The Up Side of Colorado Springs

For all of its faults, the up side of Colorado Springs is immediately apparent. The Rocky Mountain front range is the first thing you see when you exit the airplane, or, for that matter, any building or other semi-enclosed area. The mountains are your compass, guiding you when you are deliriously tired and trying to ride home from, approximately, Kansas. 

As a swimmer, I literally never experienced anything of Colorado Springs beyond the airport, the Training Center, and the Walgreens across the street. I would stare at the mountains and wonder, what’s over there? What’s up that road that traverses such a wide swath of the view? Where does it start? Where does it go? Curiosity burned inside me. When I returned as a cyclist, I wanted to ride into the mountains and find the road. 

The other day, I had my chance. It turns out that giant scar on the mountainside is the “alpe d’huez” of Colorado Springs. It goes up for eight miles, twisting and winding its way across and up and back and up and into the range. 

Actually, that’s about the extent of its comparison to the iconic Tour de France climb - the average grade is reportedly somewhere between six and eight percent, and I’m pretty sure the actual Alpe d’Huez is a lot steeper than that.

The Colorado Springs version is also, I should have guessed, a private road. And not just a casually “we paid for this so it’s technically not public” road. But a vigilantly guarded private road. There are several layers of security, the most obvious being the guardhouse at the bottom and the password-protected iron gate beyond that. The less obvious, but more intimidating, layer involves angry men, trucks and guns. 

Needless to say, we were greeted on the public side of the guardhouse by a friend of a friend who lives up the road. In a weird small-world-after-all coincidence, this friend recognized me from Bicycle Tour of Colorado back in 2005. We had a lovely time riding at a conversational pace as we wound our way up over 8000 feet of elevation.

Do I need to say that the views were jaw-dropping? In some sections, you couldn’t see a single building - just layers of forested mountain - and it felt like we were a hundred of miles into the wilderness. (We were, in actuality, a 10-minute-ride from the nearest Starbucks.) 

The best thing about getting to ride up there was that I could see a whole bunch of other roads and trails criss-crossing and cresting the mountains. And, now, I really can’t wait to ride them. But I’m going to need a mountain bike, a few more weeks of training camp, and, maybe, a truck….with a……uh, bike rack. 

Living at the Olympic Training Center

It’s been a decade since I qualified for the IPC Swimming World Championships and became a member of the National Paralympic Swimming team. That was the first time I got to experience something I had always imagined was…..blissful: being an athlete living at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.

Indeed, that first trip (or two or three…) to the mecca of elite-athletics was electrifying. Endless, bottomless, delicious food in the cafeteria! Eating half-a-room away from faces I’d only ever seen on television! Olympians were real, live, oxygen-breathing people?! Nothing to do but swim (in an amazing pool), eat, and sleep. Fabulous. My three favorite activities. Can I stay indefinitely? 

Ten years on, the newness of the experience has worn off. As I’m headed into week three of living here, with three more to go, it’s way too easy to trip into a critical, jaded mental minefield. I told a friend that being here was, essentially, a mash-up of college (where everyone is studying physical education and taking only labs), a low-tier Hilton (on account of the same bed spreads and lamps you’ll find in a Hilton family hotel - they sponsored the dorm renovation), and minimum-security jail (you are encouraged to spend as many hours as possible resting and recovering in your room and mine happens to have white-washed brick walls because it’s in the former military barracks). 

In the past decade, nothing about the Olympic Training Center has fundamentally changed - except for the buildings that they’ve recently knocked down and the few that have been renovated. I, however, have changed. 

This time around, as a cyclist headed to Para-Cycling World Championships, I’ve left at home a husband, a hilarious cat, and a job-that-doesn’t-feel-like-a-job. I miss them. I married a man who knows how to make amazingly delicious vegetarian food for the masses - he ran a vegetarian cafeteria at Google’s Mountain View headquarters - so, sadly, the cafeteria here has lost it’s luster, not because it’s bad, but because I know how much more delicious and interesting it could be.

The star-struck part of me is gone, too - everyone here is just a person, albeit perhaps somewhat of a mutant person. Some are insanely tall and have a vertical leap of about five feet, some have unparalleled aerobic capacity, some can lift unimaginable amounts of weight (the equivalent of eighteen Hillbilly Handfished carp?), some have funny arms AND one or all of the above. But in the end, everyone here is simply a person who will go on to live some sort of (hopefully rewarding) life once their athletic career has run it’s course. 

