The Road Less Taken: Lessons from a Life Spent Cycling

Contents

Foreword by Lindsay Berra

Introduction

Part I: Share the Road

The Empress of Maybe

A Pirate’s Life for Me

Q and A: What’s It Like to be a Cyclist?

The Art of Getting By

Of Pigeons and Prize Money

Want to Race with Long Hair? Fine.

A Cyclist’s Letter to Santa

Belgium Bound

The Snelheidsmeter

In It with All Her Heart

The Guy in Yellow

The Watties

Part II: Rough Road

Maps

Lunch and Other Obstacles

United We Fall

The Pinarello

Part III: No Stopping

The Call Up

Welcome to the Hope Show

The Adventures of Pocketbaby

Inexperience Is Not the Same as Weakness

That’s Bike Racing

Rock. And Roll.

On Taking

On Nuts, Nearlies, and Kicking Back

Give Me Something to Believe In

DNF vs. DNS

Being There: The Extra Special World Champion

The Bonus Wife

Part IV: Merge

Brazilian Cycling Federation Takes a Step Backward

Tour of Utah: How Men-Only Stage Races Hold Back the Entire Sport of Cycling

My Father, the Cheater

Investing in Women’s Sports: A Perfect Recipe for John Profaci

Skirting the Issue: Boxing’s Step Backward

Adonal Foyle Teaches Growl Power

The First Woman of Little League: Kathryn Tubby Johnston

Big Wheel

Swing for the Fences

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Sources

About the Author

Foreword by Lindsay Berra

I was a 19-year-old college sophomore, home from Christmas break in 1996. I got a package in the mail from Amazon.com. Inside, I found a copy of Stephen Ambrose’s book, Undaunted Courage, about the Lewis and Clark expedition to unlock the American West. The note inside from Dr. John J. McMullen said, I thought you would like this.

First, let’s acknowledge that the Internet was still little more than a precocious toddler in 1996, and that Dr. Mac, who was nearly 80 at the time, had already figured it out. He was always a pioneer of sorts. He was a retired naval commander who ran a very successful shipping business, but he loved sports, too. He brought the National Hockey League’s New Jersey Devils into a market already saturated with New York Rangers fans—where no one believed a team could thrive, much less win—and went on to collect three Stanley Cups. And as the owner of baseball’s Houston Astros, he hired Bob Watson as the GM. Watson was just the second African American to hold that position in Major League Baseball.

Dr. Mac was also the reason I met Kate Bertine.

Yes, I’ve known Kathryn long enough that I still call her Kate. Calling her by her childhood nickname is a habit I’ve been unable to get my tongue to break. To me, Kate is still the same teenager I met at the Meadowlands in the ’90s, all wide-eyes, long legs, and bangs. But she likes to use her Big-Girl Name, so henceforth, I will use it, too.

Both Kathryn’s parents and my grandparents were lucky enough to call Dr. Mac a friend, and we would all meet at Brendan Byrne Arena to watch the Devils play. Kathryn and I would eat chicken fingers and lean through the windows of Suite 121, transfixed by the action on the ice below. Dr. Mac always got a kick out of us—two girls who knew the intricacies of line changes and the two-line pass better than any of the men in the room. And because he was such a smart fellow, I think Dr. Mac knew Kathryn and I would be holding our own with the men for the rest of our lives.

By that time, I was already playing high school hockey. Boys hockey, that is; my high school didn’t have a girls team, and by my senior year, I was captain of the varsity team. My high school team practiced and played at the same rink in suburban New Jersey where the Devils practiced, and sometimes, I’d hop the boards after a shift and see my grandfather and Dr. Mac, eyeing me up from the other side of the glass. They were tough to impress and would never clap or cheer or shout. The best I would get was a nod of approval after a sneaky back-door goal or a tough battle along the half-wall against a boy twice my size. I know they both thought I was a little nuts, but I also know they appreciated my kind of crazy. Kathryn’s kind of crazy.

Dr. Mac and I got along. He approved of my gumption, encouraged my wanderlust, and seemed to understand them both more than either of my parents. He always stayed on top of what I was up to. I went to college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I continued to play hockey on the men’s club team. I also walked on to the varsity softball team, which was a considerable accomplishment for an unrecruited player from the Northeast. After college, I became a writer for ESPN The Magazine, where I traveled more than 200 days a year both nationally and internationally for better than a decade, covering hockey, tennis, and baseball (my bread-and-butter sports) and other sports, too—everything from boxing and snowboarding to college hoops and roller derby. And always, I was one of the only women in the pressbox, in the lockerroom, on the field. Now, as a national correspondent at MLB.com, the same is true.

