Hold My Calls, Please!

I am kind of busy these days and I will be for the next couple of weeks. There is a bike race going on in France that has me completely distracted. Today is a rest day in the Tour de France so I’m not missing anything by writing this short essay. To give you some idea of my level of fanaticism I will tell you about what happened to me yesterday.

Normally the Outdoor Life Network televises the Tour at 11:30 every morning. I make a point of arriving at the gym at 11:30 on the dot. I sit on one of the exercise bikes and watch the two hour coverage of the race. This is a taped delay of the race so I have to be extra careful that I don’t accidentally catch the results of the race on the other TV that is usually tuned to CNN. If I look over and they are broadcasting news of the day’s race on CNN I literally plug my ears and start singing something. It’s not very dignified but it keeps me in suspense.

When I got to the gym yesterday I politely asked the other patrons if I could switch the TV over to the Tour. When I got to the station that broadcasts the race there was a beach volleyball game going on and it wasn’t even in France. I actually screamed like a little girl whose party dress just caught fire. I like watching girls in bikinis as much as the next middle-aged pervert but where in the FUCK was my Tour de fucking France? I looked around accusingly at the other people working out, as if one of them had stolen it. My whole day was completely out of whack. It was raining (Have I mentioned that I live in Seattle?) so I decided to continue my workout sans Tour.

When I got back home I checked the TV listings and discovered that OLN had moved Sunday’s coverage to 5 p.m. Sunday’s stage was an important one so I rearranged my entire day to include a second workout at five. I know this is a really fucking boring story but it’s almost over, I promise. When I returned to the gym I switched the TV over to the race. I was tired but I figured I could tough it out for another hour or so on the bike until I saw that the riders were still well over two hours from the finish. It seems that Sundays have extended coverage. So this is the end: I rode for an hour and then went to my pub to drink beer. I watched the end of the race from the safety and security of my barstool.

I’ll admit that you have to be a total geek to watch a bicycle race on TV. I am the biggest geek imaginable when the Tour rolls around every summer. If you can imagine one of your loved ones in emergency care then you have some idea of my relation to the TV at my gym during these three weeks in July. Some friends asked me if I wanted to go see the new Batman movie yesterday. I asked them if Lance Armstrong was in it. He isn’t in it so I decided that I would have to wait until after the Tour to see Batman Begins so as not to dilute my Tour experience.

I have taught my friends who aren’t bike geeks a set of stock phrases that they can use on me so that I will think that they give a shit about a three week bike race in France. “So, do you think Lance has what it takes to do it again this year?” “This Christophe Moreau is being rather pesky, don’t you think?” And if you really want to get on my good side try this one, “I think that you should be in the Tour de France.” That one gets me hot.

Tuesday is supposed to bring good weather to Washington. It would be an ideal day to head out of town for a mountain bike ride, except for the fact that Tuesday is also the first day in the Alps for the Tour. Let’s see, either I can ride my bike through some of the most breathtakingly beautiful scenery on this planet or I can sit on a virtual bicycle in a stuffy gym next to a bunch of sweaty, smelly people and watch a bike race on TV. My hands are tied here, people. What if I went out riding in the Washington Alps and something truly epic happened in the Tour? Like when Joseba Beloki crashed two years ago. Then I’d feel like an idiot. To take a quote from Homer Simpson, “I can’t let that happen, I won’t let that happen, and I can’t let that happen.”

I pray that it rains so I won’t feel quite as dorky sitting inside on a summer day. Like the Eskimos have over 2,000 words for ‘snow,’ Seattleites have as many words for ‘rain.’ Most of them are profane. Praying for rain in Seattle is like praying for heat in Arizona. I actually have a spectacular view of the Olympic Mountains from the seat of my exercise bike at the gym which makes riding inside on beautiful days even more painful. On Tuesday I’ll draw the blinds if it’s sunny.