Suffer jet city
On returning to threshold and relinquishing control
A few days ago, I joined my first real peloton — a fast, well-known Boulder group ride full of local cycling and triathlon pros.
I knew I was in over my head the moment I found myself at the front of a 50-rider pack, beginning the ascent up Left Hand Canyon toward Jamestown. But being new to group rides, I didn’t yet understand how fast I was about to be humbled.
Half a mile in — still low grade — we were pushing 20 MPH. Then, like charging cavalry, the peloton surged to 28, maybe 30 MPH, blowing by and dropping me in two seconds flat.
I didn’t even try to go with them. I put my head down and focused on breathing and RPM. Within minutes, the gap was half a mile.
One of the lead riders briefly slowed to adjust his battery. I tried to latch on — made it three minutes at threshold — until my inner voice screamed: “No way your heart holds 190 BPM for twenty more minutes.”
I was dropped again and climbed the rest solo.
Later, a friend summed it up perfectly in a group text:
“The attacks on that ride are treacherous. With the climbing in play, there’s no drafting relief. All suffer.”
It took me back.
In high school, racing cross-country for Van Townsend, I learned what it meant to spend real time in threshold, that zone just below your max, where your body floods with lactic acid and your brain starts negotiating for an exit. Your lungs can’t get enough air, your legs burn, your mind begs you to stop.
But over the last 20 years, I stayed away from real threshold — soccer & ultra-running are both hard sports, but each has more off-ramps. More forgiveness. You can ease up, reset, recover.
Competing on the bike doesn’t offer that, I’m learning.
These days, I’m trying to return to threshold more often. Back to what Van honored in naming his running club: Suffer Jet City.
Because threshold isn’t just physical. It’s psychological — the place where the mind resists, where control slips, where excuses flood in. If you want to grow — in sport or elsewhere — you have to be willing to go there. “All suffer.” “Run toward the fear.”
And in returning to threshold, I’m re-learning lessons that apply beyond the bike — especially when it comes to control.
I’m controlling by nature. I structure workouts. I work long hours before I let myself relax. I try to shape what my kids do, watch, say. I try to control outcomes — not just in sport, but in startups, in parenting, in everything.
Control is a zone of safety. It manages fear and risk — fear of being wrong, of letting go, of losing, of bonking.
But isn’t risking & letting go where so much of the reward resides?
Take the Jamestown ride: I didn’t attack because I didn’t want to lose control. I didn’t want to face next-level oxygen depletion.
But in the days that followed, I kept replaying it. What if I had gone for it?
It would’ve hurt. I probably would’ve blown up. But I would’ve known I tried — and maybe I would’ve gained something: a little more fitness, a little more confidence for next week’s velo.
Parenting has similar lessons. I can’t control my toddler’s emotions. I can’t run Saturdays entirely on my terms. The best moments with my kids come when I drop the schedule and enter their world — when I stop managing time and just play.
Startups too. Especially early stage. There’s an instinct to control the vision, the market, the roadmap, the burn, the outcome, the competition. But it’s hard to control the outcome of a game with infinite variables.
What is controllable is the quality of the work to bring the thing into reality — and whether the entrepreneur is brave enough to commit, even when the mind tells him/her not to.
“Running to him was real; the way he did it the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free.”
— John L. Parker Jr., Once a Runner