I work in much the same way I played—head down, nose-to-the-grindstone, doing the best job I can possibly do. It’s the same way Kathryn rides her bike. It’s the way we both live our lives.

We both travel, a lot. Sure, a lot of it is work-related, but there are also a lot of trips we choose to take because there’s a mountain we want to climb or a beautiful stretch of road we want to ride. I like to think of my sense of adventure as one of my best qualities, but it often leads to that same presumptuous question, one that I know Kathryn also hears, over and over: Don’t you think it’s time to settle down? That query always makes me think of great white sharks and automatic watches; if they stop moving, they’ll die.

That question also reminds me of the 592-page thumbs- up I once received from a man who didn’t dole out thumbs-ups very liberally. Dr. Mac told me to follow my own path by giving me the story of two men who quite literally made their own.

Kathryn and I have always had that in common—we’ve done what has made us happy with little regard for what everyone else says should make us happy. I won’t apologize for that, and I don’t think Kathryn ever will, either.

It’s like she says; the wind feels too good on our faces.

—Lindsay Berra, national correspondent for MLB.com

Introduction

At 18, I knew exactly where my life would be by the time I turned 28. I’d be married, have two kids, maybe three. There would be a medium-sized dog of mixed-breed heritage, pound rescued. My job within the publishing industry would be steady—no, lucrative!—and my income within a comfortable upper-middle-class bracket. So that’s what I wrote down in the spring of 1993 when my high school history teacher, Mr. Johnson, handed each student in his senior homeroom a blank sheet of paper and asked where we saw ourselves 10 years later, when the calendar brought forth 2003.

Bil Johnson was the man. The dude. The cool teacher. The one with the ponytail, the hip wardrobe, and a passion for teaching accented with a slight, unspoken disdain for the syllabi and structures that steered students toward test-score prowess instead of an education based on truly absorbing the lessons of the world. His full name was Wilbur. I applauded his savvy commitment to being a Bil with one l. As a Kathryn called Katie during my childhood, it made no sense that my parents chose -ie instead of Katy. Bil Johnson was my hero, a much-needed sign there were people in this world who got it. Despite the fact I had no idea what it was. This naiveté was clear, as my 10-year prediction of my life mirrored exactly the same sentiments as most of the other girls in my class. We simply used our moms as models for the question, calculating how old they’d been when we were born, where we lived in New York suburbia, and what some of our parents did for a living. I lived in the right town, went to the right school, kept myself in the right lane, and that was that. I’d surely stay in the right lane and keep making right turns.

Bil Johnson collected our letters. He said he’d mail them to us in 10 years. We snickered.

In 2003 my parents received a letter addressed to me. They had moved six years prior from the house I grew up in, but our town was small and my parents had not moved far. The postman remembered the new house and dropped the letter in their new mailbox. I, too, had moved many times since college. My parents forwarded the letter to Colorado, where I lived in a rented home with three housemates on the outskirts of Boulder. I was struggling to find work and had recently broken up with a serious boyfriend. I was 28 and batting zero for the very predictions I made about my own life. I had nothing my teenage self thought I’d have—no husband, no kids, no dog, no salary. And yet, there was this: I was happy. I liked my life, unpredictable and oblique as it was.

There I stood, holding a letter from the past written about the future mailed by an old history teacher forcing me to contemplate the present. My first reaction was to laugh at everything from my gullibility and sentimentality to the fact I’d so assuredly written my future in pencil. As the letter lingered in my thoughts, which was surely what Bil Johnson intended, my feelings turned inward and one question drifted to the forefront. Though I was happy, I was struggling. Is it okay that I’ve veered so far off course? To miss the right-turn lane? To have amassed nothing from the realms of my own projected normalcy? It would take another decade to formally decide on such answers.

Now, at 38, I know the answer to veering from the path of normalcy is yes, it is okay. Not only is it okay to take the road less traveled, but it’s the one we’re supposed to take if we’re lucky enough to see a divergence. I don’t think this alternative path shows itself to everyone, and that is also okay. But for those of us who do see it, or want to see it, the road shows up for a reason. Not necessarily a spiritual reason as I’m not likening this road to a religious or universal belief, nor can I attest that this reason is a biological impulse. Reason itself may be none or all of those things, but I do believe we’re all born with an internal What-If whisper. Some of us just hear it louder than others. For this reason, I’ve never thought that Robert Frost actually chose between the two roads in his famous poem, The Road Not Taken. Sure, he saw two roads and looked at them both. He admits they were both pretty equal. Then he took one. Yet in using the word take instead of choose, I’ve always felt as if Frost possessed that What-If whisper, the one that says, Come on, Bob. This really isn’t a choice. You know you’re supposed to take that path on the left. So get on it.¹

My whispers, paths, and What-Ifs led me far from the predictions of an 18-year-old girl who had yet to understand the gorgeous, gnarled maps of Maybe that would soon unfurl their atlas within me.

