The Tour de France has been over for 2 days now and I am in withdrawal.
Lance didn't win-- exactly. He did get third though-- not too shabby for a 38 year old who's been out of the sport for 4 years. (Seriously-- they showed pictures of him watching the Tour from home last year drinking beer with a little pot belly.) Way to go, Lance.
Watching the world's best cyclists is inspiring. And then discouraging. Why? Because you'd think that riding a bike is riding a bike. When you watch basketball or football or gymnastics, you see the athletes do seemingly inhuman actions and realize that they are special people born with certain talents and characteristics. But, riding a bike seems like something that everyone should be able to do, right?
Wrong. The riders in the Tour de France ride 100 plus miles everyday for 23 days, with 2 rest days in between. They cover over 3000 miles. They climb thousands and thousands of feet. They ride up hills that are 8-12% grade (think Suncrest) at 18 miles per hour. That's a pretty dang good average for me on a flat road, let alone on an incline!
I can't imagine the suffering these guys can handle to put themselves through that kind of ordeal. I rode up to the windmills by the point of the mountain the other day without stopping on the steep part and was pretty dang proud of myself-- even though I was sucking wind and seeing stars for 2 minutes when I got to the top-- and that was only a quarter mile climb!
My point is that, just like running, even though riding a bike is something that nearly everyone can do, there are definitely some people who do it on a level that is incomprehensibly better than most of us.
Maybe that's why I just spent the better part of a month watching them do it. Some people find God in music, art or nature. I see Him in the beauty of watching His most wonderful creations in an impossibly long, difficult, and supremely graceful feat of endurance.
How long until next July?
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