The Chainless Victory
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The Chainless Victory — A Mug’s Long Memory (Extended Edition)
I’ve been with Gary Crum long enough to learn the language of small sounds— the hiss of a kettle when it’s almost done, the click of a freehub spun idly by hand, the soft clink of a spoon against my rim when he’s thinking hard and needs the taste of coffee to finish the thought.
I’m a mug—ceramic, a little chipped, saved from a dorm dumpster on a windy afternoon—and I’ve spent years stationed on a desk in a cramped apartment that looks less like a home and more like a museum of bicycles and the parts they shed.
Frames lean against every wall like sleeping greyhounds. Wheels hang from the ceiling like metallic fruit. Boxes labeled “Bar Ends, Maybe?” or “Random Spacers That Will Somehow Be Exactly the Right Size” permanently occupy the kitchenette table. Chain-lube scent blends with roasted coffee and the mineral smell of wet tires after a ride. This is where I live. This is where I listen.
I wasn’t physically present for most of the stories I’m about to tell you, but I’ve heard them in pieces—secondhand—while Gary rebuilt a derailleur on a towel or tapped at his keyboard sketching satellite trajectories for NASA. If a mug can have a memory, mine is a scrapbook made from overheard sentences and the foam rings he leaves on my surface.
The Fifth-Grade Escape (for Science)
Gary grew up in a rural town with one flashing light, three churches, and a feed store that doubled as a gossip hub. On summer nights the air smelled like alfalfa and warm dust.
In fifth grade he and his best friend, Harold, decided to skip school for a science project— not the usual trifold-board variety, but the kind that takes all day in a garage and gets your hands dirty.
They “borrowed” bricks and boards from behind the shed, dragged a length of clothesline from the laundry room, and set to work. Gary had just devoured a tattered library book on simple machines and couldn’t stop talking about levers, pulleys, and inclined planes.
He balanced a rusted hammer on a brick to make a lever and used it to hoist a lawnmower wheel that two days earlier had squashed Harold’s toe.
He strung the clothesline between two sawhorses, used a skate wheel and coat hanger to make a pulley, and lifted buckets of gravel like tiny dockworkers.
“See?” Gary said, pushing his glasses up with the back of one greasy hand. “You trade distance for effort. Pull farther, it feels lighter. That’s physics.”
Harold squinted, then grinned. “That’s magic.”
By afternoon they’d built a skateboard ramp out of a cinder block and splintered plywood. Harold was the test pilot. He wobbled down, launched off the end, landed upright, and shouted something a teacher would have given detention for.
They spent the rest of the day adjusting the ramp by inches, learning how tiny changes made the difference between “sketchy” and “sendy.”
Gary forgot plenty of history dates over the years. But he never forgot that Tuesday— the day he learned that understanding motion meant you could bend the world, just a little, into doing what you needed.
The Strawberry Summer
Fast-forward to middle school: Gary’s love for racing had outgrown the creaky fork on his hand-me-down bike. He’d seen pictures of the MRP Ribbon with ramp control— a fork that didn’t just cushion but read the trail and let you tune the ending. The price might as well have been Everest.
So that summer he convinced Harold to pick strawberries with him. At 5:30 every morning in June, while classmates slept, Gary and Harold were out in the fields. Bend, pick, drop into the flats. Dew soaked through their shoes. The sun burned crescents into the backs of their necks. Their fingers stained red, as if the berries demanded a pact in blood.
Harold worked beside him with his own motivation: he wanted to buy a brand-new Zune— a music player he was convinced would be the next great invention. Gary still laughs about it years later.
“The field taught me cadence,” he told me once while pouring coffee. “It’s just like climbing—rush and you fumble, hesitate and you stall. Find a rhythm you can hold for hours and the day moves under you.”
By month’s end Gary had the money for the fork, Harold had enough for his Zune. Gary brought the fork home like a newborn, laid a clean towel on the table, read the instructions twice, and installed it with reverence.
