Why Biking Secretly Stinks

Let me tell you why biking secretly stinks…

I have an adorable fat cat, a house, a husband, two hilarious children, a cool job, a pretty white Diamondback 29er, and 60 minutes of free time in the middle of my day that I can use for whatever I want. (I have other stuff too, it’s just not really worth mentioning right now.) Some people call those 60 minutes a lunch break. I call it ME time. And the rest of the 1380 minutes of my day I  spend doing my cool job, going home to my house,  kissing my smelly kids, (sometimes I literally can’t even tell what color shirt they wore to camp that day they are so dirty. But I’m ok with it…) I pat my fat cat on her fluffy fat belly, feed my husband, (who is not fat, but eats wayyy more than my fat cat.) and live my life. 

Last week I took one ME hour shopping at JC Penny and found 3 cute tops that were all on sale, one ME hour at the gym, sweating, and gasping, and regretting (ok maybe not TOTALLY regretting) every minute, one ME hour paying the Cable and Power bills and two separate ME hours on the Hill behind our office on a bike. People call it “M Hill” because it has a giant M on it. I’m not convinced that’s the real name, but the experience is real. The dirt and rocks and plants and thrill on it are all very real.

I don’t think about my email inbox when I’m on M Hill. I think about not riding off that cliff over there. I don’t think about my grocery list. I think about not slamming into that tree that I’m approaching way too fast. I don’t think about anything except what I am doing that very second. So there is this sound; this whistling, crunching, grinding, whipping sound that happens when I ride my bike. And I don’t want it to stop. When that sound stops it is a direct result of one of the following 5 things:

1. I crash.
2. I chicken out. (see #1.)
3. I have to park it and breathe to prevent my lungs from combusting.
4. I need to stop for just a second to look at______________ (fill in the blank. A flower. The view. That thing I thought was a Mountain Lion, but is ALWAYS only a tan rock.)
5. Life.

That’s it. That’s why biking stinks. You can’t make that feeling, and noise stay. It stops. It always does. When your 60 minutes are up you go right back to your inbox, and your grocery list and your utility bills and the noise you hear is life.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like the sound of life! I love to hear the cow bells ring in the STRIDER sales room because someone set up a new dealer, or in the marketing room because we got a licence deal with Suzuki! I love to hear my kids tell me about the new game they learned at camp called Ga Ga or what sort of ridiculous foods my husband ate at the fire station.

Get on a bike. With a co-worker, or a friend, or your kid, or someone else’s kid. (Kids are way better at riding bikes than grownups, so they can teach you if you don’t know how…) But try really hard not to listen to the sounds it makes. Don’t listen to the whipping, or the crunching, or your giggling child riding on two wheels. Because when that sound stops, it stinks. And you’re just stuck with your wonderful, stressful, perfect, enriched, busy, blissful life, and that little tiny voice in the back of your head that is telling you to get back on your bike.

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Update: Since writing this blog post I have discovered that the official name of M Hill is actually Hanson-Larsen Memorial Park (AKA Greatest place on Earth.) 

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