The Anger of Youth

Start“The Anger of Youth”

While listening to Roger Daltry belting out The Who’s “Substitute” one day it dawned on me that he must’ve been poor as a youth just like I was. The song came straight from the anger of his youth in London, England. Mine was spent dreaming of dirt bikes… specifically getting one of my own. When I pedaled out of the gate at my first real BMX track on my crappy CYC Stormer, the kind with the rear foot brake, I had no idea how much of a dork I must’ve look like. I ignored the audible comments from the side as real racers uttered, “He’s gonna crash…I give him half a lap, etc.”

Well, I didn’t crash and I made the whole lap…out of spite to my detractors. Ahh, the anger of youth. I was eighteen years old and this was as close to motocross I could get financially. I was just happy in my delusion that I actually belonged to this new group of people. The taunting stopped for the rest of the day; my determination to be a part of these cyclists wore them down and won me a spot if not in their hearts then their minds.

The next time I rolled out of those same gates it was for practice in my first real race and the bicycle under me was a twenty-two pound wonder-bike built by my best friend in New Rochelle High School, Rafael Schlanger. Rafe, as he likes to be called, eventually went on to invent the original Spinergy Rev-X wheel and currently owns and operates the even better Topolino Technology wheel company in nearby Connecticut, but for now he was simply by cool buddy who lent me his awesome bicycle to race.

While I didn’t win my class I did make two main events and won nice ribbons in both races for my efforts. The anger of youth served me well as I was still hurt from the snide comments made at my first venture on the track and was intent on making them all eat their words. Aggressive riding with a hint of berserko didn’t win me any friends on the track but Rafe, Milko, and Sven were pretty proud of me that day. I remember that day at Craigmere BMX in New Jersey like it was yesterday but it wasn’t, it was 1979, almost thirty years ago.

Flash forward a couple of years into the future and I had flown through the BMX ranks going from 17+ Novice to B-Pro in a year and a half. My last BMX race was at an NBA national in Massachusetts. My old car gave up the ghost on the trip up and my buddy Richie Robinson (Factory Torker) had to call his dad to come get us afterwards... all the way from New York. One crash in the heats cost me a spot in the mains but I beat Mat Harris, a noted Pittsburgh Pro at the time, in the heats I didn’t crash and that was my consolation. The motocross bug was pulling hard at the time and the anger of youth conspired with a healthy dose of impatience and I hung up the BMX helmet after that race.

In the next several years I suffered on the motocross tracks not understanding why fat guys who were not in as good shape as I was were regularly beating the snot out of me. They weren’t better athletes, they were better motorcycle riders. A decade passed before I won a moto and the coveted first overall followed a few months later. Past that, two top ten district championships, one Amateur class championship, a room full of trophies and enough stories to keep Cycle News interested and my knees had had enough. A total knee replacement in April of 2007 had me sitting on the couch and channel surfing to a new channel called Versus and I fell into a hypnotic stare as lycra-clad warriors sped down a mountain in a country on the other side of the planet. It was the Tour de France, a race I had heard of sporadically through my own racing days but had never paid much attention to. In an instant these guys with shaved legs and colored Lycra looked pretty damn heroic—how can anyone ride that far, that fast, for that long? I sat glued to every episode I could catch, some on repeats and saw the beauty, the brutality, and the purity of cycling. I had come full circle back to my original roots. I was a cyclist long before I was a motorcyclist.

The anger of youth kicked in again even though my biological youth was well past and as soon as I got the okay from my physical therapist and surgeon to ride a bicycle I was riding my mountain bike along the paved paths of the South and North County Trail near where I live. At first I couldn’t ride four miles without stopping; I had forgotten how difficult pedaling was. My buddy Terry who was racing novice moto when I was terrorizing the amateur class and giving the experts/semi-pros reason to worry, was romping all over me.

The anger of youth kicked in again and sent me on a mission: develop the new knee muscles and kick his ass. On a Sunday morning ride we were moving at a pretty decent clip only to have a hoard of roadies come hammering by us.

“Hold your line,” and ”On your left,” got annoying pretty quickly. We all vowed to get road bikes and try to keep up with them now. Being the most OCD of my friends I got mine first. I was blown away by the speed of this carbon fiber Tommaso. In a short time I was riding twenty miles at a time at fourteen to fifteen mile per hour average. When a group of twenty-somethings blasted by on one ride without the benefit of even a warning, I damn near busted a lung catching, passing then dropping the young punks until they were out of sight. They saw for real how a forty-six year old who is crotchety but not quite as angry anymore can motivate himself and drop the hammer.

Two months later after witnessing Team USA (all of whom are avid road cyclists) win the prestigious Motocross of Nations I lost all sense and decided to go for my year end goal of a fifty mile non-stop road ride. I was three months ahead of schedule and every time my body wanted me to stop the anger of youth burned brighter inside and kept my legs rolling.

The excitement I feel right now for road riding is how it was when BMX and motocross were new to me. Every ride I am learning something new about the bike, the setup, and the techniques but mostly I am learning stuff about me, who I am and what makes me tick inside. Cycling is without a doubt the purest sport on Earth and I have tried my capable hands at many. I love my new Lycra friends as much as my old nylon friends. I love my Tommaso as much as my KTM. I love the Tour and will always defend it and the gods who race it. I love my fellow cyclists – young and not so young. We all can live boldly through our machines with the anger of youth guiding our competitive instincts along each of our chosen paths. Enjoy the journey for the race itself is against only you and no one else. It’s gonna be a great ride, see you out there.