What about pleasure?
The seconds tick by with sadistic slowness. My legs beg me to end the torture. My breathing irritates my bronchial tubes. I can no longer keep my upper body relaxed; all my limbs are tense and the knuckles of my hands turn white from gripping the handlebars so tightly.
If I could keep my mouth shut, I would grit my teeth, but I grab every breath of air as if it were my last, with a grimace that conveys a feeling akin to despair.
And I like that. Not the pain itself. Not that awful moment that shows how relative time is, when each recovery period seems shorter and shorter, and each effort, even though it lasts the same amount of time, seems longer and longer.
What I like is the idea behind pain. Its logic. I like training: the process of honing your body and making it work for you.
Slow progress. Setbacks. New advances. Good days and even bad days that force us to rethink our plans, to learn what works for us and what doesn't, what helps our bodies perform better. There is something beautiful and pure in all of this. The idea that this strength is objective, that it belongs entirely to me.
In a world where work is subject to criticism, and its quality is often a matter of opinion, physical strength is reassuring in that it is expressed without being judged by an external force. The numbers tell the truth: that of my physical and mental fitness at this precise moment in my life.
And where is the enjoyment in all of this?
It's the great annoyance of people who only move when they have enough breath left to whistle the tune that's been playing on repeat in their heads since they heard it at the supermarket. When they see me running, they look at me with concern, thinking I'm some kind of masochist who gets his only pleasure from sports by watching himself suffer.
They may never understand how wrong they are.
But they're not entirely wrong about the show. In the sense that I consider myself a kind of pain artist. And that training is rehearsal in preparation for future performances.
The idea is to perfect a technique. Here: pedaling well and hard to go fast. The brutal effort of intervals is like practicing scales. It's like reproducing anatomical models in charcoal. It's like repeating an arabesque until the movement is perfect. It's like incorporating an emotion to convey it in a way that brings it to life for the audience.
And at the same time, it is the creation of a machine that pushes the boundaries and teaches us how far we can go too far.
The pleasure comes later. In what you get out of it. The races, the real ones. But also, and perhaps even more so, the rides friends, where you battle it out to a sign or the top of a hill. It's the endless pass that you cross during a trip, with the desire to cross several more, because you can and because the effort, made normal by training, is drowned out by the sublime landscapes, the heavenly bends, and the general exoticism of the place.
It's showtime. It's the performance we put together during the off-season, repeating the same movements with the immense patience required to complete each step, our entire bodies focused on the goal that lies ahead, like a light at the end of winter.
That's where the pleasure lies. The joy of knowing you're more alive than usual. Of being in good shape. Of feeling wings sprouting, knowing that you made them yourself. And that even at the top of the highest pass, in the hottest summer, neither the sun nor the naysayers who condemn my obsession will melt them.