by Marc Melville

Created on: January 20, 2009

The parallels between a solo 24 hours with an infant and a solo 24 hours of racing a mountain bike are amazing.

The race starting time is high noon on an otherwise ordinary Saturday. The pre-race jitters have caused the cocoons in your belly to hatch and the butterflies have carried your stomach into your mouth. You gnaw on it like a piece of peppered beef jerky. With the blast of the gun, signaling the start, your stomach drops in an instant back into its position nestled amongst the intestines and kidneys. The anticipation of this moment has been building for months, gone with the crack of a pistol and the roar of the crowd. It is now the physical you vs. the mental you.

An infant sleeps for potentially 20 hours every day the first week or two of life. The noon start to your "shift" is fairly, uneventful. She sleeps on the pack-n-play while you clean up the carnage from the morning festivities of breakfast, unfolded laundry, and pick up the latest editions of trash magazines that litter the floor. You are feeling good, even after a 4am wake up to sneak in a two-hour bike ride on the roads taunting the street sweeper and donut makers of the town. It seems as though this will go smoothly according to plan.

The LeMans style start is always a cruel joke to play on cyclists. Running in bike shoes is like the inverse of running in high-heels, although not as difficult (or so I've heard). The run to the bikes is about a 600-meter loop, out and back to the starting area. In grade school, you did this run in under two minutes, yet today it seems like it is taking forever. You realize, between lung busting pants, why you never earned the elusive Presidential Fitness Award patch. The stampeding herd slightly spreads out as you approach your bike, attach the front wheel, and roll out onto the course for the first of many laps. You jockey for position with the other riders before the wide-open field dumps into some wicked twisty single track. The sounds of cogs in motion and skipping chains begin to deaden as the field of one hundred riders, ten abreast, funnels to a single file line like ants marching home from a successful assault on some local picnickers.

The baby is being fussy occasionally and making odd sounds coupled with grimacing faces, which are perceived to be cute and special, mid-day. Change a soiled diaper; do a feeding every 2-3 hours, and then back to sleep she goes. Once she is asleep, it's back to an afternoon of leisure. You think to yourself, "Ahhh yeessss!

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