The saving grace, for me, at this time, is that it’s the height of the summer travel season. Every day there are several groups of thirty to fifty people being led up the Olympic Path - a half-mile walkway from the Visitor’s Center/Team USA Store (where you can buy shorts, t-shirts, pens, pins, and coffee mugs) to the lawn outside the cafeteria (where you are greeted by a sign that tells visitors that they are not allowed any further). At various stops along the way, the visiting hordes press their faces and hands to the tinted-glass picture-windows of the pool and the gym. Ooooh, look at the inside. Heroes in the making. 

From the inside, it feels a bit like being an animal in a zoo (I’m guessing). Everyone looking at you, curiosity and interest written all over their faces. But it’s also a good reminder for the days when being here feels more like jail than like vacation: As an athlete, we’ve earned a key to the inside. Lots of people would love to be here.

When the visitors stop at the edge of the lawn, we athletes get to keep walking through the double doors into the Athlete Center. Inside, we have access to absolutely everything we could possibly need to train. Say you have a sharp pain in your knee as you are headed out to ride. Forty minutes after returning to campus, you could be walking out of the Sports Medicine building, kinesio-taped up and assured that nothing major was wrong. Ice baths, snacks for your training rides, meditation practice, massage, a trashy novel and a movie for Friday night - it’s all here. If we need something that’s not already on campus, all we have to do is ask. 

Living for a few weeks at the Olympic Training Center is, I suppose, a bit like vacation, provided that your idea of vacation involves ridiculously hard physical activity and ridiculous devotion to resting up for more physical activity. It is a bit like a hotel, a bit like college, a bit like jail (but a minimum security one). For the athletes who live here permanently, it’s actually even more - it’s home. Living here - training here - is a privilege we’ve earned. Truly it is a privilege to be on the inside. So do me a favor. Come for a tour if you’re in the neighborhood, and help me remember that.

The Secret Reason I Wanted to Race

All season long there was exactly one race that I was completely fixated on doing.  Part of the attraction of this particular race, was that I knew (everyone kept telling me) it involved a lot of riding uphill. But I also had another, more secret reason for wanting to race the 2011 Cascade Classic Stage Race… 

In order to even GET to Cascade I had to do a lot of racing - I was a brand-new Category 3 racer when the season opened, and in order to register for Cascade, I needed to upgrade to Category 2. And that meant I needed to earn upgrade points by winning early-season races. 

From early February to late-June, all I thought about when I wasn’t physically AT work was bike racing. Would I be able to race Cascade? At which races would I have a chance to win some of those precious 25 upgrade points? 

There were only so many weekends when I could get away from swim coaching, so every week I sat down with my calendar and the Northern California race calendar and strategized. It was going to be tight, I had to straight-up WIN most of the races I entered. But still, (nearly) every week, it seemed possible. With hope still alive, my thoughts turned to other more important concerns. Primarily: how would I do against the world-class riders who would undoubtedly show up for Cascade?

Because that last question was my secret reason for wanting to do this race. I wanted a chance to see how I stacked up against the best women cyclists in the world. And the best ones usually showed up for Cascade. 

This year was no exception. The women’s Pro field was littered with current and former champions of all kind. National champions from a half-dozen countries. Olympic champions. World champions. (Yes, plural.) And then there was me, former Para-cycling World Champion time trialist, who was less than a full year into competitive bike racing. 

I spend a lot of time on the speaking circuit telling people that the Paralympics are the Olympics, that Paralympians are Olympians. But it’s easy to say that when there’s scant, if any, events where you can directly (and fairly) compare the two. But here I was, upgrade in hand, registering for a 6-day race that would, for me, be a test of my “Paralympians are Olympians” campaign. There would be Olympians in this race. Did I have the skills, the fitness, the talent to back up my claims and race with them? I sure liked to think so, but, really, I wasn’t too sure.

Craig Calfee Finds the Critical Part

In one dreadfully long silence, near the end of the first design meeting for Project Handlebar 2.0, as I prepared to unclip from the fit cycle in failure, I could see Craig Calfee scurrying around his shop. Into the room on the right, then disappearing into the back, into the room on the right again. 

He had said (and he would know), there was NOTHING, not one single bike or part manufacturer, NO ONE that made a piece of tube in the diameter we needed to make the design work. 

