This is the true post of Little 500 riders picked to have their lives surrounding America's Greatest College Weekend posted to the web. To find out what happens when the IDS stops just reporting and starts getting real...check here for The Real Ride - Little 500 style.
Spring is generally viewed, I think, as a restorative time, when the winter finally breaks and the sun shines through, lighting up everything, inside and out. Sandals and shorts finally get dusted off. Around here, the Kilroys' patio starts buzzing.
For the last six years, spring, for me, has been defined by the Little 500.
Memory seems to suggest that spring always seemed to turn right after Spring Break, which usually included some good days and some bad ones. But just as campus refilled itself, spring would always finally wake up for good (Except in '08, what a miserable season).
And so the first 70-degree day, the first spring showers -- all of these things that most people generally view as a signal to go appreciate being outside again -- just serve to well up an appreciable nervousness inside me.
Riding the Little 500 is a really cool thing to do, an admirable physical challenge and a fine experience. Training for the Little 500 is not.
Breaking yourself, over and over again, most often literally year-round, for one day of actual competition is not a natural act. Nor is slogging through the dead of an Indiana winter, or sacrificing your grades and your social life for this thing that offers so little physical reward.
When you really think about the odds of a four-year Little 500 rider winning a race, with 33 teams, usually of four riders, involved in just one 200-lap (100 for the women) race that includes pit traffic, attacks, exchanges, crashes and countless other unpredictabilities, it's sometimes a wonder that anybody makes it across the finish line at all.
Qualifications can be even worse. I've seen very good teams, teams that on talent and training and sheer merit should have been in the front four rows, lose everything on quals day.
But I'd be lying if I said I didn't love the first of spring, because I would be lying if I said I didn't love every part of the Little 500 experience. This will be my sixth year involved (four as a rider and now two as a coach), and I certainly hope I'm nowhere near my last.
Accuse me of chasing the glorious days of my misspent youth (of like, two years ago) if you wish, but in my opinion, there really just isn't any experience quite like the Little 500, so why quit it?
Early on in my career, if we're going to call it that, I came to terms with the likely reality that I would probably never win a race (I was so thoughtful, wasn't I?). It's disappointing at first, discouraging to think that you could give so much of your time and yourself to something without the most tangible return.
But then you come to appreciate the nuance more -- the nervous thrill of quals, the intense excitement of Miss-N-Out, that glorious week of campus celebrity. It touches you, reaches you in a way that maybe nothing else will, no matter where you finish or how you race, and it lights you up inside.
Like the first sunny day of a new spring.
Zach Osterman is the coach of Sammy Cycling. He was a rider four-year rider for Sammy Cycling. He is a previous editor of this newspaper.
