JUST WHAT ARE YOU PEDALING?

My beginnings in cycling are ignominious. Years ago, the state of North Carolina decided I needed a timeout from driving, so I decided to buy a bicycle as an alternative means of travel. However, my driving restrictions proved not to be too onerous, and the bike became a means of recreation and exercise.

At this time, I was just a guy who rode a bicycle. I thought it was an effective way to stay in shape to play basketball (the sport used to be a holy exercise to me) and to counteract the my gluttonous intake of beer and fatty foods. But I was not yet defined at least in part by cycling; I was not yet a cyclist.

In time, two things happened: I became too old to play basketball at the level I wanted to -- the thought that I was unable to guard some 21-year-old whippet without a harpoon was galling -- and I still enjoyed a high-calorie intake. Being too vain to let let myself get fat and too erratic to stick to a diet, I began channeling most of my athletic energies into cycling. And inexorably, I became a cyclist, which is to say I became a creature enslaved in several ways to the worst elements of fitness and fashion.

There are two great clans in cycling: the mountain tribe and the road tribe. I am a road cyclist and something of a snob about it. It's not that I despise mountain bikers -- several of them are good friends and excellent cyclists. It's just that as a whole I regard the mountain tribe much as an explorer might regard some exotic aboriginals: worthy subjects of pith-helmet anthropology but not fellows to be sponsored for club membership. So I will be talking mostly about the road tribe.

One of the most obvious things about road cyclists is that we tend to dress garishly, wearing jerseys and shorts that are about as subtle as a volcano. True, the clothes have functions that facilitate cycling, but they are also means of heraldry. The jersey says something about the rider. For instance, wearing the jersey of a European team signals that the rider is a serious cyclist who follows the sport and could easily hold forth about the skills of Manolo Saez and Johann Bruyneel as team managers. Loud jerseys tend to be expensive jerseys and say that the rider is not merely dabbling in the sport but is taking food out of his childrens' mouths to feed his enthusiasm. Simple jerseys tend to indicate the novice rider who has many miles to go before earning his plumes. But perhaps the most honest jersey that a cyclist could wear would be one that said, "I poured the family fortune into the money pit of cycling, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."

Such jerseys appeal to the peacock that lurks inside all cyclists, but there are limits to when they can be worn. For instance, the jersey is for cycling only; wearing one as casual wear is just sad, and recalls a comic strip boy who derived a sense of empowerment from his favorite pair of underpants.

There are basically two kind of rides to do on the road: social riding, which is done at a gentle pace and facilitates conversation and comradeship, and training riding, which is done at a brutal pace and facilitates Darwinism. In training rides, the cyclists organize a single-file pace line that is meant to enable riders to draft off one another and so conserve energy. In reality, the pace line is a means of weeding out the weak and making them feel it. "You thought you could ride with me, pal? Guess again; and if I see your bones bleaching on this stretch of road next time I'm on it, I'll say words over you." In its purest sense, a pace line is survival of the fittest.

But there are other risks to pace lines as well. If one is firmly ensconced in a pace line, one begins to act with the relentlessnes of a machine: just keep pedaling and don't think too much. Sadly, sometimes a real idiot gets to the front of a pace line and decides to show just how inhuman his strength is. So he leads ... and leads ... and leads until you realize that you are somewhere in the Yucatan Peninsula. Given that cyclist tend to wear bright colors and that bright colors often announce fertility in the wild kingdom, this could be extremely hazardous. "I say, did you hear about old Shuttlesworth? His pace line wound up in Uganda, and he was swept off his bicycle by a besotted baboon. Now he's a love slave to lesser primates in the rain forest. Bad show, that."

Social rides also have their risks, which usually begin with someone saying, "Say, why don't we ride out to (wherever). We've never been there." Last fall, a friend and I decided to ride out to the Ocmulgee National Monument (a national park in Macon) on the recently finished greenway extension. After reaching the park, we had a miserable time finding our way out, riding hither and yon in search of the exit. It began to dawn on me that there was a good chance that we would be lost there forever, and so might become an eternal fixture at the park. I could just hear the ranger saying in one hundred years "And if you listen closely enough under a full moon, you can hear the spectral voices of two cyclists who got lost here and never found their way out. We call them the Two Losers. They are saying, 'Is this the way out, dude? No, I think it's over here. We just went that way, dude. No, dude, we just went that way. I'm thirsty, dude, I want a beer.'"

Don't try to talk to a road cyclist after he or she has done a long ride. Usually, the rider is under such an endorfin buzz that higher cogitation is impossible. At best, you might get a few parables and have your questions answered with something like, "As the pebbles abide in the stream, so the wolf lays no eggs." But you will not get intelligible conversation.

And yet I love cycling. I love being out on the road alone with my thoughts and I love being out with friends. And I love the lore of cycling. One of my favorite stories is that of Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor. Anquetil was the first cyclist to win five Tours de France, and Poulidor was his luckless foil. Though Poulidor was a superb rider in the high mountains, he couldn't match Anquetil in time trials and so he usually finished in second place. They were fierce rivals with little love for each other. After Anquetil retired, it seemed that Poulidor's time to win a Tour de France had arrived. Until he was knocked down by a motorcycle in the mountains. While he was down, two of his rivals attacked, a gross violation of Tour protocol but not against the rules. As Poulidor struggled to catch them and limit the time they were putting into him, he was heard to say, "Jacques himself would never have attack in such a situation!" His words got back to Anquetil, and the rivals eventually became friends. In 1987, when Anquetil was dying of cancer, Poulidor was one of the people who visited him on his deathbed. Lore has it that Anquetil looked up at his old adversary and said, "I am afraid, Raymond, that you finish second yet again."

That was panache, and that is also part of cycling.