I’ve got a little bit of a complicated relationship with my bike. For five or six years, all I wanted to do was to ride, and to ride as fast as I could. I passed on dinners with friends to spend time on the stationary bike, got most of my calories from weird powders and gels, and pretty much every time I rode it was at an uncomfortable pace.
At the time, or for most of the time, I loved it. There was never any danger of doing it for a living, but I got good enough to travel to big races and to start with the guys who do do it for a living. The hard work really was fun.
After a year or so of bad results and burnout, though, I got tired and disillusioned. My expectations soared while my results stagnated. After a bad season I quit racing, and then I quit riding. I told myself that it wasn’t so much that I stopped loving to ride bikes – I just needed to see other people for a while.
See, when I moved to Montana I was way into climbing on rocks. And ice. And trail running. And backpacking. And hunting. And you get the idea. After a season or two of racing, though, it was all I thought about. After racing lost some of its luster, I went looking for some of the things that I lost.
Backcountry skiing moved to the forefront and got me back in the alpine, and I even took up running-when-not-chased. Riding bikes moved to the background, and while racing is still very much a part of my life, I didn’t even own a mountain bike for a few years (which is my circles was akin to sacrilege).
And then I bought one again. It’s not light, or particularly speedy. It’s not much for racing. It’s a big squishy thing that’s made for long days and backcountry trails, or, more simply, for fun.
I’ve been riding it a lot, and being back on the bike is like meeting an old friend in a new place, or hooking up with an ex. It’s simultaneously familiar and new. It’s exhilarating. It’s fun, and it’s reminded me why I spent so much time riding in circles in the first place.
Riding without tracking my power profile is great. I don’t ride with a watch, or keep track of how far I ride. If I don’t feel like going I don’t go. Sometimes I try hard and sometimes I just screw around, but every time I get out it’s fun. And now that I’m back on the bike, I’m starting to remember what motivated me to train so much a decade ago.
Through freezing, rainy training rides and mind numbing hours on the rollers; through long drives to races I didn’t finish; through an identity that was caught up in unrealistic expectations, racing for me was rooted in fun. And now that the expectations are gone and the fun is back, I wonder if it would be so bad to pin on a number again.
So go hit a jump (or don’t, whatever), or have some beers and get sunburned on the river, or call in sick and spend all day smoking ribs on a Tuesday. Take a little time to have fun.
