On Beginning: Three Rides
We’ve invited guest writers to contribute to our blog. The below is by Sarah Pape, one of our SBT GRVL team members. Sarah is an English professor, writer, and editor in Chico, California (land of the Mechoopda peoples). Learn more about Sarah and the rest of our SBT GRVL team here.
I. Trepidation Rides Along
We head toward the river, bikes perched atop the station wagon, projecting shadows of fast ghost figures keeping time with us all the way out to the levees. We situate ourselves, donning helmets, gloves, zipping and unzipping frame bags, and I feel very pro even though I am clearly mirroring the small readying rituals I’ve watched him engage hundreds of times. I’m wearing his old gloves until I get my own.
We limbo under the levee gate. “No shooting” and “No trespassing” signs remind me of the stories he’s brought home about aggressive property owners, and I wonder if we’ll be unbothered or if I’ll have to tuck tail and run. The benefits of being on gravel and away from cars brings other unruly possibilities.
It’s an early winter afternoon, clear blue skies with the bristle of leafless almond orchards on both sides of us. I need to ride for 45 minutes, I tell him, both as a commitment and a safeguard. He will ride as far and as long as his legs will carry him, totally joyful and exhausted by the end. I don’t yet have that sense of guaranteed elation. My body is too much with me. Trepidation rides along, the concern for my body and all its switches and triggers always at the fore.
We’re a couple of miles out and I realize it’s not as hard as I thought it would be. I imagined it as a stripped-down version of driving slow down a dirt road, the jiggle and bump threading up my spine rather the bikes two tires and suspension. It’s pleasant though, riding next to him, pushing myself to go faster and then slow when needed. The big, grippy tires equalize the surface, neutralizing the roughness. Surprisingly, I find myself going over the bigger rocks to see how the bike handles. We’re both paying close attention to my experience.
After a long bout of cold weather asthma, riding with my mask on helps warm the air as I breathe harder. It’s not the hinderance I thought it would be either. There is some little relief in hiding my breath. I’m going to have to get used to being witnessed in extremity. Sweating. Cramping. Sucking air at sea level.
II. The Next Beautiful Thing
I ride by myself around the park. Teaching doesn’t happen until late in the day, so I disregard any hesitance about working out on an already threadbare schedule. I get to the park quickly, padded shorts helping with the tenderness in my biscuits, and I feel quick and excited to start a loop around. Before leaving the house I remind myself, Overdoing it doesn’t make for long term success.
And then about halfway, where there is a slight rise on the path, imperceptible to most, I feel myself flagging. Should I stop? Take a break? I slow a bit, gear down, and decide to just notice the next beautiful thing. To my right is a favorite pocket of foliage, mostly bare now, but for a confetti of golden leaves tacked and tucked in such a way that it looks to be caught in a still frame. As if the celebration has been captured mid-fall. I let my mind work the metaphor long enough that my body loses track of its complaints. Or maybe the rise has plateaued. Either way, I feel good again and this good feeling causes me to choose the single track back down the other side. This bike is made for rocks and dirt and reaction. I wonder if part of my fatigue back on the other side was a sense of monotony.
III. To Try and Almost
As we’re readying for the drive, tucking inhalers and water bottles and snacks into all the nooks and crannies, he seems surprised at my enthusiasm. My participation and excitement. “You know how I am. It has to be my idea,” I say as we’re walking the bikes out to the car and hoisting them atop. I can’t quite explain my resistance to riding before now other than it felt like life on a bike belonged to him. Or that he’d departed for a journey so long before me, there was no hope of catching up. His community. His unabashed passion. Do I feel it? Not yet. I understand that my relationship to this movement, this machine, will come with time, with miles.
Driving up the Skyway, there’s only a couple hours left of light and the bikes cast paired orbits on the pavement next to us. I love that, he says, and I know what he’s seeing, and his happiness at our sharing this time is apparent and open. He narrates the roads as we wind our way through once-lush landscape, pointing out the charred places, wondering what it must be like to live with the daily reminders of blunt, inescapable catastrophe. Those are from burned cars, he indicates toward the ink-black blots shining on the road like keloid scars. As we pass each one on our way up to the lake, I say a little prayer, I hope you live.
We arrive to the lake on the wrong side, he thinks, so we get out, look around, totally alone but for a boat way out in the middle and decide that maybe we should start across from where we are. I pick up a smooth, knotted stick and put it in the back of the car. We’re going to have to put a rack on your bike for your collections, he says.
On the other side, the trail is visible and so we park under a cluster of tall trees and redo the gathering of things we assembled back at home. This is something I’m beginning to understand about cycling—there are core comforts to remember to bring along—gloves, water, layers, snacks, and even if you don’t use everything, if you don’t bring it, you’ll want it. Over time, the checklists become ingrained and in the same way you leave the house to drive your car, you have a new set of habits and preparations that dictate each beginning.
The trail is wide and soft, little constellations of rocks punctuating the rises and descents and though I am almost immediately breathing hard, I am also experiencing something new—pleasure. One might say fun even. The bike is gripping the trail, each mechanism responding without pause to the energy I input, which acts as a kind of reciprocal dialogue between my body and the machine. I want to go faster and I do, laughing and groaning when a hill bests my attempt and I have to straddle/duckwalk up, but even this feels good. To attempt. To try and almost make it means that I one day will have the mojo or skill or strength to make those last few pedal strokes and crest the challenging spots.
As we ride around each curve, we see that there’s a very good chance we’ll end up where we first parked and decided against. For me, there’s a satisfaction or sweetness when we get there because I had totally accepted I couldn’t make it very far. I believed I’d have to stop and go back because of the difficulty of what was probably considered an easier trail. This is just part of the training experience I’ve chosen. A permission to not make it. To listen for the cues my body gives and honor it when there is an obvious request for reprieve. I expect it to be hard sometimes but I refuse that it must be punishment in order to count. Perhaps someday I will want to play in the edges of pain or discomfort that come with greater accomplishment—bigger hills, longer stretches. But for today it feels like a win to head back from a place that seemed too far at the beginning, full of joy and anticipation for the next rise on the trail.
