Him: “Do you think Lance Armstrong would have won the last Tour de France even more convincingly if had not insisted on ‘over-spinning’ with his gear selection?”

Me: “Uh... yeah.” I was proud of myself. I managed two syllables between blasts of phlegm.

Him: “You understand that over-spinning on a bicycle is kind of like slipping the clutch in a nitro car?”

Me: (grunt)

Him: “And that at some point you might over-spin to the point of ‘sawing through the clutch?”

Me: (nose-blowing sans handkerchief)

I got what he was saying. He was giving me an impromptu lesson in the law of diminishing returns. He was saying that maybe I should choose a smaller gear – higher numerically – and not work as hard when climbing. I casually shifted up.

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He reached the summit of our climb 15 minutes before I did. My heart was in a drag race with my endorphins. I exhaled. Baze was waiting and basking in the grandiloquence of nature. He owned the mountain like a snow leopard owns Kilimanjaro. I looked down at hawks circling in alternately expanding and tightening concentric circles and marveled at nature’s algorithms. I had forgotten all about the pain and suffering. It was, in the words of Emerson, Siddhartha and Bazemore, transcendental.

Baze commended me on my sticking with the climb, but I knew it was mere cycling pop psychology. Cyclists do nothing but encourage each other.

As endorphins and adrenaline caught up with my heart race, I relaxed. We munched on alfalfa bars and began shooting the bullbutter. Benchracing at 5000’.

I told Baze about another race driver I once encountered cycling.

“I was riding my bike from Venice Beach down to Redondo this summer,” I blathered while Baze listened politely, “and I see the beatific angelic white-haired figure on an ancient bicycle. The guy had George Hamilton’s tan and shoulder-length hair and he was backlit by the sun.

“Still, out of everybody on the Venice Beach boardwalk, the chain saw jugglers and the Darth Vader impersonators on rollerblades playing Jimi Hendrix on portable boom boxes strapped to their shoulders, I just knew I knew this guy from somewhere.”

“Who was it?”

“It was Jimmy Boyd, this nostalgia Top Fuel driver, who cycles 50 miles a day up and down the beach.”

“On what kind of bike?”

“A steel 1967 Schwinn beach cruiser. The damn thing weighs 72 pounds!”

“Man, that’s pushing a lot of mass.”

“I know! As we passed each other on the bike path I said to him, ‘Hey Jimmy! What’s going on?’”

“What’d he say?”

“’Not much, dude... Just faking it like always.’”