“When did you give up?”
Three days a week, at 5:30 in the morning, a group of riders roll out of the Home Depot parking lot heading north on a 30 mile route. There’s a Monday route, a Wednesday route, and a Friday route that each stick to a slightly different set of country roads. The Wednesday ride isn’t a favorite amongst the group - it tends to pick up a bit of steam on some of those rolling hills and then opens up along frontage road heading south, just before the Budweiser plant. The current record for that three mile section of road averages 40 mph. There’s always someone who says that it was that fast because of a tailwind. That’s not really my goal.
This past Wednesday, we were all sprinting along that section. I was in the lead (mostly because it was just my turn to pull at the front), when Don accelerates off the back and heads up the road. I can’t pass on an opportunity to at least try to catch someone like Don, so I kick and sprint out after him. About halfway to the sprint finish, I’m just behind Don, watching him power through those pedal strokes with relative ease. I look over my shoulder. There’s a pretty substantial gap between myself and the next rider behind. I ease up on the pedals, knowing (or at least believing) that I’m not going to pass Don but that I’ve got a pretty comfortable second place finish. Don continues hammering through the finish line.
I catch up to him, congratulate him on holding strong through that section. He asks if I was the one on his wheel and I respond that I was. “When did you give up?” He asks. “About halfway to the finish” I said.
I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then. It was the words that he used that caused me to reflect on a few things. I did give up. I gave up first place, not that it was necessarily mine to give up, but I gave up the pursuit of first. I accepted second. Amongst the strong riders in that group, second place isn’t something to be ashamed of - but accepting second, that’s something that I haven’t been able to let go.
Here’s the thing that really gets me: I look around at people who have been successful and I think I know what it takes. I’m not talking about money here, I’m talking about those people who have figured out how to unlock meaning in their lives, those who have a clear vision of what it means to live a good life and they enact that vision every day. They live the vision with a clarity of mind and purpose that eschews distraction. Don’t get me wrong: they know what leisure is, but their leisure and my leisure is not the same. Their downtime is reading a book. My downtime is flipping on a terrible television show and spending a couple hours scrolling through my phone: it’s the double-input of show and phone that’s necessary to keep my attention. I do that for a couple hours, feel sufficiently depraved about my life choices, and then go on to do something else.
One or two of you might think that I’m being too hard on myself, that I should be more accepting and forgiving of myself, and there is some truth to that, but there’s something else at play that I’ve never really been able to figure out until recently. I have always felt like I was meant to do something different, to change things for the better, to help people make their lives better by changing the systems and infrastructure that limits our growth and potential. That’s why, as much as I wish it wasn’t the case, I can’t be a bike mechanic - although it’s good work and so incredibly gratifying to be able to fix someone else’s bike, I felt too much like a cog on the cassette and less like a motive force behind my own existence.
The ancient Greeks would say things like “to know the good and to do the good are the same thing,” that is, once you know the good, you will necessarily do the good. If there is a conflict and you end up doing something that you “know” isn’t good, then it’s likely because you think the thing that you’re currently doing is better or more good than the thing you think is good.
So that’s what I struggle with: I accept a second place when I know that I could have pushed harder. I accept my own limitations because “second is still pretty good” or “I’m tired and just need to veg out”. When in reality, I know that I have more energy to give. And the thing that I know more than anything else is that it has nothing do with second place. It has nothing to do with how many episodes I’ve watched or not watch. It has everything to do with pushing and giving everything you can in that moment. It means accepting second place when the race is over, but not one second before.
I saw this video again the other day. Bike Magazine (which was one of the casualties of the pandemic) always produced such beautiful content. If you have 15 mins, it’s worth a watch.