I said nothing, just watched him criss-cross the building half-a-dozen times. Sensing that my dream of adjustable, portable, travel-ready handlebars was on life support, I sent a silent plea to the universe.

“Come on, let him find what he is looking for.  Help him find the pieces.”

He came back into the fit area, where I’d been propped on the fit cycle for the better part of two hours, the whole time watching one of his employees very patiently and very carefully add deraileurs, cables, and a set of the lightest-most-expensive-brakes-ever-made to a gorgeous bare-carbon bike. 

“Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s possible - the diameter we need is—”

Calfee broke off and looked at the guy building the bike. 

“Where do you put leftover steer tube?”

“What?”

“Steer tube.  Where do you store the cut off part?”

The look on this guy’s face made me realize the difference between a creative tinkerer (to whom virtually nothing is ever truly “useless” garbage - everything has potential) and a nice, competent bike builder (who will immediately put useless bits of steer tube in the garbage so it doesn’t clutter the work space). Obviously, the real question was, “Do you KEEP leftover steer tube?” And the answer to that one was clearly, “No.” 

 The futile-from-the-outset search of the workbench that ensued was kind of funny to watch, only because Calfee seem to actually BE searching for something while the bike-builder was randomly picking up items while staring at Calfee. Calfee then dove head-first into the nearest garbage can and emerged, eyes glittering like a teenager who just found a usually-locked door to be propped open.  

“I think….” He scurried over to where I sat, stunned by this sudden turn of events. He dropped the 6-inch bit of steer tube into the clamp.  “Yes, perfect,” he said, looking quite pleased.

I said thanks to the universe. Craig Calfee had been struck by inspiration yet again and found the critical piece. In a garbage can. Project Handlebar 2.0 was back online and going to come to fruition. 

Fit Cycles: For Exercising Patience

The long silences were worrying at first. Each time I explained a new feature, a new idea for Project Handlebar 2.0, I was greeted with……….quiet, contemplative silence. 

And each time, just as I was becoming certain I’d finally come up against the thing that would make my dream of box-able, carry-on handlebars impossible, Craig Calfee, the Creative Genius Carbon Fiber Tinkerer, would scratch his head, and say very slowly, “Well, hmmm….I’m thinking we could…okay….what we could do is…..” 

As he talked his way through another solution to the challenge I offered, it dawned on me: Craig Calfee was thinking eighteen steps ahead. He was, mentally at least, well into the details of the fabrication process. 

I, meanwhile, was still sitting on a fit cycle (in my jeans, no less) with a few random pieces of aerobar in my hand, debating whether it would actually come together into something usable. 

At some point, probably an hour and a half into the first design meeting, I realized that if I just threw out an idea or a constraint or a concern - kind of like those air fresheners that automatically belch scent into a room - and then waited…..in silence……he would eventually come up with a solution. But I had to be quiet and patient. Some of his ideas we quickly rejected.  Some of them we slowly accepted. All of them were clearly inspired. By what, I wondered. 

Possibly too much exposure to fancy adhesives and drying-accelerants. In the case of the driftwood bike, inspiration was literally picked up off the beach outside their office. (When the huge metal door rolls up for UPS deliveries, you can hear the crash of the Pacific Ocean.) 

Or, perhaps, maybe, inspiration is inevitable when you tend to solve problems by attacking them from the angle no one else is using, and happen to have a deep reservoir of technical experience. Of course, it might be something else altogether.

Even the quickest glance around the Calfee Design HQ, will leave you inspired to try something new, to experiment.  Everything - bamboo frames with hemp-wrapped joints, custom painted collapsable-for-travel tandems, the Stealth Bike (which they call the “Prototype Aero Bike”) - is immediately beautiful and totally unique. 

If you have more time (say, two hours?) to linger on the fit cycle, will you notice not only that there’s a box on the shelf behind you that reads “Customer Name: Greg Lemond.” You will also notice that the remnants of experiments - some grand successes, some less so - litter every nook and cranny of the building. 

These remnants came in handy for Project Handlebar 2.0 - in fact the critical components were all leftovers from Projects Something Else. 

The detritus of Craig Calfee’s creative innovation - in its various stages and iterations -  left plenty for me to consider as I sat there waiting intermittently for him to return with 22-grams of purple-iridescent airplane glue, or fine-tuned handholds, or the hot glue gun. (“I don’t think this will get too hot on your skin. Probably.” Thankfully, it did not.)