Even after being alive for nearly fifty years, somehow I haven’t come around to the realization that I don’t have super powers. I’ve read and watched a lot of super hero stories, and—because I’m an idiot—I’m still waiting around for my super hero powers to show themselves. In the Marvel Mutant Universe, mutants get their powers at birth, in childhood or during adolescence, but my teenaged years passed by unceremoniously, in the super powers sense, unless you count a squeaky voice and sprouts of body hair as super powers—so I wait. I bide my time, polishing up my origin story (every super hero has an origin story, whether it’s being bitten by a radioactive spider or being shot to Earth as a Krpytonian refugee, you need to have a good story about how you got to be super); but so far—no powers to speak of.

So I do the next best thing, I try to grind my mind and body to a pliable paste in order to race bikes every once in a while. And it’s during bike races that my failure to understand that I don’t have super powers really gets me in trouble. I attempt to do things that are really out of the realm of my possibilities. I try to break away. I try to jump across to breaks. I show up to race. These are all things I really shouldn’t be trying to accomplish without the assistance of proper super powers. Yet I persist. I squeeze myself into Spandex (as all self-respecting super heroes are prone to do), and I jump out of the phone booth (yes, I know there aren’t any phone booths anymore—I am old) ready to battle the forces of the category three universe.

I can do this because I’ve honed and developed one of the most valuable auxiliary super powers a bike racer can possess—delusion. I’ve deluded myself into believing that if I go out and ride my bike at a painful level of effort for specified durations of time, my body will magically transform into an organic engine capable of dashing the hopes of all my enemies. I’ve deluded myself into thinking that I can mix and match the perfect combination of parts and components into a machine that will transport me to mightiness. I’ve deluded myself into the conceit that the world needs to see my middle-aged backside shoved into Lycra. But this delusional effort takes its toll. A person can be swept away by the obsession and mania that maintain the delusional lifestyle that’s required to be a mighty bike racer. One can become addicted to the compiling of miles and hours on the bike, one can become obsessed with every morsel of food that one eats or doesn’t eat and, saddest of all, one can be tempted to the dark and joyless world of the darkest of cycling disciplines—the time trial.

As the guy from Gidget told the guy from Pleasantville, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Delusion is a powerful drug, it can lead some to ruin, it can lead some to do ungodly things to their hair and run for president or it can lead some to the desperate act of attaching aero bars to their bike. So far I have resisted the delusional temptation to pedal alone while dressed as a male gamete, but should that day come, check my ass for bites from the radioactive delusion spider.