bill strickland

Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.

That’s the end of the first paragraph of Tim Krabbe’s The Rider, which is simply the greatest book about cycling ever written. Those lines kept coming into my head Sunday all during The Derby, humid, hot, tailwind, the pack pegged at 40 per, and Pearson slapping his ass to let me know he was attacking the hill and I should follow. And there we were, out in front and up the hill, laying clean road between us and the pack, stringing the whole damn thing out, hurting people and popping some for sure, ruining someone’s day, making someone else feel like all that hard work had paid off because they were hanging while the Animal attacked. Sitting on his wheel, 53-16 uphill, I started thinking, “The same roads. The same roads. The same roads” — also from The Rider. When I got home I had to look through the book to find the whole sentence: “The champions have better bikes, more expensive shoes, many more pairs of cycling shorts than we do, but they have the same roads.”