Last month, I was still employed, and then I wasn’t.
That’s the only way I know how to say it. My badge still worked. I had a laptop, a calendar, a title in the directory. And the emails slowed, then mostly stopped, and the meetings I’d video into went ahead without me. I sat there with all my gear on, watching a race I was technically still in, and it was scary!
I’ve been in that exact place before, just standing instead of sitting. You’re at the track, warmed up, legs good, and you find out you’re not in the heat. You’re still in your kit. You’re still holding your bike. You just don’t have anywhere to go with any of it.
Nobody was being cruel. That’s genuinely what a transition month is. It’s just a strange thing to live through, and I don’t think anyone warns you how strange it is, so I’m writing about it.
My last day started just like the days before: I woke up at 5:30 am, grabbed a cup of coffee, and took the dogs out. With two sips left, the thought hit me: today was the day, and then it was over. Last email sent, goodbyes said one last time, and the computer packed. Each of us will experience this day differently, so here’s what actually got to me. Not fear of how I will make money. Not fear of how I will get a new job.
It was that, for ten years, I had other wheels around me.
That’s what a team is. You take your pull, you swing up, you drop back, you recover, somebody else is in the wind while you do. You know exactly when your turn is coming because there’s an order, and the order exists because somebody looked at what each of you is good at and built it that way. Even the hard part is shared. Especially the hard part.
And then you’re out there, and it’s just you, and every bit of the wind is yours.
I want to be careful here, because “scary” gets used loosely and I mean it plainly. It’s scary. Not thrilling-scary, not a growth opportunity — the real kind, where you’re pretty sure everyone can see you not knowing what you’re doing. I’d been telling people for years that I’d love to work for myself someday. Turns out saying that with a paycheck behind you and doing it with nothing behind you are two different sports.
The other thing that shows up, and it shows up fast, is: it’s me.
I know that voice well. This isn’t my first cut. I’ve missed teams before — selection I trained for and didn’t get, races I didn’t make the roster for. Every single time, the first story my brain reached for was that I wasn’t good enough, and it reached for it before I had a single fact.
Here’s what twenty-some years of that has actually taught me. Sometimes it is you, and that’s useful, because then you go fix it. Usually it’s the field, or the timing, or a coach building for something you’re not built for. And the two feel identical from inside. There’s no clean way to tell them apart in the moment.
So you don’t get certainty. What you get is a record. I’ve been cut, and I’ve also made teams — including ones people told me I had no business trying for. Both of those are in my history. If getting cut proved something about me, then making it has to prove something, too, and I don’t get to count only the losses.
That’s not a pep talk. It’s just arithmetic.
Here’s the part I most want you to hear, and it took me until about week two to believe it myself. That was last week. This post is a little late, but I needed some downtime, and that’s okay because I’m not starting over…
This was your start.
Now, with a 2-year gap, during which you learned a few things.
So Nope! You are not starting over…
Starting over would mean showing up without a base. Not knowing how to hold a wheel, or how to hurt for four minutes on purpose, or what your legs do when the effort goes long. That is not your situation. You’ve been racing this entire time. Every year you spent doing the unglamorous work, every problem you solved that nobody clapped for, every skill you built while somebody else’s logo was on your jersey — all of that is yours. It doesn’t get returned with the laptop.
The thing you lost was the shelter. Not the fitness.
And I’ll be honest that the shelter was worth more than I ever bothered to calculate. Doors opened before I knocked. The invite got accepted because of the logo. When I said “we’re looking into this,” the “we” carried more weight than I ever intended. All real. All gone. But none of that was ever the part that made me good, and knowing the difference is most of the work right now.
There’s a mechanical version of this, and I’ll keep it short, because it’s true and because it helped me.
When you come off a wheel and hit the wind, your effort spikes just to hold the speed you already had. Riders feel that spike and read it as proof they went too early. Some of them tuck back in. What’s actually happening is that you’re now paying full price for something you were getting at a discount, at exactly the same speed, with exactly the same legs.
It gets harder. You don’t get worse. Those look the same on the inside, but they are not the same thing.
Two weeks out, and I don’t know how this ends. I’m in it. Legs burning, no wheel to sit on, doing math on how long I can hold this.
But I’ve held the line before. I’ve put in the work. I’ve won the race, and so have you.
Keep going.
— Lyndze