By the time I had my biology test collapse (04 My desperate need to escape), I had already started racing bicycles. So, when I quit my pursuit of academics, my desperate need to escape was naturally transferred to the pursuit of becoming a world class bicycle racer. Unfortunately, this was another chapter in the same debilitated book.
When you race bicycles, you’re categorized as a junior through the age of 18. It turned out that one of the strongest junior teams in the nation was based out of St. Louis, which was the city I lived near throughout my youth. I joined this team, and after I had my biology collapse, I started training the way that I used to study. My daily training with teammates took me away from home every day, allowed me to make some friends that lessened my experience of isolation, and gave me a physical outlet to blow off emotional steam. We also travelled to go to some of our races, which allowed me to further get away from the people that had hurt me.
Looking back, I’d say cycling was akin to my first love. I’ve always found that beautiful sense of childlike freedom when I get on a bicycle, and I was quite talented physically as a cyclist as well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t handle the pressure that comes with racing. When I was working to help a teammate win, I could perform well. But when it was time for me to shine, I would completely collapse and perform miserably.
It took many years of healing for me to understand that for me, stepping into the spotlight meant highlighting something attractive that I ‘knew’ would automatically become a target on my back. A target that would invite in the awful, just as I had learned it would when I was a boy getting sexually abused. The potential of moving back into that type of situation always led me to collapse emotionally, and so I would chronically fall apart when I got the chance to shine as a racer. At the time, I had no idea what was going on. It just felt like there was something wrong with me that kept me from living up to my potential.
I got to travel all over the country as we raced my last year as a junior, which occurred during the end of high school, and then I got on a team that spent the summer in Belgium racing when I was 19. I then spent my final season in the States. My last race occurred in Wisconsin, where a few of the European pro teams that didn’t do the Tour de France would come to do a series of races. Between them, the American pro teams, and the more elite amateurs that were allowed to race with the pros, there were some really strong riders in those races. That final day, I made it into a group of 10 riders that went off the front of the main group—the peloton. We were flying down the road even though we had 90 miles left to race. I was one of three amateurs in the mostly professional group, and I started struggling from the onset of our escape.
The pros started yelling at me—something I’d never experienced before—because I wasn’t doing enough work to help the small group build a lead. By that time, I knew my season wasn’t going well, but I hadn’t really faced the reality that things were coming to an end. That day, as I found myself in the thick of a race that I was clearly struggling to be a part of, everything just kind of came to a head. All of a sudden, without thinking, I just sat up, taking my hands off my handlebars, and started coasting as I watched the group move away from me. In that moment, I knew my racing career was over.
Watching the group of 9 ride away felt like I was watching my dreams and hopes ride away with them. I had invested everything in the idea of using cycling to find redemption as a human being that might have the chance to feel as though I had enough value to find a place in the world. If you would have known me at the time, you would have felt that this ambition was crazy, for I clearly had quite a bit of value to share. But when you’re torn up at a core level emotionally, you don’t feel this way at a foundational level, and that type of core truth matters.
By the time I rode my last race, I was going to college and spending almost no time back in St. Louis. I had escaped physically from the world that had destroyed me, but once I had escaped, I found that this wasn’t enough. What I really needed to escape from was the awfulness that sat within me. The high level I had reached with cycling had shown me that I was able to find some value within myself, but I still felt like a fraud because my wounded core needed an excuse to clarify this emotional point. My inability to perform in races when it counted gave my core the clarification it needed.
Core debilitation doesn’t just suck because it hurts. Many of us have learned to deaden ourselves so we can make its different negative emotions manageable and so normal that we don’t even notice them as they pervade our lives. But deadened or not, core debilitation also sucks because it keeps us from being a part of life.
“When we’re debilitated at our cores, meeting certain challenges is like climbing a mountain with an injured knee. The debilitation naturally drives us into conflict and distance, instead of connection and flow, with the mountain, especially with the ones that challenge us the most.”
I loved the challenge, the work, and the pursuit of excellence bicycle racing gave me the chance to be a part of. My body was designed to float up hills and mountains. But I couldn’t really be a part of any of it because my debilitation wouldn’t let me get beyond myself. Instead of being able to apply care and respect in a way I trusted because it was grounded in integrity so I could reach out and experience union with something I loved, I ended up needing to use it to fight against, and to ultimately reinforce the torn-up state of my debilitated core. To fight against and mostly lose the battle that I would always be a worthless piece of poop that would never find redemption.
As I continued to coast, the main pack caught me, and I let them ride away as well. I rode back to my car, packed my bicycle, and drove back to St. Louis. About two weeks later, I would be starting my first bicycle tour in the Colorado Rockies. In so doing, I’d be starting the next chapter in the same debilitated story. Fortunately for me, there was an unseen throughline to my story that was patiently directing me towards the only chance I could ever have at redemption: to heal at a core level.