Inside Speed Week

Matt Kelley
SBR Quantum Racing domestic rider.
USA Crits SpeedWeek report.

Headphones on and up. Up a little more. Drowning out the screaming techno blaring up and down the street. Dulling the din of caged combatants crashing past in one minute forty second intervals. Ragged guitar smashing gets my eyes seeing red. Bass rhythms regulate the pounding of my heart. Wake me up, shake me up, whip me up. Headphones up.

Fidget with my display settings. Fidget with my shoe settings. Fidget with my gloved fingers. An official is stamping and bellowing a hundred paces in front of me. The setting sun is blinding. The roaring crowd is deafening. The rhythmic hammer fall of my heart matches the beat of a clock counting down to zero. Zero. Zero.

A whistle shrieks and the breath of a hundred sons are suspended for a hundred moments.

My chariot is fire. My blood is foam. My grip is steel. Charging between pools of light and sound I can hear the snorting and cursing of battles waging around me. I can not see but feel my way through the bodies and machines. Elbows and hips and teeth gnash around sharp corners. Money is snatched. More money is snatched. The crowd, drunken, pushes closer to the gates. Eager for blood. Thirsting for the fight. Urging us on with balled fists to go faster, faster, faster still.

The clock inexorably beats toward exhaustion. Courage my heart, we must go on. My teeth are bared. My eyes sting with salt. Fingernails tearing through my gloves. The pain is endurable; my mantra, my religion. The pain is endurable. My collapsing body is strapped to my machine. Every corner is a nightmare. The machine is fighting me, bucking to be unleashed. The enemy surrounding me are ghosts from another time. I'm racing towards the brightest light. I'm sprinting for that golden pool of relief and reward. I reach out with all my heart. Yet still I hear the rejoicing of victor and vicarious. The golden light shepherds me past it's warm embrace. My head bows under the heavy yoke of suffering not yet released.

I cruise through the light, the din of the crowd, the revelry of the victorious. Into the darkness. The cool places. The silence. I listen to my breathing. Ragged and gulping. My body is fire. My heart is coal. Tonight was lost. It will not be my last. Golden light I am coming for you. For now, headphones up. Headphones up.