Drama

I have been thinking about how to write this blogpost for 3 weeks. I was eating dinner at Felini's on Colley with several cyclists. I had just met Mary Alex, a fairly new racer from Northern Virginia, who asked me how long I had been riding. I said, "I did my first race in 1991." She hesitated and I expected her to ask me for pearls of wisdom, but instead she declared, "You sure have seen some drama."


No freaking doubt. Obviously she was refering to the flawed human condition of mixing high speeds, with relationships, flag duty, managing slow riders, money from sponsors, gear from sponsors, talking unbeknownst into race recorders, ordering jerseys, wearing jerseys, not wearing jerseys, chasing down teammates, losing someone's gear, being perceived as chasing down teammates, rolling without waiting, waiting instead of rolling on time, withholding passwords, withholding payouts, withholding rational thinking. . . and so on. I started this blogpost by brainstorming the "Top 10 drama events since 1991" and it was the darkest, uglist Word Document I had ever written. I'd need to leave town if I posted it.


Instead, I thought back to a simpler time when there was no drama, and communities of people got together to raise barns. I thought of how raising a race registration tent is the cycling equivalent of a good old fashioned barn raising and how every act of tent raising takes the sting out of drama: