i did a short filler article for Arrivee about this subject in 2006, it's probably on here somewhere. Short quarter page articles can help fill awkward gaps.
New words for old feelings.
I
have been re-connecting with some of my past of late, re-reading some of my inspirational books, Everest and the Arctic the main subjects. In Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez I came across some Eskimo words which chimed a bit with how I felt at times, there was ilira ( nervous awe), kappia (apprehension) and nuannaarpoq (taking extravagant pleasure in being alive) In ‘The Climb’ by Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston de Walt I found a Russian word, samochuvstvie (An impression of a person’s state of being, the combined and observable aspects of a person’s mental, physical and emotional state.)
This interested me as it is so often difficult to adequately describe the positive aspects of Audax riding. So much cycling slang refers to suffering on the bike, as we bonk, we grovel and then we crack. We all know what it means to be ‘on song’ to be literally singing with joy, usually with the wind at our backs, but other shared experiences stay within our own hearts for want of an adequate vocabulary.
Peter Marshall gave us a glossary of French cycling slang in Arrivee before the last PBP. These summoned up much of the feeling of riding in a group and in a culture in which cycling isn’t so ‘far out’, but what can express the joy of keeping pace with a Barn Owl as it hunts along a main drain across the Fens in the light of an early summer dawn, or the misery of hard won time draining away into a headwind on an endless false flat.
The particular joy of Audax for me lies in the tangential experiences, the fact that things are happening at the edge of the main event. The world passes by as does in a train journey, inexorably, but the foreground is not the flickering blur we see through the carriage window, we smell the new-mown hay, we hear the deer crashing through the corn and hope they won’t dash across our path. But we don’t hang around, our aim is not to be part of the world we pass through, but to get right back to where we started from. What we need a vocabulary to share our Audax experience.
1) . Welcome-Broken: The mental state which enables one to sleep underneath a table in a motorway service station cafeteria lit by 5,000 watts of fluorescent tubes. From Welcome Break
2) . Smugliness: The proud look on your face when a waitress or shop assistant advertises your audacity to bystanders.
3) Contemptment:The feeling you get when a staggering drunk tells you to ‘get a life’.
4) Dumpling: The action of pulling away from another rider who is riding at a lower pace, also the name for that rider.
5) Yadmossia: A nervous apprehension that rabbits are about to run under your front wheel..
6) Schmidt-blindness: Loss of night vision caused by a bright light following immediately behind. ‘.
7)Viewphoria: Legs spinning with renewed vigour in areas of outstanding natural beauty, usually the cycling leg of a Triathlon, can also apply to scenery.
8)Bananausea: I don’t mind if I see another bendy yellow fruit of the genus Musa, no don’t say the name, oh no! it’s too late.
9)Amnausea. I feel queasy, I don’t know why, I’ve only had 12 Ibuprofen, 10 Gel thingy’s, 5 litres of PSP and 15 Nutri Grain bars in the last 250 miles, it’s not as if I haven’t done this before.
Looking back at my suggestions for new words to describe the joy of Audax, I seem to have concentrated on what might seem to be negative aspects. I am starting to question my optimism, am I a glass half empty or glass half full kind of guy, the answer of course is that both glasses are full of Coke and I’m now drinking the last 500mm out of the 2 litre bottle I bought because it cost £1.26 and 500mm would have cost £1.19. I must admit that I swing between trying to sum up the craziness of Audax and being scared that analysing any part of it might bring the whole thing crashing down like a house of cards. Only time, distance and of course the coming PBP season will tell.