The Camel’s Heart:  From Fitness to Death in the Adirondacks.  By Jack Papa (Mayfield, NY: Trillian’s Web, 521 pp., $19.95 paperback).
Reviewed by Michael Bauman

         Much like the authors who write them, good cycling books are multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, and multi-functional.  They do many things at once.  Jack Papa’s The Camel’s Heart:  From Fitness to Death in the Adirondacks is precisely that sort of book -– a cycling memoir, a primer on ultra-marathon race promotion, and a veritable handbook on team building and friendship.
         As a cycling memoir, Papa’s volume traces his evolution from an overweight and somewhat lethargic chain smoker into a lean, focused, high-mileage ultra-marathon bike racer.  The tale of that evolution, told in sometimes staggering detail, is both instructive and encouraging.  It delineates Papa’s year-round training regimen, which included cross-country skiing in the winter (and the common and continuing struggle to remain consistent on the indoor trainer) and his ever-growing, warm-weather love affair with the bike, often expressed in one- and two-hundred mile interludes.
         Put differently, this volume is a keeper of the UMCA institutional memory, especially in the way it preserves the history of east coast ultra racing in its fledgling years, even before the enormous success of great events like B-M-B.  The cast of characters in this tale of memory is varied and endlessly interesting, from the resiliency and natural talent of Frank Ripple to the power and single-mindedness of Mara Bovsun, and to the legendary geniality and expertise of Lon Haldeman and Susan Notorangelo.  In these pages we meet them all, including John Marino, Al Muldoon, Mike Shermer, John Howard, and Pete Penseyres, to name but those who come readily to mind.  Quickly indeed do Papa’s heroes and friends become our own, and the experience is genuinely enriching.  Reading these pages makes one a member of Team Johnstown, in spirit if not in fact.
         If this sounds a little dreamlike, then perhaps it is.  But that is not the good news, for dreams sometimes keep the company of nightmares, by which this volume is haunted.  Papa was the director of RAAM Open East, a challenging RAAM qualifier that saw in just one fateful hour not one, not two, but three deaths -- a driver and two cyclists –- two in one accident and the third in another.  Perhaps in order to help exorcise his own demons, or perhaps in order to help prevent such a tragedy ever from occurring again, Papa unfolds the details of this awful event in all their gruesome sadness.  To read this story is deeply painful.  One can only faintly imagine how difficult it must have been to live though it, as Papa did.
         The great horrors of human existence are also the occasions for greatness, and this tragedy was the stage upon which was displayed the heroism, compassion, tenacity, and honor of all those who shouldered this ugly and onerous burden.   But occasions for heroism are also occasions for cowardice and indulgent self-interest, which Papa’s tale recounts as well.   The juxtaposition of these varied responses is a memorable lesson in moral enlightenment, not simply event management.
         No book is perfect, of course, and this volume has its flaws.  At least half the art of storytelling is knowing what to leave out.  This large volume seems to leave out very little.  It could have benefited from the careful scrutiny of a ruthless editor.  But then, so could nearly every book.
         In short, this work delivers what its subtitle promises -– both the joy and triumph of high-level fitness, on the one hand, and the inevitable fragility and tragedy of life in a fallen world, on the other.

date modified:
5 July 2006