Dropped.

Ouch.

You´ll never have a friend as honest as a bike. Which is good. If any of you were as honest as my bike, we´d have already been in many a fistfight and would not be friends anymore. You can study the bike, you can ride the bike, you can train the bike, but you can never lie about your ability on the bike. You can lie on your resume, you can cheat on a test, and you can plain make shit up for almost everything else in life, but you cannot make up your ability on the bike. You are what you are, and if you try and claim more than you are, the bike will not stand for it. You just get in over your head, and when you´re dropped, it´s just you and your bike, and the bike is the last thing you want to be hanging out with when you´re dropped. Being dropped is one of the most brutally honest and brutally painful methods of social exclusion as it is. And your bike is not helping matters when it is laughing at you saying, ¨Man, you´re shit bud."

No matter how hard you work or how good you are, why is it never good enough?

Maybe it´s like Lance says. No one flys up a mountain, you just work really hard and struggle; if you´re lucky you just reach the top before everyone else.

You try and negotiate with your bike. Talk to it, push it along, work out some kind of deal. But in the end? Nothing. Bicycling Magazine once asked all it´s readers, ¨What do you say to your bicycle?" If they must know, I say to my bike, "What more could you possibly want from me?" But it doesn´t matter what you say to your bike, it´s what your bike says to you. And my bike just smiles and says, "I´m only making you better."

But never good enough. Why?

So I still get up everyday and get back on the bike. Partly out of habit, partly out of that need for a morning rush, mostly because I´m not sure what else to do. Eternal-OptimistBrit believes that one day it´s all going to come together and I´ll be flying off the front of the pack. And I´d have never even noticed when I finally got good. Realistic Brit chides my shortcomings, knowing something should be better by now but isn´t. However it will not get better by staying in bed. All good things take time and lots of hard work. Tan Brit just wants to go outside and work on improving the spandex-glove-sunglasses tan. Athlete Brit´s pride has been deeply wounded, but nevertheless falls in line with Stubborn-As-Hell Brit, who gets up every morning realizing that this is going to be Brit vs. Inadequacy, Round #677,819, and inadequacy has a good chance of winning the battle again. But that´s no excuse to not go out and give all attempting to kick ass and take names.

Because it says a lot about the war in that Brit As A Unit has yet to be K.O´d.

I don´t know when I became the all-time points leader for Moral Victories. I just sure wish they counted for something.