Larry M. Coleman

Day’s word count: 3753

Total word count: 31,684

Writing location: home

Work: off

Exercise: none

Notes

Came up with the title: Beyond Category. Finally!

All my titles have two words and have a connection to the book that is strengthened as you read. This one is a cycling term that I hope also stands out on its own even if you don’t know cycling terminology. You don’t need to, because I let Richard explain it in a scene when he’s reminiscing about the woman who was “the one who got away.”

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Ilsa brought darkness to my life through an excess of light, like when you see a sunset so beautiful you can’t help but sit there transfixed as you watch the sky change. You hope the sunglasses you always wear will protect you just as you know they won’t, and for that sight on that evening, you hope they don’t. So when it’s over and gone—gone forever because there’s no way to rewind a sunset, no way to take one back—you have a large black spot directly in the center of your vision and for a long time after it’s gone, in order to look at anything you have to look away from it so it can only show up in your side vision.

Climbs in the Tour de France are graded the opposite way burn units grade theirs. There are four categories: 4, 3, 2, and 1. Fours and threes aren’t easy, but at a pro level, they’re warm ups. Twos are harder speed bumps, and the sadists who lay out the courses often like to chain them, taking a bit and a bite out of the legs instead of eating the whole drumstick at once. They’re the wolves of the tour: something to be a little wary of by themselves, but they’re dangerous once they start coming at you in numbers. The category one climbs are the ones that tell you that you’re going to have to earn your pay check today. They’re the difference between being on a hard club ride and riding for a Racing Club.

But there’s another category, and it’s one that’s not a category. Ones that weren’t included in the original categorization scheme because when it was put together, they would have been too cruel to do, and it was logically (and mercifully) assumed that no sane human would try them on a bike… they were considered too hard for even cars to make it through. These are called hors catégorie: beyond category.

These are the climbs that careers are made on. The three weeks of the Tour de France can often come down to one day on one of these climbs: show up prepared or lucky or (most likely) both, and you can make your entire life afterward. Let the opportunity go and lose that day, and you can lose more than that. You can go from holding the yellow jersey to holding a handkerchief. Even if you try to make up the time, everyone else is killing themselves just as hard, and the best you can do is to hope to end up a memory. Most likely, you won’t, because people only remember who won, not who almost won.

Ilsa was beyond category. She didn’t fit into the category of women I’d been with for years, the ones who were fun training rides in the park, maybe a few category fours here and there, with a couple of threes in there whose names I also can’t remember. Every rider remembers the names of the hors catégories: the Galibier; the Col de la Loze, whose name is as pretty as its climb is ugly; the Alpe d’Huez; the Tourmalet, whose name is close to torment; the Col d’Izoard, which has a small cycling museum at the top, as well as a memorial, in case you die once you get up there.

And now there was Elisabeth, Lise, Ilsa… whose name I remember three times.