|
My very first bike race took place when I was 12 years old. The race was around a one-mile
block by my elementary school. My buddies and I were all on Schwinns. It was an informal
competition. But I finished dead last, hundreds of yards off the back.
It was an embarrassing moment for me since I had earned a hard-fought reputation as one of
the fastest runners in the school.
The Glum-Looking Crowd in the SAG Wagon
Too often, the focus in sports is on the victor. But nice guys (and women) like myself know
what it’s like to finish last. In a three-day mountain bike race in Costa Rica, I was dead
last for two consecutive years. Granted the race is billed as “the toughest mountain bike
race on the planet,” with 26,000 feet of climbing over 270 miles, and granted that I
trained for the event, I was determined to finish each day, come jungle hell or high water.
Unfortunately, I never managed to make the mandatory time cutoffs for each day, and so I
got scooped up by the sag wagon, which in this case, was a battered African safari jeep.
We were a glum-looking crowd in that sag wagon as we bounced along the dirt roads Pac-Manning
other slow riders.
But there was a saving grace in riding last. I had my own private police motorcycle escort
for much of the way. I felt sorry for these two policia following me all day on their
Kawasakis. I even shared my food with them.
The “Bill Rule”
When I showed up the following year to race, one of the same policia motorcyclists was
assigned to herd the last riders. When he saw me, he told the race organizer, “Oh, no, not
him again!” This all took place in Spanish so I was spared the embarrassment until after
the race when the organizer told me.
To complicate matters, I refused to get scooped up by the sag wagon on day two during a
tortuous ascent of an 11,000-foot volcano. I was hours behind the leaders. It started to
rain, it got cold, but I refused to quit, which meant that my police escorts also couldn’t
quit. I saw pleading in their eyes for me to give it up. But I wouldn’t and I couldn’t.
It wasn’t until I crashed during the descent in pitch-dark conditions that I surrendered
to the counsel of common sense. I gratefully accepted a ride on the back of one of the
motorcycles and was whisked off to the race hotel headquarters where I arrived at 10 p.m.,
some six hours after the majority of finishers.
The next day I gave the policia twenty dollars as a thank you. And the race director
sternly warned me—and all the other competitors—to get in the sag wagon if we weren’t going
to make the cutoff. He called this the “Bill rule.”
The best method to not get discouraged when you are in last place is to concentrate on the
following thought: You are doing this race for yourself and no one else.
During an early-season duathlon one year, I dropped out of the bike segment shortly after
the eight-mile run segment. My calves were cramping from the cold. As I slowly biked back
to the start/finish area, the crowd cheered me on, thinking that I was the leader.
In another race, a seven-mile cross-country torture run through steep hills (it was called
the Avia Scramble and was the precursor of adventure races), I had to muster all my speed
and stamina to finish second-to-last place. It became a real back-of-the-pack race to the
finish. When I wheezed across the finish line, a reporter from CNN shoved a camera and
mike in my face. I was asked, “So how do you feel?” I flashed a gallant TV-smile and
replied, “I have had better days.”
So there was a benefit in finishing almost dead last. I made CNN.
|
