The Sprinter's Margin: 36 years and 18 seconds
The Sprinter’s Margin: 36 years and 18 seconds A recent conversation:
Ray Dybowski: Hey did you hear? Alan Antonuk won that road race by 7 minutes.
(Me) 7 minutes!? I don’t think the entire margin of victory from every race I’ve won would total to seven minutes!
(Ray) Laughs, thinks I’m kidding.
As it turns out I completely overestimated my prowess as a bike racer. I truly was disciple of the Walden mantra, “win it at the line.” After this conversation I did a little math, totaling the number of races competed on a bike over the last 36 years and the rough percentage of those that I won and by how much and then estimated the average finish speed to calculate the average total time between my front wheel and second place. Finally I added up those races to calculate the minutes… or seconds that those margins added up to.
So guess… Guess the total margin of victory for a somewhat accomplished cyclist, who won 400* out of about 4000 races over 36 years? Alan Antonuk won one single race by 7 minutes – surely it must add to more than that, right? (*Includes heats, semis, finals etc. in BMX and track racing – perhaps not as impressive a number as it might look.)
Wrong. 18 seconds. Count it out: one one-thousand, two one-thousand… Get to 18 one thousand and you’ve counted the entire impression of my cycling career across multiple formats: road / velodrome / cyclo-cross / criterium / & bmx.
Here’s the math, complements of excel:
| Value | Metric | Description |
|
5280 |
feet | # feet in a mile |
|
3600 |
seconds | # seconds in an hour |
|
37.5 |
mph | average sprint speed |
|
55.00 |
ft/s | average sprint speed (in ft/s (5280*37.5/3600) ) |
|
2.5 |
feet | typical margin of victory: 1/2 bike length = 2.5 feet |
|
0.045 |
seconds | time to travel 1/2 bike length at a sprint speed of 55.0 ft/s |
|
4000 |
races | # of races (including heats, semis & finals) entered over the last 36 years (road, track, crit, cyclocross, bmx) |
|
10% |
win ratio | percent of races won over the 36 years (used to be much higher…) |
|
400 |
wins | approximate # of career wins over 36 year career at an average span of one-half of a bike length |
|
18.18 |
seconds | total margin of victory for 400 wins with 1/2 bike length lead at 37.5mph (=400*.045) |
Really? My entire cycling career boils down to 18 seconds? ½ second a year?
Yes. This is a fact. So also is the fact that these victories weigh heavier than the chronological time involved in completing them suggests.
I embrace this conundrum – that time is inherently flexible and that, perhaps, “really living” is found at the margins, at the pendulum swings of the hours, days and weeks of suffering condensed to prepare for a race, meeting, or test, and then again in the expansion of that invested time through the seconds those long hours deliver: a dash across the finish line, a flash of insight, or a compelling soundbite at the right moment in a meeting. The math of the mind is logarithmic and paradoxical: investment measured in years often results in outcomes measured in seconds or lesser intervals (sprinters are the “comedians” of the peleton for a reason). Yet, in the timeless continuum of the human psyche they are equals.
What is the value of those 18 seconds? How many hours, days, weeks, even years would I trade for that tiny slice of ever expanding time? Contained within the long yawn this moment comprises is series of unforgettable moments burned into my retinas and into the fibers of my legs and lungs. That first churning, panic-stricken race in the rain at age 8 with Frankie Andreu, Paul Jaqua and Jamie Carney around the Dearborn Towers. Hundreds of perfectly anointed sprints from 5th wheel and 150m to go to win as a junior and then again in the Cat 3’s. My largest margin of victory at Downer’s Grove when a 160+ rider peleton crashed in my wake in the final corner and I coasted across the line alone. The bike throw against Jamie Carney on the track to win a spot to the world championships in North Africa. Flinging across the shiny cobbles in the rain downtown Grand Rapids year before last to finally raise my hands in celebration.
The wins matter little, but there are synapses built in the process that are separate from pedaling: wires bent toward confidence, towards persistence, and inclined to treat the heat of battle as enjoyable. These connections made in the heat and pressure of the race stay melded together long after…
I’m a terrible bike racer in the grand scheme of things. A non-factor surfing the waves of the strong players forever relegated to the vagaries of the field sprint on easy courses. Yet in 18 seconds over 36 years a great deal of my character has been formed. In the early days a quiet standoffish confidence resulted – when asked to predict my results I would say, “I think I’m going to win, but we’ll see.” In more recent days a willing recognition of all my weakness and failures surrounding a tiny little jet engine of a strength – and hope. “I hope to finish – and if I do, then I have a shot.” Hope, perhaps is the source of all good, all energy, all tenacity. It is irrational, hope. It specifically is designed NOT to meet the facts. Facts represent the past and carry its inertia. Hope represents the eventualities of the future and provides a trajectory that necessarily includes uncertainty and the possibility of humiliation, or glory.
Bill Strickland, editor of bicycling magazine, wrote a compelling book called “Ten Points” that anchored much of his life and his pursuits, failures, and successes to a Wednesday Worlds local bike race. Bill Strickland was also abused, severely, as a child and the reverberations of this horrible past had begun to creep into his present. Earning “ten points” in the local series for his daughter was less about beating his significantly challenging rivals, and far more about the magic provided by a “point” earned through suffering for a noble cause.
Bill never did earn his ten points. But he did end up exorcising some of his demons and becoming a good father and the editor of the nation’s largest cycling publication.
I’ll likely never increase the span of my wins from 18 to even 20 seconds much less 7 minutes. But, on the margin… it doesn’t matter. It was worth it.