Lie to your girlfriend, lie to your wife, lie to to your brother or sister.  Lie to your mother, lie to your boss, lie to your co-workers.  When the truth is discovered, you feign empty emotions of contrition, act ignorant, make up excuses.

You can pick your nose and you can pick your friends but you can’t pick your family; i.e., your family has to accept you, there is no choice.

Your training peloton is not your family.  Like a family, your training peloton did not PICK you, although, it does have the option to banish you in order to maintain its sublimity.  You discovered the rapturous essence of the peloton; you begged & pleaded; you demonstrated your best behavior and after a period of initiation and serious doubt, the peloton ALLOW(ed) you to become an insignificant cog in its glorious existence.

The adage “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission” is a meaningless and empty expression when it comes to secret training and your relationship with the peloton.

Secret training is tantamount to being traitorous; it makes you a faithless perfidious recreant, an undutiful worm. The peloton tolerates many forms of indiscretion from its ranks but secret training is cause for exile.  The putrid syllables of your name never uttered again.  It’s an exile that’s equivalent to execution for lack of honor.

Adieu Animaux!

Painting: Manet’s Execution of  Maximilian (1867)