A Year of Drawing Flat Lines

(this piece is an excerpt from a correspondence project with Kate Wagner)

Kate,

It’s funny how our dreams diverge and intersect. You are frozen static and I’m hurtling forward. You can see your demise come about while everything in front of me is pitch black and I can only hear faint signs whirring in the distance. Neither of us are in control. We are both waiting for the dream to inevitably show its hand. To prove that, for all of our troubles and woes, we are, for now, lucky and cursed enough to watch and persist.

Gino was, as you know, correct. I integrated that truth, of a win as something that merely happens and passes, as some sort of wishcasting towards my fantasy of the life and lot of a professional athlete qua athlete. But real professionals are haunted by results that fade while mine lingered, always finding new life as an ideological cudgel. Maybe it’s a gift to have the circuit that keeps athletes coming back for too long so thoroughly broken. I was a failure as a content producer, sponsorship vessel, and Instagram politics influencer, but there are no “what-if’s” left to haunt me in regard to being an athlete because there’s nothing left to do. I’m barred from the challenges that loom as what ifs and know that there’s no distance over time pedaling equation that will take me to where I want to go.

My coach used to reference Janez Brajkovič whenever the topic of disordered eating came up. I had no idea you two connected while you were in Slovenia but it makes so much sense. His understanding of sport as necessarily a form of abuse is something I tried to write about last year. The abuse being this ability to inflict and sustain suffering. The ability to say “I don’t want to feel this anymore” and capacity to produce a sensation so overwhelming that all your worldly troubles melt away. People have written endlessly about the time slowing phenomena of intense efforts so I’m not going to tread trite waters but it’s real. Pedaling at the limit of your capacity and sustaining it as you chase the high of those twenty seconds that tick on for an eternity is the closest analogue I know to the production of a cancerous body without organs. A subject temporarily remade into a climax of sustained intensities.

In 2023 I had no future to be oriented towards and, in turn, lost the ability to pedal hard. The physical sensations, analogized as zones and workout targets one chases in preparation to win the next race, were inexorably bound up with memories of pedaling up the mountains of New Mexico. Every attempt at an interval induced these visceral flashbacks to something that happened, ended, and then inexplicably persisted. I was incapable of making it to those 20 seconds where the world fades and all you can do is count seconds, rotations, and breaths. So, deprived of the ability to lose myself in the solace of suffering through all consuming sensations, I became obsessed with making flat lines on my stupid little graphs, I ran. Because running is stasis and the illusion of productivity. Something far less terrifying than wandering and turning your attention to what must come next. I made all of these beautiful lines while I pedaled to nowhere. Hours upon hours of pedaling so methodical and rhythmic that trainer rides were often indiscernible from afternoons spent on the undulating roads of New England.

I turned my efforts towards drawing long flat lines across the country because the ability to bury myself in suffering never came back.

I’m glad that cycling, in a roundabout way, brought you to psychoanalysis. Sometimes I’m confounded that sport hasn’t brought more people towards it and then I remember the irreparable damage that would come about from remedying the contradictions that produce an pathologically driven athlete. The modern professional athlete, like any other laborer, is the model CBT patient. A clinical subject, a machine in need of psychological tune-ups to keep them docile and adapted to the market demands.

Setting aside the presumed enhancements and his attachment to an authoritarian petrostate killing detractors and laborers en masse, Pogacar, the boy, is a hollow vessel because he is the epitome of this clinical subject as athlete. Someone who wins because the numbers say so and suffers a loss because the caloric intake was simply not regulated properly. He is the poster child of the blood lactate revolution in cycling. The inevitable epistemic turn towards athlete as numerical assemblage that pedal, crank, and hub borne deflection meters set the stage for decades ago. The increasing rationalization and embrace of a clinical logic in the peloton is not just a capital induced sickness stripping excitement and intrigue. It is a poisonous way of knowing our bodies that trickles all the way down to the recreational athlete whose penchant for pedaling is a front for an obsession with data production. Sense perception must be quantified and translated into something objective. To feel is not enough. The march towards a world of atomized and dislocated subjects has continued apace to the flesh. The sensor laden athlete increasingly bears resemblance to Heisenberg’s man. Someone who, to paraphrase Arendt, is wrapped in fabulous instruments and ever more ingenious machines unlikely to encounter anything in the world that is not man-made and hence is not, in last analysis, he himself.

Now I have strayed off course to the mountains of data that I’m haunted by. I keep telling myself that these archives can be something more than an obsession with self surveillance. But to understand how I have to poke and prod and critique them in the hopes of unearthing some understanding. The other day I looked up the activity my late friend had completed 6 years prior. I went out and ran the exact distance at the same clip maintaining roughly the same heart rate as he did on April 17th, 2019. Never before have we had access to such an archive of embodied sensations. We just have to translate the numbers back into something that we can feel.

Sometimes I’m unsure if I was the only one stupid enough to have bought in so fully and vain enough to wear the sadness on my sleeve about my unlikely success going unrealized. It’s cathartic and important to be reminded that you, and others, have also given up every dollar saved in pursuit of this fantasy life. Sport won, like it always does, and now the object of our fantasies has no need for us. We are responsible for making something with this mountain of experiences, feelings, and connections that accumulated as we ran. We are the only ones who can excavate our bodies of work from the void that disguises itself as a fantasy of the good life.