Gas in the Tank

I love this sport. I'll lead with that, because some of what follows is going to read like a warning, and it isn't--not really. I love the quiet of a long ride, the way three hours alone on a road can untangle what a whole week of thinking couldn't. The friendships that only seem to form at six in the morning in the cold. The plain, stupid satisfaction of being a little stronger than I was last year. Cycling has given me some of the best hours of my life.

I came to it sideways. I'd started in triathlon and rode casually with friends, nothing serious, just good company and some miles. Then the pandemic hit, I started showing up to a weekly race ride, and a competitive fire that had always been in me got stoked. My FTP (the number cyclists use as shorthand for engine size) was around 200 watts back then, and once that fire caught I couldn't stop feeding it.

There's a particular thrill in getting strong, too, and I won't pretend I'm above it. The guys I ride with each bring a dragon to the Thursday ride--engines we've spent years feeding. Once your dragon is strong, you get to hurt people--or withstand the hurt they're trying to dish out--and be the one still there when others crack. The strong dragons get the respect. It's a deeply stupid game, and one of the most motivating things I've ever found. A guy on the ride summed it up better than I ever could: "We like kicking each other in the nuts."

Everyone knows there are sprinters and climbers and the wiry guys who float uphill. What I didn't expect was how precisely it shows up once you start tracking your own numbers. The data doesn't deal in labels. It just hands you your own engine, plotted out. Some dragons are tuned for high output over short bursts, all snap and fury. Others are geared low and long, diesels that grind for hours. Mine came back squarely the first kind, and most of the time that's a blast.

My Strava power profile: 928 watts for fifteen seconds, 241 for a full hour. All snap up close, fading to a grind toward the long end – the dragon I just described, in one picture.

For four years the graphs went up and to the right. I grew that 200-watt hatchling into something in the mid 260s (breaking into Category 3 territory--solid amateur racing status), peaking in 2024 with north of 700 hours in a year, about ten hours a week, and a coach to make sure none of them went to waste. By every number I track, the dragon was thriving, and I don't regret a single one of those hours. But the climb showed me something the numbers couldn't. I was starting to want things more than I wanted another handful of watts, and a dragon that big has a way of eating the time and energy you'd need to go after them.

And it cost more than time. When the tank runs that dry, the thing you've been feeding starts to leak. There was a game night with my girlfriend's friends that I rolled into straight off a long Saturday ride, wrung out and wired and agitated, the filter I usually keep firmly in place worn clean through. I remember exactly what I said. Halfway through a game I told her best friend to shut up. She took it personally, and she was right to. It was a sharp, ugly thing to say to someone who didn't have it coming--the edge that belongs on the bike, loose in a living room full of people who deserved gentleness. The dragon had been fed that day. I hadn't, and neither had the relationship.

Then the ground shifted. A friend was killed on a group ride. Phil. One of the people who made this whole thing feel like home back when I was new and clueless and getting in everyone's way--he treated me like a welcome guest anyway, and grace is the only word that's ever fit him. I already wrote about Phil, and I won't try to do it twice here. But losing him like that, to the very thing that brought us together, didn't just make me sad. It put a question in front of me I'd never really had to hold before. Is any of this worth it?

I stopped chasing the Thursday crowd and drifted to solo miles. Partly to think. Partly because I needed to be honest about where my time and my heart belonged, and whether they belonged out here at all. The bike stayed. The fire just banked low.

My fitness went with it. For a while that felt like failure, the numbers sliding month after month, my FTP drifting down into the 220s. But when I finally dug through the data, it wasn't a stick to beat myself with. It was just clear. I hadn't lost anything mysterious. I'd stopped feeding the engine, and engines fade when you stop. Cause and effect, in watts.

There's a smaller version of the worth-it question, and the data answers that one cleanly. That peak year with the coach and the ten-hour weeks, the one where I wanted to know how strong I could get--what those hours actually bought was a handful of watts over where I already was. The first hundred watts in this sport come cheap. The last ten are the most expensive thing you'll ever buy, and you pay for them in the one currency you can least afford, the time and attention that belong to the people in your life. So no, that part wasn't worth it. That answer's easy.

The bigger version doesn't have a clean answer, and I've stopped expecting one. Because the bigger version is Phil. I can tell you to the watt what this sport gave me and what it took--in fitness, in hours, in a relationship. I cannot tell you whether it's worth the risk that took my friend. But losing him did something the watts couldn't. It added weight to a question that had already been forming--not just whether the sport is worth it, but whether it's the thing I should be pouring myself into at all. I still don't have the first answer. Phil pushed me toward the second.

And then yesterday I did my first real group ride in months, and the fire I thought all of this had buried came roaring back the second the pace lifted. That's the part I can't argue away either. The pull is real. The snap, the want to be at the front when it all goes single file, still in there. It never left. The legs, though, are another story--I hung on for about ninety-five percent of it before getting dropped within sight of the finish, all the want in the world and not quite the watts to bring it home. In fairness, I was on a gravel bike on 47mm tires, which is the kind of excuse that sounds made up and happens to be true.

It was good to be back among the brotherhood, the people who speak the same stupid language. The same brotherhood I lost Phil from. And as much as I love it, it isn't the family I'm actually after--a wife, kids, a house with some noise in it. I haven't found her yet, and you don't meet your wife on the Thursday ride. Ten hours a week doesn't leave much in the tank for showing up to the places you might. That's the other side of the scale. Not just the risk Phil made real, but a family I still have to go start, and the energy these hours have never left me to go looking. The tidy solution would be to just find someone who loves long days in the saddle as much as I do, so the two stop competing. I'm not holding my breath. The ratio out here runs heavily the wrong way, and "must enjoy four-hour sufferfests in the cold" turns out to be a narrow filter to build a search around.

So I don't have a clean ending for you. I'm not going to tell you the fire won and the fear lost, or that it went the other way. What's true is that I rode yesterday, and I felt alive in a way I'd been missing, and I thought about Phil as I responded to the questions of where I've been with "contemplating my mortality". The worth-it question doesn't get answered at a desk. It gets answered a little at a time, every time I decide to clip in or I don't. For now I'm clipping in--a little heavier than I used to be, at a volume that leaves something in the tank for the things I've figured out I want more. Eyes open, carrying him, still asking.

A dragon is a strange thing to love. I can't imagine my life without the energy it throws off, and I wouldn't want to. But it cuts both forwards and backwards when it's mishandled, and the catch is this: I feel most alive when it's loose. The trouble is that a life worth living gets built out of the things that endure--a marriage, kids, something good and slow--and a dragon has no patience for any of that. It wants the fight, and it wants to consume. Making it home is the part it leaves to you.

i fleshed this piece out with claude over a period of hours... 25% of the prose is mine and the finished work is consistent with my experiences, feelings, and metrics.