Time Trial
As a break from academics, I race bicycles, and one event I do regularly is the time trial, or race against the clock. A local bicycle club runs an eight-mile time trial out in Woodbridge every Saturday morning in the summer.
The time which separates the good riders from the rest on the Woodbridge course is 18 minutes. Thus my goal for the past three years—to break the 18-minute barrier. I knew it was theoretically possible, because three years ago on a particularly fast day, inspired by a friend and well before I became a Christian, I did an 18 flat. But that one extra second eluded me. In fact, I had not come close since.
Last summer I decided to emphasize time trialing more than in the past, and, on three consecutive Saturdays in June, I went from 18:30 to 18:20 to 18:13.
Inspired by this progress, I bought a truly magnificent wheel for my bike, made of carbon fiber and formed with airfoil shaped spokes, hoping that money and aerodynamic technology would make up for my physiological and psychological limitations. The next week I used this wheel, and for my many-hundred-dollar investment I saw improvement, all right—about four seconds worth.
“This had been my goal for the past three years—to break the 18-minute barrier.”
Especially at places like Yale, where we are encouraged to think highly of ourselves, we tend to forget that every blessing we receive comes from Him.
In dollars per second, that worked out to more than… well, I’d rather not say. My friends in lab—who knew the “per second” cost—thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. How humiliating! Yeah. I hung up my fancy wheel, and forgot about time trials.
But in mid-August I decided to try again. They say preparation is the key to success in time trialing, but things didn’t work out the way I had hoped. I didn’t train on Thursday or Friday, and the whole week I had been getting to bed late and waking up early to work in lab.
Friday was particularly bad. My experiment that day bit the dust, and Friday night was one of those horrible nights you inevitably have before an important exam—parties in the street, the feverish sleep, and then the early morning car alarm symphony. Not only that, but while pedaling on Whalley Avenue out to Woodbridge early Saturday morning, a car nearly hit me. Then the official who runs the race didn’t show up on time.
Have I gotten up early for nothing? My legs felt like lead. As I warmed up for my ride I didn’t think of setting records; I wondered how slow I was going to go. Should I bag it? Despair hit me. When will I have another chance to do a good time?
I rode up to the starting line. As the official counted down the seconds I tried to put on a brave face—come on,… hold it together… just ride… PLEASE CONCENTRATE! “Three, two, one, go!” I went. Can you imagine the horror of this ride? I felt so slow! Can this be happening to me?
Riders in the time trial start at 30 second intervals, seeded slowest to fastest. I am rarely caught, but for the first time in years I felt the fear of impending humiliation. Half a mile down the course, as the road slowly began to rise, I almost sat up from my tuck in frustration.
Turmoil in my mind. No, get back down! But I’m going so slow! Don’t argue! Don’t think! I’m failing! I wasn’t even gaining on my “minute-man.” Usually I can catch him in the first two miles. Now he was going to hold me off until the turnaround. I could feel it—I was falling apart. No form. No focus. Panic….
Failure.
But then a single thought—honestly, one I never contemplated in bike racing before—crossed my mind: Lord, if this is what you want, then your will be done. I had failed. There was nothing more to do but surrender. My preparation, my efforts—useless. I decided that if the Lord wanted me to ride like this, then I would have to accept that, bitter as it might seem.
Amazingly, as soon as I said those words, I didn’t worry any more. Lord, your will be done. Yes, that was it. Just pedal now. Lord, your will be done. What did it matter anymore? I was going to ride the way the Lord wanted me to ride. I had already lost so much time in the opening two miles that a record was impossible. Did it matter if I passed anyone? Did it matter what my time was…?
Well, I ended up passing six of the seven riders who started ahead of me in the course of the race, and with 200 meters to go I peeked at my stopwatch: 17:35! Unbelievable! I sprinted to the line: 17:49! I pumped my fist in the air as I crossed the line. Yes! Arrogance unleashed. I am the elite!
But as I rolled along to cool down a sobering thought struck me. Who was I fooling? I had failed out there. Everything had gone wrong. I had been in the process of self-destructing.
It was the Lord who set that record for me. Simply because I surrendered to His will. Even looking at it rationally, you can’t say it was my doing. Statistically, 17:49 was an outlier, my personal equivalent of Bob Beamon’s long jump in Mexico City. I was improving five and ten seconds at a time. A great ride for me, on a good day, would have been 18 flat. That was realistic. In fact, even the official was surprised. She thought she had made a mistake, “Did you time yourself? What did you get?” But we both agreed: 17:49.
In our day-to-day lives we often forget to think of the Lord. Especially at places like Yale, where we are encouraged to think highly of ourselves, we tend to forget that every blessing we receive comes from Him. Perhaps we acknowledge that God has some hand in the big events of our lives, but don’t we secretly feel we are masters of our own daily destiny—our exams, our papers, our experiments, and our time trials?
I think the real message of my time trial was not that God cared whether I did a record time. Rather, He reminded me, in “words” I could not ignore, that He is always with us.
I have found it both humbling and wonderful to realize this, as did a king named David many years ago, who wrote, “Who am I, O Lord God… that you have brought me this far?” (1 Chronicles 17) and “Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you” (Psalm 9). Funny to realize, wonderful to understand, that the Lord can be sought everywhere and anywhere, even on a bike.
Dan Gewirth, Postdoctoral Fellow, MB&B