The Captain’s Log

Hey. I gots me an offer to do some more work for Dirt Rag. I suggested some really mundane ideas, including a test report on a certain Specialized Enduro SL FSR Comp. They don’t want mundane. “Limitless” is what they said. “Free-form space” was another description of the sort of thing they’re looking for from me. I’m a little freaked out. At long last I think someone is actually asking me to use a little artistic license to produce some relevant magazine content and I’m frozen out here on the double yellow line like a frickin’ deer in the headlights. What should I do? My mind has gone blank.

On one level, I’m digging the panic. It’s the first real mental challenge I’ve had since trying to come up with a name for my third child. Well, okay, and learning how to play the Pokemon card game. I know I’ve got the juice to do something really cool, but I just don’t know what it is yet. I’m excited like I used to be on Christmas Eve as a little kid.
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Here are some choice action shots from a folder I just stumbled upon recently. Yes, those are blue corduroy OP shorts. And a violet Burton Snowboards tee, flowered Vans and Bevan’s Haro Freestyle bike near Huntington Beach. It was back when the big bike show was in Long Beach and we stayed at my friend’s house in Costa Mesa. The Stumpjumper shot is from my old backyard in West Dover, VT. It was one I submitted with my first-ever feature story in Mountain Bike for the Adventure entitled “The Mechanic’s Tale: A Somewhat Truthful Recounting of the Quest for the Bull Monument.” Thought I was Chaucer, I did. And the ‘cross shot was back when any schmuck could show up and ride the nats. This one was in Nutley, NJ and I was one such schmuck. Paul Curley won. I wrote a story for VeloNews. I had 32nd place sewn up until I cramped on the last lap and had to settle for a distant 38th. See? I wasn’t always this casual. I had drive. I had spunk. I had mud in my mouth for a week.

Waaaay too many days have passed since I’ve actually swung my leg over a bike and ridden it. These things happen. Today I started over. I’m good at starting over. I wonder some times if maybe I even like it. I pulled the two semi-empty water bottles off my bike from the last assault on the Kingdom Trails, pumped up the tires, figured out how to dress for 40 degree weather and had at it. Not a big ride, but enough to get the muscle memory synapses firing again.

I have these gifted friends who seem to be able to put together years of uninterrupted riding and build on their fitness to the point where they can really cover a lot of ground in a given day. Good on them. I’m more inclined to never give up starting over. There’s about 12 pounds of me that traverses the matter/antimatter threshold in this ebb and flow of cycling fitness. It’s on this side right now. In a few weeks (I’m hoping–the annual 6-7 week onslaught of getting the school up and running is over once again) it’ll be on the antimatter side again. I love that intial rush of success you get when you’re starting over. Maybe that’s why I’m not more vigilant about sticking with it, year in and year out.
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I have a vivid imagination. However, I’ve been places my mind would never go this week. My boys had dueling cases of, shall we say, digestive distress. I’d like to get into the nitty gritty details with you here, if only to start healing my post traumatic stress, but I’ll spare you that. What comes to mind, in summing up, is Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now whispering, “The horror…The horror.”

So, not a great week for bike riding. I did manage to straighten two rear derailleur hangers and discover a busted front axle on my dorm guys’ bikes. Everything else bike related was either funny or tragic. Uncle Knobby blew through yet another cycling related career when his pseudointellectual boss, who hired him for his loquacious nature, fired him for talking too much on a tour. Hank Barlow, the originator of Mountain Bike for the Adventure magazine (which later became Mountain Bike when Rodale swallowed it up whole and spat out the adventure), has been chatting with me via email from France, where he’s been gobbling up the road riding, lo these past 13 years. It’s been fun looking back on the sport and a bunch of the characters. Hank still eschews all suspension. Just takes the fun out of riding for him.
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A series of emails today flushed out Hank Barlow, the originator of Mountain Bike for the Adventure, the original name of Mountain Bike magazine. He’s been living in France the past 13 years and says he still eschews any and all forms of suspension. Says he’d rather earn his way down the trail by improving his skills than buy his way over the rough stuff with a big travel bike.

I pretty much agree, but only because that’s the riding style to which I’ve grown so accustomed. I ride with the full-suspension crowd and we do have different styles. I’m always on the slo-mo track going up the hill, looking for interesting ways to gain altitude without putting my foot down. Back when I started riding, what mattered was riding. Or, more to the point, whether you could ride a section of trail or had to dismount and walk it. Riding down was mostly a matter of skill and large coconuts under your kilt. But, again, speed wasn’t the factor. It was all about do/not do.
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My middle child is my oldest son. He’s been wrestling with some kind of gut cootie for a few days. Last night he hurled in his bed around 3:30 a.m. Not that I knew anything about it at that time. I sleep like a dead guy. But my wife filled me in this morning.

So it’s time to bust the move for school this morning and he’s looking a wee bit wan. Not sure the lure of pizza with his third grade class atop Putney Mountain at lunch is enough to rally him, my wife says, “And today is the cross-country race at Kurn Hattin.” “Cross-country race!?” says he. “Okay, let’s go!”
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There I was, minding my own business of a Sunday afternoon when this whirlwind of braids and limbs caught me ’round the neck and shrieked my name. The little girl named Emilyn who used to live in my dorm has morphed into the young lady Emilyn who was back to visit campus for Harvest Festival. “I’m so glad I found you,” she gushed. “I’m working in a community bike shop in Santa Cruz called the Bike Church.” She went on to tell me her “partner” (I call him a boyfriend) is a cyclocross nut and that she rides about 40 miles a day. And she looks like it–tan, lean, alive. “I’ve never done anything athletic in my life,” she said. True, I remember her mostly as a hippy chic with an aptitude for physics and theoretical math. Then came the punchline: “I owe a lot of it to you for putting a wrench in my hand back then.” She told me about her friend from L.A. who used to drive everywhere. “I helped her build a bike. When I see her, the first thing she’ll say is ‘Let’s ride somewhere.’”

