feet first, part one

I had planned to spend the night before THE bike fit cleaning the cobwebbed Cannondale, preparing All The Right Questions, and sleeping. Instead, I met up with my erstwhile teammate Lee, who in turn made the mistake of suggesting a local establishment that offers free drinks to the builders of record-setting coaster-houses. With my over-budget bike habit on my mind, it was thus ruinously easy to allow beer before dinner to become beer for dinner.

You can't take me anywhere.

Needless to say, I did not enter the Cramblett garage studio the next morning at my most articulate, and I resigned myself to a repeat of the same unproductive interview I've already had with my doctor, my PT, and an orthopedist. What hurts? This, this, sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes that, too. When? A little bit all the time and a whole lot other times. What does it feel like? Oh, it's a sort of numb, buzzing, stabbing, aching, pulsing, hot, cold, searing, dull, piercing twinge ... sort of ... thing?

As someone whose love and livelihood is the neat arrangement of words, a problem I can't corral into a sentence is a problem I can't manage. And chronic pain is all about loss of control; it's like sharing your skin with a medieval despot or an untrustworthy drunk. My legs might carry me uncomplainingly up Half Dome, or I might pinch a nerve walking to the grocery store. I might ride merry laps around Tamarancho in the morning, but pedal home one-legged from my carpool's house in the afternoon. The medical term for this is "episodic". The legal term is "arbitrary and capricious". The lay term is "gggggaaaahhhhhhhhh".

I've spent the past ten months obsessing over why I am sometimes functional, sometimes not. If I could just pinpoint what I was doing wrong—riding hills, riding hard, riding long, riding in the morning, riding this bike, that bike, riding on the full fucking moon, whatever—that would at least give me back some agency, let me plan. But I have gotten nowhere at all playing Whodunit. And one of the first things Curtis did—almost imperceptibly—was steer the conversation away from my breathless recitation of the infinite variables and toward the one constant, which is, of course: my own body.

[More later. Two posts to recap two hours is pretty absurd, but they were a long time coming—and I trust the bike nerds at least are curious.]