from the post, I've been thinking a lot about you guys, and bits of memory keep coming back!
The other names you mention are familiar, too -- Joe (shortish, had a mustache? I once tried to convince him that the IBM PC was a passing fad), and Ted Chesky. And there was another guy -- tall, thin, curly hair -- he had the first frame I'd seen with internally-routed cables, I ended up taking him out in a crash in the road race of my first (and last) Detroit Week series.
If you're ever in the Pacific Northwest, get in touch. My email is 'ted' followed by a dot followed by 'diamond', then the at sign, and then Google's public e-mail domain.
Ted Chesky. The other Ted. The better Ted. Ted was a Cat 3 when I left, and was improving all the time. He was also extremely smart, extremely nice, tall, thin, handsome, ... everything I was not. (Except tall, but it's not as if I had to work at that, was it?!)
He also worked in a bike shop in Ann Arbor: Multigear.
I remember, he was the first person I showed this freak winter bike I had built up. I had built up a set of 700cc wheels with knobby tires on metallic-red BMX hubs, and put them on my fixed gear winter bike, which I'd built up from an early 70's green Raleigh Super Course frame. I used this bike to ride around in the Nickels Arboretum, and along the railroad tracks and banks of the Huron River, in the snow.
I was looking him up, and saw his name turn up in race results from not too long ago. Better Ted, if you're out there, get in touch!
Couple more memories:
1) Angelo, you took us out one day early season to play bike tag, to improve our bike-handling skills. I was riding fixed gear that day -- the only one of us -- but I still couldn't catch anyone when I was "it" -- just couldn't accelerate enough, or change direction quickly enough.
2) Barton Hills -- where we went for hills. Barton Hills was Ann Arbor's most exclusive residential enclave. Tucked up on the north side of the river, on the way to Whitmore Lake. In a flat place, those were some seriously sharp hills, albeit short.
3) Angelo, I remember once on a training kind, we got hassled by some guy in a jeep. You took off after him, and -- am I making this up? -- caught him! Another memory, based on hearsay, so maybe this is completely fabricated: I remember hearing that, when down in Florida one winter (where you went to train), you spent a night as a guest of local authorities after a difference of opinion with a local motorist that ended up with your water bottle on said motorist's windshield.
Post a Comment