I’ve been going through a bad stretch of feeling like I’m not making much of a difference, other than for the oxygen I’m converting to carbon dioxide and the food processing in my intestines. Well, okay, I’m raising kids, staying married and helping quite a few of my friends keep the rubber side on the road. I mean career-wise or outside the sphere of my own little world up on this here hill in Putney. Emilyn made my day. Not only is she riding, she’s providing others with inspiration and the means to ride. Sometimes I’m just so wrong.

This friend of mine is going through a tight spot and is currently a resident in a local mental heath facility. Visiting hours are every day from 3-4 and 6-7. I motored on up there for the 6-7 slot today.

I’ve been a lot of places, but never beyond the cafeteria of a mental health hospital. So I was a little intimidated by the locked white door into the facility. I pressed the intercom button. “How can I help you?” says the little grid. I tell the grid that I’m here to see my friend. “What’s your name?” I tell the grid my name.

Silence.

Time passes.
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Sorry to double dip. But last night I was hanging with the guys in the dorm and we were discussing, among other things, the irrelevant nature of time. That somehow led to silly words such as “irregardlessly” and “misunderestimated.” Then we put the ideas together to pose one of the deeper questions facing the health insurance world. In fact, it’s probably what has derailed health care reform in this country for so long. The question is this: When does a pre-existing condition actually exist? Does it exist before it exists? Only a quantum physicist knows for sure. Perhaps better pre-planning would prevent so many pre-existing conditions. But a plan is what comes before an event. When does one pre-plan? Is that the plan before the plan? Or is it the plan? If so, why not just plan?

You probably didn’t see this next part coming. With the aforementioned discussion still reverberating in my head, I ventured through the local Dunkin Donuts drive-thru today in search of an everything bagel. I grasp the concept of the everything bagel. It has everything on it–salt, sesames, poppies, garlic, etc. So why is the bagel with nothing on it called a plain bagel? Why isn’t it the nothing bagel? Or, assuming the plain is the antecedent of the everything, why isn’t the everything bagel called the fancy bagel? Plain/fancy. Everything/nothing. Plain/Everything? Sense this does not make. Befuddled am I.

And why are pedals you clip your shoes to called clipless pedals? And why are sleeveless jerseys not called vests? Or ill-fitting tights called baggies? Maybe it’s because I live with so many foreign students, but does the English language seem a little hard to explain sometimes?

Here is my core belief with regard to riding bicycles: The world would be a much better place if everybody did it, even a little bit, every day. Can you imagine such a world? I ride my bike because I like it. But in the meantime, I don’t burn gas, my blood pressure stays in a healthy spot and I don’t need a whole lotta medication (well, okay, just a little) to keep the “black dog” of depression from nipping at my brain. Even my sister-in-law, who has no voluntary muscular function in the lower half of her body, rides her hand cycle on a regular basis–often with her daughter in tow in her Burley trailer. There are not a lot of valid reasons why this dream of mine couldn’t come true.

So what am I doing to achieve that end? I’m really not the sit-in-meetings-with-officials advocacy type. Sure, I’ve been to some of those sorts of meetings, but I don’t have the mojo to stuff envelopes, man tables, write to elected officials and all those sorts of important things that keep the byways and trails open for the rest of us. I’m more inclined to invite somebody who doesn’t ride to join me on a ride. Tattoo Dave is my latest convert. He already had a bike. I just had to show him what was possible, in this case, with trail riding. A new bike ensued, as did a whole lot of hours going over essential accessories, tools, maintainance, nutrition, pacing, singletrack skills and so forth. Now he’s dusting me like I’m riding backwards, but he’s also gotten his cousin and his uncle on bikes and plans to upgrade his wife’s bike so he can justify something even groovier for his own quiver. Oh, and he’s taken to riding my wife’s road bike to work until he can afford one of his own (she’s pretty dirt dedicated these days, so the loan is no real hardship).

I feel like I have a gift for creating beginner cyclists, turning beginners into intermediates and giving intermediates all the reasons in the world to never get better than intermediate if that’s where their comfort level is. I saw this guy last Saturday on the Kingdom Trails. He was riding with a bunch of fairly skilled guys. This guy looked fit, but I watched him picking his way down a technical section that lofted his rear wheel. Gravity is the law. He fought the law for a few moments, but the law won, and, over he went. The first sommersault looked deft enough to prevent cervical trauma, but as he started the second rotation he stopped short when his helmet hit a tree. His head was in it. The helmet–not the tree.

He was okay. Well, he was missing a tooth, but he started the day that way. (Why do I assume he’s a Canadian hockey player because he’s got a missing tooth? Gotta work on those prejudices some more.) But I’m wondering if his skills will improve enough to match his pals. Or will he stop riding? Me? I was walking the section this guy endo-ed on. Hey, I gotta work on Monday. Family of five and all that. But I’m cool with that. Dave just waits for me at the bottom and we go on our merry way. I wanted to let that guy know that you can still have big fun without requiring orthopaedic surgery on a regular basis. I wasn’t sure how to enlighten him in the moment without it sounding like a put-down.

This belief is starting to feel like a mission. It’s what’s luring me back into the temptations of bicycle service journalism and riding skills clinics–and making noise about the lack of cycling in the public school phys. ed. curricula. Anyway. If you’re a duffer like me, embrace it baby. We’re still way ahead of the 95% of the rest of the population that’s not riding. You win just by showing up. Don’t believe the hype. You don’t have to improve. Just show up.