Sunday at 172 BPM
The reason they call it “mountain biking” is because it’s one of the most efficient ways of getting deep into the mountains under your own power.
There are always moments of internal & external surprising beauty, as you struggle & crawl upward & then fly down, skipping across rocks & trails.
You can see on my handlebars, how I turned my HR monitor away from view. After seeing consistent 190’s on the climbs, I just did not want to know anymore. My HR averaged 172 BPM for a 2 hour ride, (including warm-up, down, & a few stops). My heart runs fast, like a small motor straining to power a big car.
I’ve trained & raced off-road since ’89, but have cut down drastically the past 5 years out of fear that injuries would impact my speedskating goals. But these days I am less worried about injury than about missing “the joy of singletrack.”
Or of missing views like this. That small dot far off on the trail is a fellow cyclist.
But after this ride the thing I am musing about is something I saw riding an old bike path to the trails.
The sheer effort and determination of this tree, to force and crack through this cap of asphalt, impressed the heck out of me.
Speedskating is a sport of incremental improvement. Year after year, you get a bit lower, a bit stronger, more precise by degrees, not leaps & bounds. Barriers to performance & hard caps of what you think is possible can be broken through, if you try very hard for a very long time.
However, the world can be cruel, can be random. This would be a better picture & metaphor if the tree was thriving, instead of having been reduced to a sawn-off stump.
But as a seed, it fell in an inhospitable, difficult place, and made a fantastic run of it.
Filed under: from the coffee shop
Great shot, great metaphor. In fact, I think it is a BETTER, and perhaps the BEST metaphor, with the tree dead AND sawed off!!! What came first? The sawing then the death, or, the death then the sawing? Who cares!?! It doesn’t matter… Most if not all skaters I think would feel that their careers end up dead and sawed off, even the best of the best, and even the ones that live life in the good graces of their NGB. It’s a testimony to the nature of the sport, and I have a feeling most wouldn’t have it any other way. Thanks for the post.
I agree with Speedy. With the sawed-off stump, we get a little slice of reality to remind us that even the toughest of specimens can come to an unhappy ending.
Who knows how the best skaters feel? What is it like to reach one’s full potential? I know what it’s like, not only to be sawed off before my time by my NGB, but to add insult to injury — to be DENIED, OUT OF SPITE, the women’s 10K track record at the facility I no longer call my own home ice - by some goon hockey arena Zamboni driver who is technically unqualified to hold the position of general manager.
The moral of the story? Only give a chainsaw to those who know where to cut. I’d like to cut me off some subsidized incompetence!
I relate a quick George Carlin quote:
“I Love seeing grass coming up through cracks in the pavement. It’s so Heroic.”
It is even more interesting to think about how the old bike path seems to have faced the same fate as the tree.
Okay, without doubt that pathway is a challenge even for the 4×100’s. Was this in PC?
That withered stretch of asphalt sadly enough reflects the state of inline pathways most everywhere….
Let’s save our Pathways and Trees!!
skatenow
for the salt lake city-ites, this bit O path is a connection between 11th avenue and the beginning of the dry creek trailhead, next to some houses…
it is a very small path & pretty much straight up & down, and would be certain death on inlines, even when it was new.. (I needed my ATB low gear of 29-32 to climb it)
Hey my head is getting hot from all this thinking. I love the free look back at the city without the burn thank you man. I wonder what history would be different if mountain bikes were invented 300 years ago?
I see the splintering effects of the us short track team along with the dying marketing potential of this misplaced misguided sport. In the end all is dying to make way for video games and !!skiers!! Caleb the skier!!