So it’s post-race, I’m sitting in a pasture in Valle Crucis, I’m utterly depleted physically and mentally, I’m covered in a sheen of slimy filth, and I have an open, oozing wound on my leg. Then I look up and start pondering the meaning of all those mysterious Health Dept. warning signs and police tape cordoning off large sections of the pasture. Then I remember the total devastation wrought upon Valle Crucis earlier this year due to hurricane induced flash flooding (there’s still plenty of evidence hinting at the destruction). Then it dawns on me that, hmmm, maybe all those floodwaters destroyed everyone’s septic systems in the valley. And that the lovely sheen of filth spread over my open wound is in reality a film of poop juice. Then I joked to my wife about Johan Museeuw crashing in the filth of the Arenberg Forest during Paris-Roubaix and nearly having to have his leg amputated due to infection of an improperly cleaned wound. My wife didn’t really see the humor in that and out came the baby wipes, Neosporin, and sterile gauze. Yeah, I guess I’m kind of attached to my leg and don’t want it lopped off from gangrene.

All this talk of filth and feces got me thinking about one of the all time great descriptions of what it means to be a hard man each Spring in Northern Europe. Here’s an excerpt of Maynard Hershon interviewing Bob Roll and Alex Stieda in a 7-Eleven pre-season training camp:

Hershon: Tell me, Alex, about the “typical pro moment”.
Stieda: In my mind, it’s racing in Belgium, or anywhere, but Belgium comes to mind. It’s pissin’ rain, the wind’s coming across the road at an angle…
Roll: Slowed down by nothin’ whatsoever…
Stieda: No trees…no hills…the wind’s whipping across your face. Anything you say gets torn out of your mouth and thrown out into the cow shit. Cow shit’s getting sprayed up at you off the road ’cause you’re riding through where the manure spreader was the day before.
Roll: It washes out onto the road. You have pig shit and cow and horse crap and human feces coming up in your mouth the whole race…
Stieda: …from the spray from the rider in front of you. You look up; there’s five echelons up the road. You look back: there’s no echelon behind you. You’re the last guy, just hanging on.
You can’t pedal any harder. You pull on the bars harder, just trying to keep up. You’re giving everything. You look up the road and there’s a guy from your echelon attacking, trying to get to the next echelon. Nothing you can do. That’s a typical pro experience…
Hershon: Bob?
Roll: That freaking orange soup, man…those freaking last month’s carrots. To begin with, they grow those carrots in grey earth that’s been overused for centuries. The carrots only grow a couple of inches long and pretty narrow. They boil them for a few hours…This is all over Europe, you know…
Stieda: Not just France…
Roll: No, not just France, but Belgium and Holland and Germany and Switzerland. Not Italy, because in Italy they have…
Stieda: They have a love relationship with food in Italy. Anywhere else it’s more of an abusive relationship.
Roll: No, the carrots don’t grow very well. They boil them for a few hours. Then they serve ‘em up. You can’t eat them but they don’t throw them away. They make soup out of them and freeze it. They’ve killed everything; any nutrient that ever snuck in there is long gone. And they serve it to you a couple of years later. Everywhere you go it’s the first course.
Stieda: It’s a fact.
Roll: So when you’re suffering there in the gutter, eating cow shit, you’re thinking, gee, maybe I’ll get some orange soup this evening. What a bonus. That’s all you can think about. That’s a typical pro experience. If you can’t get used to that, you better stay home and go out to Chart House and have a giant filet mignon every night…for about the same price.
Stieda: Luckily, we weren’t paying for that soup. The team paid for it. Ah, I guess we paid for it one way or another…
Half-Wheel Hell & Other Cycling Stories by Maynard Hershon, 1994.