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Outside Magazine September 2004
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Out There
Tribe of Pain (Cont.)

LANCE ARMSTRONG has said that in the final stages of a climb, he is half delirious, driven onward by fear and predatory instinct. "The beauty of a difficult hill climb," says veteran U.S. cyclist Drew Miller, "is that tactically there is not a lot going on. Everything is in your control. You throw down what you have, and the strongest guy is going to be there at the end."

For almost two miles, with the mountain's upper 1,500 feet shrouded in mist, the steadily isolating effect of a difficult climb becomes complete. Riders are invisible to one another, the road a blur, the end nonexistent. Then, somewhere ahead, you hear a light ding-ding-ding coming through the atmospheric quagmire, then a shriek, then you see a few shadowy figures jumping and waving. A gap of silence follows—a bend in the road—and finally there's a large crowd in front of you, screaming, with ghostly, parka-clad figures pointing at where you should go, where you shouldn't go, but mostly yelling, "PUUUUSH!"

Later, at the finish, there is excited chatter about all the riders who were flung off their bikes when crosswinds caught them on the Wall. One of them is the women's winner, Genevieve Jeanson, who finished third overall with a time of 59:58, six minutes off her course-record time. "I tried to get back on my bike, but the road was too steep," Jeanson tells the press corps. "I had to walk."

Danielson, on the other hand, has swept upward with grace and grit, completing the course in 51 minutes and five seconds—a minute and a half shy of his own record from the year before. Philip Wong finishes second in 55:23, a performance that earns him rider-to-watch honors and an invitation to race with Fiordifrutta, the nation's premier amateur cycling team. "I just got interviewed by OLN," he gushes. "Cool."

Farther down the list comes Spamman, who improves his personal best by five minutes and sets his sights on an elite 1:20 next year. Alan Johnson, one of the West Point guys, beats his previous time by ten minutes. Johnson is so energized at the finish that he charges up the last climb and accelerates the last few yards—when he suddenly remembers he's riding a bike without brakes.

"I was screaming, ‘No brakes!' thinking I was going to run somebody down," he says. "But I was only crawling, and some folks reeled me in. My mind was wasted; maybe I thought I was roaring along at this huge speed."


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