We Begin Our Ascent. Joe Reed Mungo
the men. We’re on one half of a closed-off highway, which curves through the landscape. We come over a very gentle rise and I see the breakers strung into a short line, turning their heads as we approach. Warnings over radios and the passing of the motorcycle outriders who precede the peloton have already informed them that they are being caught, and there is something in their resignation that almost makes me sorry for the ruthlessness of the group I tow behind me. The peloton, really, is the thing: the center of the bell curve. We riders are defined by our presence within it or apart from it. The very best, the likes of Fabrice, desire to leave the peloton behind. Their dreams are rendered in opposition to the machine. The rest of us worry each morning that this might be the day that we can’t keep pace. Our nightmares see us left in the wake, among the team cars, the journalists, the riders fixing punctures. If ever there was one, I am a peloton man. I am happiest within the mass. I do not flatter myself that I can kick away and do without it. It has been enough for me to get here, to find a small place in such a famous event. Only, occasionally, as when we pass these eager, exhausted young men, can I see it any differently: as an aggressor rather than as an ally.
We come up to the riders. The seams of their kits are bordered with fine lines of salt from their perspiration. They ride at the side of the road, heads down. Warnings are called out as the peloton contracts to pass them. Then, they are gone, back into the mass.
* *
I have been only once to Liz’s lab, back when she was working on her PhD. It’s a cool, quiet place. She and her colleagues hunch over the benches, performing tasks on a microscopic scale. They work with the embryos of zebra fish. The fish are quick to hatch, and they are transparent. With the right magnification one can see right into them. On my visit, Liz took a little petri dish and shook it. In the center was a cluster of what seemed like bubbles but were not. They were embryos, about thirty hours old. When I looked through the microscope, I could see them: their miniature, newly formed spines, curved in a C around globular, translucent yolks. At the top of the spine were the first hints of organs blooming, a skull being formed, and beneath this was a tiny heart, filaments of red where blood was beginning to enter and leave it, the slightest twitching as it beat.
In the lab, Liz and her colleagues perform what they call lost-function experiments. They work on cells in the fish’s spines, on interneurons. They render different genes mute and seek to measure the effect of this on cell development. “It’s as if you have a car,” Liz explained to me. “And you’re taking out different parts to see what happens. Can it still drive? Is it faster, even? Is it better at going around corners?” The cells are modified to contain a fluorescent protein from deep-sea creatures, so that when viewed under a microscope, their growth is writ in neon. Liz sedates the fish, puts them on microscope slides. The transparency of the fish means one can look into them to register the way their glowing axons are beginning to thatch around their spines.
As a teenager, I was drawn to riding because of the certainty it offered, the way a clear objective made stark the choices of when to train and when to eat and when to sleep. Liz’s work is based in routine too, and yet the aims are different. I realized, on that visit, she was creating a system in the hope that expectations would be confounded, with the wish that something unbidden, inexplicable might arise. When I visited, she was coming to the end of her thesis research. She’d been studying a particular gene: the one she would continue to study in her postdoctoral work. She had hopes, supported by data, that this gene was operative in cell repair. “And so?” I wanted to know.
“It could teach us things.”
“Yes?”
“How bodies repair themselves, perhaps.”
“Which would be useful for humans too?”
“Maybe. Possibly the things you are thinking: disease prevention, cancer cures, that kind of stuff.”
“You think this is likely?”
“The chance is what wins us funding,” she said. “But we must still be lucky, of course.”
“You don’t like to trumpet your work?”
“The world doesn’t lack for ambitious promises,” she said.
“Right,” I said. I thought of my own career: the managing of my aims, the focus on single steps, individual acts.
“I’m putting my energy into the actual project,” she said.
“Of course,” I said. “The doing.”
She smiled. “The activity itself,” she said.
* *
With the breakers caught, the racing begins in earnest. Teams coalesce into groups within the peloton, sprinters and team leaders are shepherded to the front. Everyone who surges out ahead of the group is chased down now. The pace lurches to absorb attacks. It is hard, even in the middle of the peloton, to keep pace. I ride in front of Tsutomo, who is in front of Fabrice. We are at the mercy of the most ambitious, the most nervous. “Keep your underwear on,” says Rafael over the radio. “Keep in there. Stay calm.” Out of the corner of my eye I see the flash of our team colors. Sebastian squeezes his way between other riders, Johan on his wheel.
We come into the town in which we will finish,hammering along. The peloton is beginning to shed riders off the back. It is a looser thing. There is traffic furniture to negotiate. The group stretches, and we slice around a roundabout. We rattle down these small roads like pebbles down a drainpipe. Our freewheels fizz as we cease peddling for a moment. On the outside, a couple of riders hop onto a curb, and down again. The noise of the crowd is intense. It is nearly impossible to communicate among the mass. The road kinks slightly up ahead. The riders in front of me judder together but stay upright. I glance my brake to avoid colliding with the wheel of the rider in front. A Slovak rider, a time trial specialist, goes off the front with five kilometers to go. He stands and sprints and then, when he has opened up some gap, he tucks himself into his bike and pounds the pedals. The two teams holding the pace at the head of the peloton seem to be modulating the speed of this pursuit. It is very likely that we will get him easily, and his leading in the meantime discourages others from attacking. I see Sebastian ahead of me, though he is slowing, being passed by others. Johan is somewhere in the melee at the front. My own thighs burn. Fabrice is huddled down behind me. Exhausted riders are dropping from the group ever more frequently, and so we are at risk of colliding with those slowing. We travel at motorcycle speeds without the hydraulic brakes or leathers. I come up by Sebastian, nearly glancing his shoulder. My legs are agony. I feel my calves on the verge of cramp. I check right, move to the side, try to get out of the main flow. We hit a corner and I concentrate only on keeping my line. Tsutomo leads Fabrice now. They are both in front of me. The cramp in my calves arrives, fully, but I cannot stop in the middle of this group. The Slovak is hovering forty yards ahead of the rest of us; I see him over the heads of others at the top of a slight incline. People are still accelerating past me. I feel like I am being left behind a breaking wave. I pedal. I hold my pace until it is truly safe to slow, to make my way to the line in my own time. The head of the peloton has no doubt surged around the Slovak. The helicopter moves in a steady line up ahead, following the sprint finish. The noise of the crowd on the final straight is deafening. I let myself freewheel down this last stretch. I turn my attention to preserving energy.
I find Fabrice at the finish line. He’s okay. He finished with the main group, lost no time. “It’s a meringue of a stage,” he says. “You’d never think so much energy would go into something so boring.” He is happy. He wheels over to a barrier and signs autographs. He gives a brief and playful interview to a young reporter from a local radio station.
Johan and Sebastian are already near the bus when we arrive.
“It didn’t work out for you?” I say to Johan. He scowls but doesn’t answer.
“He had a good day,” says Sebastian. “He came eleventh.”
“Please don’t brag about me coming eleventh,” says Johan. “I have some dignity.”
“Amongst this caliber of racer,” says Sebastian, “that is not a small accomplishment.”