Sunday, December 06, 2009

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: 

8 comments:

--art said...

I don't know about that, Liz. That barn raising with Harrison Ford among the Amish has brought tears to my eyes. Tent raising just don't do it for me. You must have a little Walter Mitty or Don Quijote in you. Or maybe it's just that I usually don't make it early enough for the raising leaving me to participate only in tent razing, and even if I did it'd just be too damn early!

Kevin said...

you should see my "tent raising" abilities :-)

When I saw that title of Drama I thought oh jeez...
Drama, it's part of cycling (mostly road). It's part of life...

Mary Alex is a super cool chick!

Liz Schleeper said...

Kevin, I understand your comments but I need to do some refresher homework before I understand Art's!

Big Ol Bob said...

I wanna see the doc. I'm curious how many times Kevin is in there.

Liz Schleeper said...

One such item on the list is when Robert and Kevin were at the top of Reddish Knob and. . . oh, I should be quiet.

--art said...

Let's see: the only barn raising I've seen was in the movie Witness (Kelly M's other sexy movie role). ...I have witnessed a library raising.

Walter Mitty and Don Quijote both had active imaginations, Quijote exagerated mundane events -- tilting at windmills.

Aside from Kevin's kind, I have little experience with litteral tent raisings. So maybe tent raising even in the wee hours of the morning of a bike race can approach barn raising, but I think I'll at least have to get Jarre's fantstic score to Witness playing on the PA for it to stand a chance.

Liz Schleeper said...

Art, was Arthur Compton Marks the artitect your father? Wow--

--art said...

Yes. I'm still working on getting all of my dad's projects photographed and uploaded to that site. His logo takes you to the index of his works.