Passion - By Charlie

There is no better way to render something meaningless than to have it repeated ad nauseum. Perhaps there was a time when that Eminem song from 8-mile got you pumped up and ready to “slay,” but now you’ve heard it so many times it has little more effect on your adrenaline than Coldplay’s latest. Or, try, if you can, to remember the last time you heard somebody do a Napoleon Dynamite impression. It was probably around spring of 2006, and ask yourself this: Have you seen that person since that night? Has anyone? Think about it. Or, very simply, just repeat your name over and over. How long, you think, before it stops sounding like a word?

Perhaps this is why I’ve been able to walk past our in-store official Breakaway coaching plan signs nearly every day for the past 18 months without really thinking about what they say. But for whatever reason—perhaps it was the uncaffeinated nature of my mind coupled with heavy legs and the surreal calm and almost relief I feel as I approach the imminent apogee of my season over the next 10 days, the culmination of 10 straight months of dedicated training and racing boiling down to a few key moments—I noticed something on those signs, a phrase I’d spoken, read, and written, often by mere mechanical, unthinking rote, hundreds of times before:

“Breakaway: Where passion meets performance.”

For me, on this day, I experienced something reading that sign that I have really only ever experienced with fine art. Of course, I’m not saying one sentence is on par with The Great Gatsby or the Guernica, or anything remotely on that level. But upon returning to this phrase I have been able to rediscover its meaning. What re-dawned on me is that this phrase is more than just a trite shibboleth to be tossed around at marketing meetings and field tested for reactions amongst various demographics. It is a mission statement. It is a statement of pride. It is something we take very, very seriously.
Passion: Each of my coworkers exercises their role at the shop with a passion that quite frankly astounds me sometimes. It certainly can manifest itself in some goofy ways. When I hear Phil’s overexcited gasps when someone brings in a 1996 Indy Fab titanium hardtail with campy hubs, or watch Todd practically sprint to hold the door open for someone, I realize it’s nothing other than passion that could motivate these actions—passion about the bikes and people that come into our store.

Performance: Etymologically, ‘performance’ has its roots in an old French word meaning to carry out a promise. The promise we make is our other slogan: “We care for your equipment and your health.” In certain ribald circles I’ve been known to run in when not on a bike, viz., philosophy graduate departments, ‘care’ is a very important term. Existence itself, the question of being itself (rather than various beings in the world), just is care. In other words, our attention is always directed at something that concerns us, something we “attend to,” something we care for.

And so when you combine our slogans, you have something rather more profound than you’d expect. Put in rather overwrought terms, you have, “At Breakaway, we promise to direct our conscious attention to your health and your equipment, and we make good on that promise.” But basically what that boils down to is that the source of our passion (from the Greek pathos intense emotion or feeling) is you: your equipment, your health, the things that matter most to you. Maybe I’m alone in thinking this, but I don’t get that a lot of places. I’ve gone to several stores where it’s not me they’re interested in, but what they can get from me. The focus of the care there was their own well-being. I’d wager you’ve felt the same way, far more often than you’d like.

My boss at Breakaway has likened the store to a home. The staff is our family and our customers are our welcome guests into our home. We are proud of the many services we offer, and we want each and every person that comes into our home to be treated with the passionate care they’d expect as guests in someone’s home. Sure, it’s a home where they’ll downright torture your legs in order to whip you into shape sometimes, but hey, didn’t this country dismiss the Geneva conventions as quaint back in 2003?