When is racing fun?

 No, I don't ask that as a challenge, but rather a genuine question about the moments and situations when competition is truly enjoyable, a question Brendan and I discussed Sunday, possibly debated, in the closing minutes before my few-minutes-late departure. Digging deeply into simple questions is typical for Brendan and my interactions. We seem to like it, but this time we had seemingly happy spectators, and Taylor even suggested that he wanted counterpoint essays on the subject from both of us.

It started with my comment about why I stopped racing cyclocross, maybe my favorite discipline and definitely some of my best results. I loved cross, but realized I only ever enjoyed it in retrospect, as in, "Wow, that WAS an amazing race!" I'd never actually been in a CX race and had enough oxygen and sugar enriched blood making its way to my brain to notice I was having fun in the moment. So, I realized, if cross was only enjoyable as a memory, and I had a good stockpile of those memories, there was no good reason to fill mental storage space with more!

Brendan, because that's what we do, disagreed. While I've had plenty of good times mountain bike racing, and even road racing, in the moment they happened, Brendan said no, cyclocross was actually the more fun form of racing. His logic: mountain biking is fun, something we do for its own sake, and racing those bikes, adding the competitive element, can only detract from our enjoyment of the fun at the sport's core. Meanwhile, cross is something done as racing only, so it is a more enjoyable form of racing, as that's the only way we'd ever do it.

Brendan and I are both challenging people to debate, although, being an attorney, he is the professional. I suggested that maybe his outlook on competition as a negator of fun could be the cause of our diametric viewpoints, but to his credit, he wasn't convinced. So, to my discredit, I launched into recounting my favorite cross memory, WHICH DIDN'T HAPPEN DURING A RACE!

While a student at UMass, for one semester, I lived maybe a half mile north of campus, so to speed my commute, I fished out of the dump a Royce Union (pronounced un-yon, or onion if you prefer) with one gear, coaster brake, and "woman's" drop top tube frame, which I bent along with the forks jumping off stairs under the graduate research tower, and kept riding. It doesn't sound, and didn't look, like much, but that's precisely what made it such a great short-commute-to-campus bike. All semester, I never locked it, and nobody ever made the effort to pick it up and steel it!

Bartlett Hall on campus was home to the English department, and it seems I wasn't the only student riding a bike to classes there. Possibly the largest bike rack on campus was always jam packed with bikes. Sometimes even more so, and one morning as I arrived, someone was struggling to weave his bike through the mess of other rides to allow his U-lock to span the gap between rack and frame.

Time for non-racing cyclocross! At maybe 10mph, I dismounted into a quick walk to the entry door, letting go of my Onion and hearing it crash into the pile of bikes and rack where my fellow student struggled. For full effect, I never looked back but thought, "Son, you don't need a longer lock, just a crappier bike."