COMFORT ZONE

Bike racing scares me. I don't know how I'm gonna do and there are all these factors that I can't control--unfamiliar courses with turns that are sharper than they appear, gravel in corners, other people (shit! people! you certainly can't control those fuckers), and weather and what if my mind goes blank and I forget the few tactics I know or my leg gives out and stops pedaling or my bike disintegrates underneath me and I don't know how to use the wheel pit, though I'm supposed to, and am I supposed to have an extra set of wheels with me? Kinda like the equivalent of having a blanket and first aid kit in the car?

And the training. Man, it's like, you spend all this time training and now it's race day and do you have it? Imagine you spend months building a house. It's haunted. You took care to make it sturdy and scary because you want to see if you've got the guts to walk through it to the backyard. As you're building it, you imagine yourself walking over the threshold of the front door, down the hallway, through the living room, and out the back door. You picture this every time you hammer and saw and sand.

And then the day you're done building, you stand at the front door. You turn the knob and push the door open and stare down the hallway. Through the sliding glass door at the other end of the house, you can see the backyard. In between you and it is a lot of dark and what you take to be cobwebs. This is stupid, you say to yourself. You don't have to do this, you know. You can walk around the house and still get to the backyard. Hell, you could burn this fucker down, rebuild a greenhouse with pretty flowers, ignore your allergies, and walk through that to get to the backyard. And what's so great about that backyard anyway?

But the thing is--you built this house. This was the thing you wondered if you had the guts to do. And now there it is, opened up in front of you.

Do you go?