Smoketown’s potholed alleys are covered in ice and snow. By early afternoon it’s still below freezing, but Trellis Brewing’s parking lot is stuffed with stickered and bike-racked Outbacks and Tacomas and CX-5s. I blow into my hands and queue with 70 other cyclists memorializing the life of Alex Pretti, a Minneapolis mountain biker and ICU nurse killed by ICE agents on January 24, 2026.
The low, slate clouds over downtown Louisville spit wet snow on our helmets, mittened hands, and neoprene toe covers. We read out loud the signs we see on the backs of our contingent—“Chinga La Migra,” “ICE OUT NOW,” “Enough.” We wave to walkers who yell support, to drivers who honk in solidarity.
Alex Pretti rode bikes and died being a good neighbor. He was shot because he stood out, because he got in the way, because he challenged power. We pedal in remembrance, on big bikes and small ones, expensive bikes and cheap ones, joining 250 other rides around the world.
We roll out and face a driver who screams, honks her horn, flips us off with both hands, and charges into the group, braking her beat-up Nissan Altima two feet from a rider’s bent knee. Most of us shrug, because most of us are used to angry drivers. Most of us are used to anger.
At Tuesday Night Worlds, Lexington’s hardest group training ride, we get buzzed by trucks and muscle cars on Bryan Station Road. We’re doing 30 m.p.h. on our 20-pound bikes in our silly suits, and they’re passing within a couple feet at 50 or 60 m.p.h. in one- or two-ton vehicles, just flirting with some casual manslaughter. Lifted pickups slam brakes in front of us. Drivers use slurs as they throw what’s left of their daily Big Gulp out the window. These are good Americans who spray diesel exhaust and proudly display from their truck beds American and Confederate flags, whipping the wind.
We pedal hard, keep the bikes rubber side down, use our dumb heavy legs to make enough power to keep ourselves safe. Functional threshold power, FTP, is the magic number that tells us how much force, in watts, we can apply to the pedals in an hour. Our bike computers scoop up data on every ride, so we can compare ourselves to others.
It’s too cold to ride outside in the winter, so I sit on my indoor trainer, slurp green apple energy gels. I watch YouTube and Love is Blind and listen to Norwegian black metal when the plan calls for long, droning intervals. On these short, dark days the only power that matters is in the contact points. My stiff cycling shoes clipped into pedals, the torque of the sprint, the watts I can hold for 30 seconds or 5 minutes or an hour.
I’ve been forcing myself to spend more and more time at my threshold limit. Getting used to the pain as the minutes and miles pile up, working through the searing burn of lactic acid in my legs. Building tolerance. My FTP should improve, a new magic number bigger than the last. But I won’t know until I test myself.
I hate FTP tests. You mash the pedals for 20 minutes near and beyond your limit. But you pace yourself, too. FTP is an average of the effort you can hold over those 20 minutes of pain.
You grind. You ride at your current threshold for a few minutes and then you add more watts, a frog in a pot, a little more, 30 seconds at a little more, just one more minute at a little more. These efforts pile up and push back. You take belly breaths and drop your shoulders and make chicken arms. Your heart rate drifts, pumping harder each minute because it’s been pumping hard each minute. You doubt yourself. Your arms and back tense, you’re gripping too hard, fighting with muscles you shouldn’t be using. You tell yourself whatever you need to hear. You unclip and lie on the floor and wait for your hot thumping heart to hush.
How much more force can I tolerate?
Alex Pretti made himself big, tried to help. I hide at home, in the drops, curled like a question mark over my trainer. When the weather warms, I’ll roll Bluegrass tarmac, away from the city, alone.
Brian McNely teaches at the University of Kentucky and races bikes. His work has appeared in Off Assignment, Bending Genres, Invisible City, Porridge, and in academic journals such as Philosophy & Rhetoric. IG: @bmcnely
 | A guest post by
|
An amazing tribute to this good man who will help us not to forget. Thank you.
Brian, you have a great sense of words that are clipped, concise and precise. Thanks for exposing me to something I know nothing about. I felt right with you as you were pushing for more. I felt like that when I was working crazy amounts. Always a little more. I wasn't aiming for the good cause you are, though. Keep at it, man! Great stuff!