Bicycle Vignette №1: the Cervélo. It starts with the Cervélo.
By: Kate Wagner
Tags: Personal, Cycling

The Cervélo now sits on my smart trainer in my office, relegated to permanent Zwift duty in lieu of more favored bikes that fit me better and serve more practical purposes, but I still love it. I love it so much that when I move to Chicago two weeks after receiving it, I can’t bear to let the movers pack it away in their truck. I choose instead to go to the bike shop, buy a car-mounted bike rack and hitch it to the rear end of the rental car we drive perilously up through dicey Mid-Atlantic highways, mountain switchbacks, and endless expanses of subsidized corn. When we have to stop in Breezewood, Pennsylvania for the night, I take the Cervélo inside the shitty hotel room with me, lay it beside my bed, watching it warily as I catch a few hours of shut-eye. When we arrive in Chicago the next day, it is the first thing I bring into our empty apartment.

Me, riding the Cervélo in Oak Park. It’s my fifth week in Chicago.

Like all first loves, the Cervélo inspires both passion and fear, but mostly fear. It is fast and I am slow. It is aerodynamic, and I am a useless blob of flesh blowing about in the infamous Chicago wind. It is elegant and promises elegance. I am clumsy and my ability to ride a bicycle can only be described as laughable. In this case, opposites truly attract.

I’m too scared to ride it on the road. The first time I take it out since that day at my sister-in-law’s, my husband and I haul the bikes on the L and get off downtown, where we walk them to the Lakefront Trail. I hoist myself onto the Cervélo’s uncomfortable racing seat and we ride South.

I’m used to city bikes, upright bikes, JUMP e-bikes, riding in the suicide brakes on cheap Craigslist road bikes, never going into the hoods nor the drops — safe, easy, comfortable. The Cervélo is none of these things. The Cervélo is built for one thing: going as fast as one can in the most efficient way possible. To ride like that requires a certain level of balance and skill that I, the miserable bicycle neophyte, do not quite have.

Yet slowly, with each agonizing, breath-stealing mile, I become more and more comfortable with the way my body feels in such a precarious position — leaned all-the-way forward, hands resting in the bullhorns, elbows bent slightly, back flattened. I grip the bike like a vice, tension in my arms, my face contorted with anxiety because the Cervélo is very light, very fast, and I am going with it, not so much its master as its prisoner.

We reach a hill. Like all hills in Chicago, this one is not very threatening, but it is enough to slow one down.

“You have to shift,” shouts my husband from behind me. “Use the right shifter.”

I do not want to shift. I refuse to shift. My legs feel like jelly as I force the Cervélo up the hill in a massive gear. I make it out alright, but there’s another hill soon and this one’s bigger and longer and it’s getting closer and closer with each pedal stroke.

“Jesus, Kate, you’re going to have to shift here, you’re in way too big a gear. Stop being a baby.”

I try and steady the bike by keeping my left hand death-gripping the bullhorn. It wobbles around the path perilously as I hold my breath, lean forward, and move my right hand from bullhorn to aero-bar as quickly as possible. The position is precarious and I am unsafe, but I have to shift, I have no choice, and so, I pull the little lever up and when I hear the derailleur clunk I am flooded with relief. I’ve shifted!

However, there’s a new problem. I can’t concentrate on pedaling up the hill and moving my hand back into the bullhorn where it belongs at the same time. I’m too stupid, everything’s happening too fast, and so I make a split-second decision, a truly moronic one. For the first time, I let the hoods go and get into the aero-bars (“the skis,” as I later call them) my elbows cushioned by the pads attached to the center of the handlebars. I crest the top of the hill, pedal into the descent, and careen down faster than I’ve ever gone on a bicycle in my life. I’m flying, I shift my weight, and the Cervélo, that well-tempered machine, eases effortlessly into the slight turn. I’m lucky there’s nobody else on the trail right now because as the hill flattens out, I’m definitely not able to stop.

The world is a blur, my body is stiff against the slight crosswind, my legs locked for maximum stability, and the bike is going and going and going through sheer momentum and the cleverness of its design. This is wonderful! This is amazing! Ah! Ahahaha! Look at that, I’m riding a bike and I’m going really, really fast! The thrill, the sheer thrill! But this joy is short lived, because the path quickly becomes technical again, rutted with stray bumps and wind-piled sand, and I have no idea how the hell I’m going to get out of these bars.

Time slows, and I’m running out of it. I decide to move the right hand first, the bike threatening to tumble due to my piss-poor balance. I seize the handlebar, scoot my hand down towards the brake, put pressure there, stabilize. Wobble wobble. Should I brake? No. No sudden movements, not now — one wrong move and I’ll go over the handlebars. Then it’s the left hand — I let it wander down the ski safely to the top of the elbow pad, making sure to keep contact the whole time. Finally, I manage to get my palm against the bullhorn. Exhaling deeply, I apply light pressure to the brakes and the Cervélo slows. I did it. What a relief.

It’s a weekday afternoon and it’s cloudy, and the southern half of Lakefront is deserted, the tourists greatly preferring the northern half with its beaches and many attractions. I’m given the freedom to get in the skis a few more times, practicing the transition, the leaning down, the tuck, the way the tension changes in my thighs when I pedal with my head hunkered down in between my elbows. Soon, I get better at shifting, and by the time we turn around at the end of the trail into the tailwind, I’m taking the handful of hills in stride, still a little wobbly, but more efficient, less afraid. It’ll take me a month before I can shift positions in one fluid motion instead of a series of jerky, intermediate steps, but when I get in the bars for the last time that day, I’m smiling something fierce. For the first time, I feel like a cyclist, like a person who can ride a bike with something amounting to stamina and grace. We go twenty miles that day, and it’s my longest day out so far — in fact, it seems impossibly long. Twenty miles! That’s the distance from my parents’ house to TJ Maxx!

We reach the L station, take the train back, pedal around the block, haul the bikes back up the stairs, and lean them up against the wall in our half-unpacked apartment. I look at the Cervélo differently now, with taciturn understanding of its power and a budding belief in my ability to wield it. It looks handsome in contrast to that bare white wall, and I cherish it simply as a beautiful thing that exists in the world.