Dear reader,
I continue to promise that another book essay will be next, and then something else jumps out at me. I have learned recently that you tend to latch onto what I write when a wire is hot more than when I try to be disciplined.
I have to keep following that.
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I recently posted a curious poll on my Instagram stories asking viewers how they approached an on-ramp to the highway. Do you:
A. Reach the merge point and locate an opening?
or,
B. Look for an opening and manage the approach?
Every single person voted B, because I have a small audience of very proactive drivers. 🙂 The question was prompted by how often I see motorists reach the end of a ramp and respond with sudden gas or brakes like the presence of traffic wasn’t on their horoscope for the day.
But what I was actually prompting viewers to consider, because my material is seldom simply literal, was anticipatory thinking. If you saw that and attempted to deduce where I was going with it,
therein lies the first example.
A highway ramp is an incredibly useful visual for asking:
Do you respond to life as it happens to you,
or do you maintain influence over it?
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The group ride I looked forward to every week all summer has gone roughly the same way at the same place. The bunch hits the gas after a right-hander and I have about a minute to give. I fall off the back and spend the next 2 miles getting myself back under control so I can do what I’m best at– f***ing off somewhere alone.
Two months of rebuilding after a year of severely broken riding had me feeling smitten with it again, so I went to this ride last week with the target of beating my own fastest time for the full route. With that in mind, I chose not to respond to the acceleration when we reached This-is-where-Genna-goes-to-die Ave., and set the cruise control. I ended up catching several other riders, which was new, kept the pace solid enough to reach the regroup point before everyone left, f***ed on by, passed a separate group of riders ahead of mine which was possibly a very confusing visual, and knocked my time down by about two minutes.
I carried that satisfaction into race weekend.
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I lined up with a small group of women at a criterium on Saturday afternoon, not quite able to shake an irritability that was present all morning. This is my third race back of this type after five years of long-distance focus. Nevertheless, at the whistle, I watched for that one person who wastes no time going right to the front, settled in behind them immediately, and guarded that spot for several laps.
But within the first ten minutes, I was losing my spot every lap negotiating a rough road surface I should have ignored and closing the distance that I allowed to form. The announcer then called a $50 prime lap (the winner of the lap wins money, but the race continues).
Genna, no.
We hit that corner again; I’m still being messy.
I reach the end of that highway ramp and start to look for traffic.
And there, like on any given Tuesday, I am left behind, caught blind by the very thing a man with a microphone told me was coming.
I don’t take my two miles to recover.
I bail off the course frustrated with the reality that I can be competitive for ten seconds or ten hours, but for ten minutes I am entirely outclassed.
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Before I got on my bike that day, the ramp was dark and I didn’t have headlights.
I had arrived with someone else. They began their own preparation routine and I was deciding mine. They rolled away from the car without a word while I was considering what items to haul to the course first. I wasn’t rushing it even as I was the first to race on that afternoon.
I then notice them waiting for me up the road.
I drop my plan and just grab my backpack.
I am going to condense the rest of the story because the point of this section is to highlight a massive difference in operating style and not criticize somebody I care about on a public platform when there was no real error.
I am incredibly low maintenance, but highly autonomous. I can exist in places with people I admire and be content saying almost nothing to them because, despite being a words person, so much is said without a single one.
I will happily throw in my earbuds and f*** right off for hours even if I have company. I can stay out of the way so someone can focus because that’s exactly what I need on a race day.
You’re amazing. Please avoid me.
But I spent a significant amount of time bending to an itinerary I could not see, in a place I was not familiar with, navigating an event with a layout that was not immediately simple, behind someone whose focus made me a follower.
But I am nobody’s follower.
I process environments and their impact on me fast. I come to decisions fast. Every “No, you go ahead” standoff at a four-way stop feels like I lost minutes when it was merely seconds. Each probable cause I come to about why my ancient van is disabled this time happens more rapidly than the person with their hands on it can understand how I got there, so I say,
“Let me in there.”
I’ll see the miscommunication between coworkers and inject the missing context. I’ll recognize the driver in the pickup is not just having a friendly chat with the man on the sidewalk with a metal pipe in his hand and say,
“Ayo, we’re leaving.”
And I’ll watch the time it takes for the person next to me to come to that same awareness.
When you grow up in a household where your parents are the unpredictable variables, the adaptation can go something like,
1. Notice more, sooner.
2. Control your response.
If you can’t control the situation,
you must control you.
And any place where I feel my ability to do that is negated by someone else’s decision making, I am in that awful state of mind again, in unsafe places or small-town bike races alike.
I wrote a comment recently about wondering why I was happiest when I was living in the van. Someone replied, “Because it was simple.”
No. Relying exclusively on yourself because there is no fallback is the furthest thing from simple. It was because nobody controlled that. I could change my environment at any time. I won’t try to influence what is going on around me or the people in that space when something isn’t working. I’ll just f*** right off.
It’s what I’m best at.
And each time I reach that ramp, and the story changes, I am in my own world and watching those of passing cars all at once.
And I ask,
What the hell are you going to do about it, Genna?
I will the machine. 