I only look like I know where I am going.

As a child, I fell in love with sports. Only as any athlete knows, sport itself isn’t so much the draw as the energy, will, and passion it brings out within us. In high school I ran cross country because I was drawn to the hunt of chasing down my competition, and I came to respect this primordial lesson of persistence. In college I rowed, engulfed by the physical understanding of harmony and unison and balance, and how life seemed most perfect when surrounded by those who also treasured such measurements of joy. After college, I took a road most definitely less traveled and signed on for a year of professional figure skating with companies like Ice Capades, Holiday on Ice, and Hollywood on Ice. Skating was my first true love, a sport that above all else taught me the greatest lesson sport can teach: how to be yourself. Skating was, at its most basic element, a literal exercise in carving one’s own path. Yet on the professional tour, I got lost. The path became unclear, my life map suddenly blurred by warring territories where hopes and dreams fought desperately to cross into the borders of reality. What was once a dream to skate with the best disintegrated into the veracity of a second-rate tour of former athletes who had little respect for their bodies, or much else. I struggled then, as the epicenter of an athlete’s code—to never give up—clashed terribly with the idea that it’s okay to look for a new path when the one we’re on becomes a dead end. Years removed from the skating tour, I never regret the decision to take that road. It was a road as right as it was wrong, for any journey that unhinges the control panel of our soul and lets us take a hard look at our own wiring is ultimately a worthwhile quest.²

I found the right path after my skating tour, which took me to graduate school in Tucson, Arizona. Without skating, I heeded my body’s call to find a new sport and joined the world of triathlon. The swimming, biking, and running dug their hooks into me, and I worked all the odd jobs that allowed me to put sport and writing first. I stayed on the tri- athlon road for nine years, traveling past my 30th birthday, winding around a couple of tumultuous relationships into the professional realms of racing and publishing my first memoir, All the Sundays Yet to Come, moving myself from Tucson to Boulder to the East Coast and back to Tucson again, stumbling off path a few times but somehow knowing that the stumbles were supposed to be part of the trip. When it comes to the road less traveled, stumble is code for lesson. Of course, some lessons don’t always feel so great during the learning process. There were many times where, in the midst of a life lesson, I wanted nothing more than to cut class. Then in the clamorous core of one rather large life tutorial, I stumbled upon a most unbelievable path.

During my freelance career, which somewhat sustained me through the paltry and often nonexistent paychecks of women’s professional sports, I’d done a fair bit of work for ESPN The Magazine. In 2006, the company approached me to write an online column called So You Wanna Be an Olympian? about what it actually takes to get to the modern day Olympic Games. The 2008 Beijing Summer Games were just two years away, and my job was to do whatever it took to qualify. In any sport possible. (I tried a handful of fascinating sports and eventually chose to pursue road cycling.) The ESPN call came at the most interesting time, as I was reeling from my broken engagement to Mr. Wrong Path. At the time, my chosen road was jagged and wobbly and felt as if I were trying to traverse the Himalayas in flip flops. Unexpectedly, ESPN parachuted in and pointed the way. For two and a half years, I embarked on the most incredible, life-altering journey that merged my two passions of sport and writing. As Good As Gold was published, chronicling the adventure.

And then, as all things do in the world of publishing and contracted assignments, my road ended. The 2008 Olympics came and went, the book hit the shelves in 2010, the column was finished, and that should have been that in regard to my cycling adventure. Yet something uncharacteristic happened during that Olympic journey. I completely forgot to turn right. Or left. I ended up in the bike lane, kept going straight, and fell deeply in love with road cycling. We began a serious relationship. Every lesson I ever learned in skating, rowing, running, and triathlon found the ultimate classroom in cycling. I was 33 years old in 2008 when the new What-If whispered, What if you could ride all the way to the professional ranks?

I knew exactly what I was up against, physically and emotionally. Roads less taken are terrific in many regards but hardly synonymous with continuity or ease. I learned that struggle most often arrives under two circumstances: when we can’t see our path, or when we choose to stray from the one we’re truly meant to follow. No path is clear the whole time; there is rarely smooth pavement along the road less traveled. That would be a given. This new goal of cycling toward the pro ranks would bring victory and devastation, difficulty and enlightenment, and yet another