The 12 Steps for Pro-cycling FanGirls

Tibetan Prayer Flags (from http://www.fourgates.com)

We, fangirls of procycling:

1.  admit we are powerless over men in lycra who ride bikes for a living.

2.  came to believe a force outside of cycling could transform the first words out of our mouths in the morning or as we go to sleep into something other than Jack, Andy, Thomas, Taylor, Vincenzo, Ryan, Ryder, Christian, Mark, Bernie, George, Dylan, Denis, Ivan, and/or ___ (fill in the blank).

3.  made a decision to turn our waking hours over to the activities of most normal people: sleeping, paying attention to significant others, and reading something without the word bike in the text.

4.  made a searching and fearless moral inventory of all that we forgot to do, the times we were late to work or meet friends, and the housework and dust bunnies we ignored because of the hours we spend watching races in person or via electronic device, noodling on Twitter, and dreaming of the faces and legs and maybe sometimes other body parts of our favorite men in lycra.

5.  admitted to ourselves, a higher power, and to another human being how often we seethe with jealousy over a rider’s reply to another woman’s tweet and how long the sweet feeling of a reply by a man in lycra to one of our tweets lingers, and how cranky we become dieting before a race we’ll attend in person.

6.  are entirely ready to have a (higher power, boyfriend, husband, non-cycling girlfriend) limit us to one cycling magazine a month (titles can rotate) and 30 minutes a day on Twitter, and put an end to plans to move to Boulder, all so we can convert the time we’ll save to actually riding our bikes.

7.  humbly asked a higher power, the Universe, or a member in good standing of the Barbie Doll Collector’s Club to remove our shortcomings.

8.  made a list of all those we had harmed by our addiction to men in lycra, and became willing to make amends to them all. This list could include friends and co-workers who are not cycling fans (well, maybe just co-workers, because, really, do we still have any non-cycling fan friends?) and found us unreliable as we navigated July as sleepless zombies, spectators we have trampled to grab a tossed water bottle or score another autograph, female pro-cyclists, and / or neglected partners and family members (this includes pets).

9.  made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. For co-workers and family this could mean forgoing live am coverage of TDF mountain stages and viewing only evening coverage in 2012. OK, stop shaking. Maybe proffering croissants would suffice? Date night on grand tour rest days? Posters of loved ones pasted over one third of cubicle walls that now wear Leopards?

10.  continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. Perhaps by a prayerful reflection before the start of each bike race we watch, or ranking ourselves between 1 to 10 on the Fangirl obsession wheel.

11.  sought through prayer and meditation to improve conscious contact with our non-pro-cycling selves – rediscovering hobbies and people that have brought us joy, as well as dedicating ourselves to encouraging and cheering on cyclists whom we know, including ourselves, as vehemently as we have those now slightly more distant men in lycra.

12.  having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others by establishing Pro-cycling Fangirl Recovery Groups (PFRGs) in our neighborhoods and distributing copies of these Steps to Fangirls who are the first to arrive at a team bus pre-race. We pledge to practice these principles in all of our affairs whenever we obsess, all the while remembering how special we are, with or without men in lycra.

Now, how will you carry out these 12 Steps?

yellow swallowtail butterfly