The first ride, he said, felt like cheating. Roots became anecdotes. Rocks became rumors. Two weeks later at the regional enduro, he crossed the line first. The local paper printed a photo of him grinning through dust under the headline: EARLY MORNINGS PAY OFF.
The Apartment with the Orbits
I entered the story years later, when someone tossed me in a dorm trash bin. Gary pulled me out, saw my chipped rim, and decided I deserved another orbit of usefulness. Two washes later I was on his desk, earning my keep.
The apartment was small, crowded with science projects, whiteboards of equations, and the restless energy of a young man building satellites by day and bikes by night. He talked to me like I could answer, which I can’t (I’m a mug). But if I could, I’d have said: keep going.
On the wall above the desk, he taped a photo from the enduro. Next to it, a course map from an alpine track, folded and refolded until the paper learned his pocket’s shape. He tuned his suspension by feel, then by data, then by feel again.
Sometimes he’d flick my rim with a fingernail—ceramic ringing in the silence— and announce some breakthrough to the room: “Rebound’s a touch fast. Two clicks slower and the front stops pogoing off square edges.”
He didn’t ask if the forks were happy. He asked if the bike was truthful under him.
The Ritual No One Believes
The night before a race, Gary eats peach ice cream with whipped cream and— a dash of avocado. It started in high school because that’s what was in the freezer. Superstition hardened into ritual. He’s a scientist. He knows it’s silly. He does it anyway.
You can graph rocket trajectories all day and still believe in the luck of a green smear on dessert.
The Alps (Via Television)
When the World Cup downhill came calling, I didn’t get a plane ticket. Instead, I got a place of honor on the kitchen counter, angled toward the television. I was rinsed clean, set proudly where I could see it all.
The course was brutal: Scree Garden, Needle’s Eye, Switchback Alley, and the final straight they just called The Drop. He called before the start: “Peaches, whipped cream, avocado. The trinity. Don’t judge me.”
Calm, he said. And calm with him didn’t mean sleepy— it meant steady hands, wide vision, rhythm in the body.
The Chainless Run
The gate beeped. He hammered five pedal strokes. Then—the sound every rider dreads. A dry, flat pop. The chain snapped useless. The commentators exhaled: “Crum’s race is over.”
But momentum is a kind of stubbornness, and Gary is good at both. He pumped every corner, carved Scree Garden into arcs, sailed Needle’s Eye without pedaling, and danced Switchback Alley like a song.
Each split flashed green. The crowd roared, cowbells clanged, air horns bleated. A child’s voice rang out: “He’s doing it with no chain!”
The final straight should have been glue. He folded smaller, chin low, every molecule aimed forward. He crossed the line first. Chainless.
I sat cooling on the counter, empty but proud. If mugs could grin, I’d have risked a spill.
Lessons (From a Mug Who Can’t Pedal)
People call it luck. Gary shrugs. He says: “After the chain, it’s just physics and not panicking.” But I know better.
It was fifth-grade levers. It was strawberry cadence. It was Harold’s stubborn Zune. It was reading the manual twice. It was trusting feel, confirming with data, trusting feel again. It was treating gravity not as enemy but as partner.
I’m a mug. I know second acts. I was trash, and then I wasn’t. Chips don’t stop you from holding what you’re meant to hold.
The Toast
The next morning he poured coffee into me, stood by the window, and raised me in a private salute. “To chainless victories,” he said. “And to the mug who got to watch.”
I’ll keep the ring from that sip as long as ceramic can hold a stain. Sometimes no chain doesn’t mean no chance.
Harold’s Visit
Later that morning, Harold showed up at the apartment—older now, but with the same wide grin Gary had known since fifth grade. He’d heard the news, seen the replay, and couldn’t resist a toast of his own.
Gary poured him coffee into another chipped mug—a plain blue one that had been sitting lonely at the back of the cupboard. For the first time, I had company. A fellow mug, equally imperfect, equally willing to hold what mattered.
The two of them clinked mugs, laughing at strawberry fields, ramps in garages, and broken chains that turned into victories. And for me? I met a friend. A chipped blue mug who, like me, knew that second acts are real.