photo credit: WFIU Public Radio | The racer has just gotten an exchange from her teammate and is leaping onto the bike.

A single-speed bike with coaster brakes, the Schwinn Roadmaster was the official bike of the Little 500. Based on its weight, I’m going to guess it was made of pig iron. During the winter months, my team trained indoors on something called “rollers,” a set of rolling drums mounted in a frame on the floor. Once you got going, your tires turned the drums and you stayed upright, like a lumberjack in a log-rolling contest.

 

photo credit: Alejandro Lavin Jr. | Flickr Creative Commons | Note: these are not my legs.

We liked to set up  rollers side by side in the basement of my fraternity in front of a big-screen television. No one wanted to be next to me because I had awful balance. Whenever an object swept across the screen, I would unconsciously track it and crash into the rider unlucky enough to be next to me. Nothing is so embarassing as causing a bike accident indoors.

 

Eventually they made me set up my rollers behind them, in a row by myself. I couldn’t see the TV anymore. All I could see was a line of asses, which turned out to be good practice for a bike race.   

 

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Once, riding on the road with a teammate, we came upon a giant valley. The good news was that we could fly downhill first. The bad news took the form of the uphill on the far side. The best course of action, I decided, was to go as fast as possible on the downslope and try to carry that speed into the climb. In those days I had a bad habit of dropping my head whenever I was really digging for speed. That’s why I never saw the car parked at the bottom of the valley.

 

I must have been going thirty when I hit that sedan. The impact folded my wheel and destroyed my fork. When I speared the back windshield, my helmet split like a walnut. Sliding down the trunk, I saw my friend fall off his bike, laughing his ass off.

 

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The track for the Little 500 is made of packed cinders. The turns are mushy, and crashes are frequent. Once I crashed during track practice and got road rash all down one leg. The scrape hurt, but not as much as getting out the cinders. The trainer took a wire brush and whisked inside the wound until she was satisfied she had “gotten all the little buggers out.”

The pain of the whisking was phenomenal, almost revelatory. I saw bright flashes. I experienced pain as a taste. For hours afterward I couldn’t stop blinking and blinking.    

 

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One year my fraternity got busted for some drinking-related infraction (In a nod to Orwell, IU proclaims itself a “dry campus”). As a penalty, we couldn’t compete in Little 5. The irony was that no one in the house gave a shit about the race except for the guys on the team, all of whom had given up drinking for the training season.

 

We couldn’t let all our training go to waste, so naturally we decided to hold our own race. Down Third Street. At midnight. Naked.

 

Reader, I won that race.

 

It was neck-and-neck right up to the finish line in front of our house, but I made a final standing sprint past the screaming crowd, and it was only when I shot my fist up in victory that I realized the rest of my team had actually slowed down at the finish so they could turn into the parking lot of the house. I was the only one who’d actually thought of it as a race. Now I was alone, naked, in the middle of traffic on a one-way street.

 

I had to go two more blocks before I could make a left and head back toward the house.

 

Here is what I learned that night: Four naked guys on bikes is a harmless bit of hilarity, an odd and defiant celebration of life. One naked guy on a bike is just pathetic.