Human

It wasn't until about five minutes after that I realized I should have looked at the bike. His bike, a white Trek Madone, has three licks of colour on the seat tube - gold for the Tour, pink for the Giro, goldenrod for the Vuelta. After all, if I had a buck for every skinny, Spanish-looking guy with knobby knees who rides around San Martín de la Vega and Titulcia dressed in Astana kit, I'd probably...I'd probably have enough to buy a round of coffees at the Toskana, and not much else.

What got me were the sunglasses. If it wasn't him, it was someone wearing exactly the same model on a nose that's not particularly suited to round frames. They were that odd kind of schoolbus yellow, not really Tour yellow, but not really dark enough to be Vuelta gold, either.

At my age, I'm beyond believing in princes charming or the usefulness of wading through ponds to find frogs to kiss. But I'm not beyond believing in a little magic. I believe in thinking about Tyler Hamilton's leather strap, Floyd Landis's frayed hip, or any one of a million stories of cyclists who had something determined and painful and magical in them that made them excel at what they do. (Do: present simple for things that don't change or things that always stay the same.) I believe in the power of roads that have been suffered on by thousands of cyclists, because it serves as a kind of communion to know that what I'm going through, the pain and the exhaustion and wind chill, is common to us all. I need to believe in the restorative power of coffee at the Toskana, even though I highly suspect that I'll get chewed out for not having ridden for three hours straight (even though I really needed to go to the bathroom and was feeling hungry.)

Life is a highway, sang Tom Cochrane, and he's right. And a highway is a type of symbol, a chain, the ribbon on a birthday present, a direct link between you and what you call home. At times, it seems like the highway is the strongest link I have to anything. I've ridden the M404 so many times over the past five years that I should know how to ride it blindfolded. But I don't, because every time I do ride it, it shows me something new or gives me some little gift and that's what keeps me coming back.

So: the glasses. Gold Giro glasses with dark smoked lenses, sitting on top of a nose which is going to become bulbous in its own age if its owner ends up going the Sean Roche/Jan Ullrich way once he retires. I tried to be cool. Little wave, come on, we're all in this together; I just got a round of applause from the bloody Villaverde Bajo crew. There were three riders together, one wearing anonymous gear, and a woman dressed in Phonak kit.

But there was just something about how damn ugly those (probably very expensive) glasses looked on that face. And it made him human. He probably couldn't wear something more hip, due to sponsorship obligations, but there was something about the...oh, all right - Elton John-ness (and we're talking early-piano-player-shooting Elton) of those glasses that made me think, you know, even if it was him and even if he is some kind of big shot...he's still human. You couldn't wear glasses like that without some kind of either post-ironic hipness, or obliviousness, and not be human. Otherwise, you'd be wearing something far more hip and ten times as expensive.

I can see it on the road ahead:
running hard, I'm here,
but I should be there, instead.
-- Tom Cochrane, "Human Race"