Mulholland Drive: The Disorganized Race and The Disorganized Report

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive features a nightmarish dumpster monster in horrifying contrast to the dreamy, delicate beauty of Naomi Watts. Ye be forewarned: this Mulholland Drive tale is more akin to the former.

Hollywood's rough.

Casper Casparian organized a "gentlemen's race," or, as I prefer to call it, a disorganized race. (And seriously, his parents must be total homophone-philes; they probably say stuff like "Our son's rose buds rose from their meaty, stocky stalk to meet the sun.") While an organized race has start times and finish lines, numbers pinned to jerseys, legal releases, race officials and other honesty-preservers, a disorganized race adheres to the much-flawed honor system. After all, real gentlemen don't cheat, and if they did they'd face any insinuation of dishonor with a pistol duel like formerly honorable Congressmen used to.

This informal race was posted on Facebook, the online home of honor, honesty, updates about fro-yo and manic thoughts. Surprisingly, this format apparently proved popular at attracting some of the best racers in the area, who're all over 30... Creepy.

State Champ Hime Herbert looking virginal.

Beginning at 8 am at the intersection of San Vicente and Ocean, the route would take us on a "fast but neutral roll-out" along the Pacific Coast Highway for about 35 miles to the bottom of the Mulholland climb, the real start of the carnage.

A huge crowd of macho dudes in colorful spandex blanketed the intersection, and the finest local race teams (LaGrange, Helen's Cycles, Ritte van Vlaanderen--I don't know, some ersatz Belgian-themed club replete with excessive vowels and a strange dearth of glottal stops) were well represented. I don't usually race with the best guys (it's bad for everyone's morale), yet the elite racers were ready with their $2000 carbon deep-dish wheels with hand-sewn "tyres" and gay Oakleys in colors like "Retina Burn."

(As long as we're wasting time on a blog: I don't know if it's possible to make uglier glasses, but that hasn't stopped Oakley from trying with models like the Jawbone, shown below in the popular "Retina Burn" colorway.

Inorganic, yet grotesque.

Of course, as long as we're talking ugly brOakleys, I'd be remiss if I passed an opportunity to plug my all-time favorite brOaks...

Clearly Bluetooth headsets in line at the grocery store weren't dickhead enough.

No, not the horrible Thumps with a built-in MP3 player and headphones, but the over-the-top in every way, "What? I don't have ears?" monstrosities popular with poker dorks and this slick dickhead below. Anything this ugly could only come from HR Giger and/or Oakley. Fuck, look at this tool. I'd love to join his homophobic, Bud Light-sipping, cigar-smoking foursome with the Hummer golf cart... Wait, is this John Daly?

"You fuckin' nailed that shit, bro."

Bark all you want about faux-kley marketing-speak cliches like Iridium® and Unobtainium® and I'll splatter you with O-Matter®. Oakleys are hideous, and only ever cool in an ironic-moronic 'so bad it's great' way.)

With that out of the way... We set off on the roll-out along PCH with about 80 riders, chaperoned by the lovely Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. They'd properly surmised that this group was either going for a bike ride or about to riot, harassing us over the megaphone with ludicrous requests like "Ride single file, please." Finally, the Sheriff picked out a guy in a red jersey (literally, "Hey you in the red jersey, pull over NOW!") and the rest of us pushed about 26 miles an hour toward the start.

Robin Hood: Men In Tights takes a piss stop. Diedrich smiles, and Tuttle rocks the World Champ stripes. Still making fun of him for it, too.

A bathroom break, which took place behind the Chevron station at Trancas or Zuma Beach, preceded the start. It was pretty funny seeing all those bikes stacked behind the station with streams of urine trickling down toward the highway... Just like any old day in Paris. (The French take a little piss anytime/place they can, like dogs marking territory.) It was then that my training buddy Tim dropped out of the race for an immediate morale boost. But with a group this big, at least I wouldn't race alone.

We proceeded right on Mulholland and the race was ON. And upward. I don't know what happened behind me, but I stuck with the lead group as the road veered immediately toward the sky. I was climbing with a group of about 10 dudes with a combined body fat percentage of about 3%--real racers, nothing but tight little muscles and huge bulking veins. I should know, I was studying them from the back, trying to hold onto a wheel for about ten minutes at my maximum heart rate of 190. Cliche-ridden announcers know the mountains separate the men from the boys, and I quickly learned I was a breathless little girl. In cycling-speak, I popped.

"Not a problem," I'd have said aloud in an English accent if I'd had any breath to spare, "I'll simply drop back into the chase group. Surely they're holding back a little." No sooner was I caught by the first chase group of about five before being dropped by them. "Fuck!" I exclaimed without accent. I was solo again, with no other group in sight below me; I was hurting, my heart was pounding, my legs were screaming, it was just the first five miles of the race, and I was going to have to go it alone. It never got any easier from there, either. Heading over the mountains into the San Fernando Valley, the temperature started to skyrocket into the 100s, and I quickly realized that wearing my all-black kit had been an unfortunate idiotic choice.

"This is how I get high." --Andy MacDonald

I could go all sentimental/ubi sunt/southlandtopology.com about the beauty of the coastal range that is Malibu's backdrop, how I prefer the solitude of the mountains to the thousands of $20 million-dollar mansions stacked six inches apart, forming a stucco seawall along most of Malibu's (and SoCal's) once-beautiful coast. But this day I didn't notice much beyond the brain-sucking heat and my own breathless suffering. This was a race, not a ride, and that created a myopic focus on the challenge at hand: "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women." At least that's how Conan the Barbarian would've described my flailing mission.

Casper creeping up out of nowhere.

A few hours later, finally relieved of solitude by Casper "The Casp" Casparian creeping up alongside me, I crested Seven Minute Hill (I think it's called Cold Water Creek Drive by non-cyclists) to reach the finish. There were a lot of dudes who'd whooped us--probably about 15 or 20 already there. Oddly, not very many came in after us. Out of 80 or so who started the race, only 25 or so finished. Everyone was completely wiped. And now we simply had to climb over to the ocean side of the coastal range to get home. In the words of Casper, "Next time I'm going to pick a route that ends closer where we'll finish."

Finish line/middle of nowhere. I think Calabassas?

Thankfully there were some cold Cokes and workout beers/Lance beers (Michelob Ultra) waiting at the top of Old Topanga, which helped us over the final hump.

My computer says the race was around 70 miles with 3300 calories burned; more importantly, I didn't get last place.

They say competition is half mental, but I'm pretty sure this race was full-mental. I really enjoyed abusing myself, I hate myself a lot.

Yah trick yah!

I'll look forward to the next disorganized race. Then I'll steal another photo of myself looking fast and pain-free from rockstorephotos.com, to leave another alternate yet photographic impression of that day's reality. Like a mother after labor, I'll look back somewhat blindly, and fondly.

I didn't pee myself, that's the sweat running off my chin.