Today Dave (our adventure leader) took us back to a little shed off to the side of the property; a building that I hadn’t even really noticed before. We walked into the dim interior looking around curiously. Bikes; eight or nine bikes of various sizes and ages lined up or hanging from the ceiling like giant metal spiders. He asked the guys to wheel them all out onto the grass and then he split us into pairs according to our size and then each pair was given a bike. Marci and I received bike number 2 and two aesthetically pleasing helmets.[1]
I have to confess that riding a bike has never been my forte. I actually didn’t learn until I was seven. My parents had sent me to Ohio for a few weeks over the summer to stay with my grandparents. Grandma had suggested that I ride one of the old bikes over to my cousin’s house to play. This was back when you could actually let your kids ride their bikes a few miles through the countryside without worrying that they would never come home. I told her that I couldn’t ride and suggested that she drive me over in the car. Yeah, Grandma wasn't having that. So I spent the next several hours sitting on a bike while my grandmother pushed me. There was crying and yelling but I did eventually master the art of riding a bike and rode constantly when I got back home. However, I was that kid who would dismount and walk my bike up and over curbs. When the sidewalk came to an end, so did my ride. This might have changed but when I was nine we moved out of our neighborhood to a place with no sidewalks or alleys, just windy country roads, unleashed dogs and cars that drove way too fast. So by the time bike #2 was in my hands it had been a good ten years since I had been on a bike that didn’t have a large fan in place of the front wheel.
It’s been said that riding a bike is something that you never forget, a skill that stays with you. I found that to be true. I was a little wobbly at first but pretty soon had no trouble getting the bike from point A to point B. The challenge was that Dave had placed obstacles in between point A and point B, rocks and large logs. Our job was to weave in and out of the rocks and then ramp our bike over the logs. Dave was attempting to simulate things that we might come across on our trail ride. I don’t even know how many times I hit that log. It seemed that no matter how hard I tried to lift my front wheel, I never managed to get it high enough. These were skills that I had never bothered to learn because, frankly, there weren’t a lot of logs laying across the sidewalk in the neighborhood, and they always had those nice places where the sidewalk dipped right down to the level of the pavement and you could just coast on through.
I failed at every single task given to me. I could not weave through the rocks. I could not jump over the log. I could not coast down a grass covered hill and pedal furiously back up the other side. And I could not convince myself to keep trying. My helmet came off, I handed my bike over to my partner and I refused to stand up and try again. I knew that my limit of humiliation and failure had been reached. There was much attempting to persuade me to continue to try but it was all in vain. Attempting to learn new skills in front of people, failing, and not caring at all has never been one of my strong points. I knew that continuing on would just lead to more and more frustration. So I took my juvenile and crappy attitude and sat down in the grass to watch the rest of my classmates fail and succeed.
We rode our bikes again for the next PE class, but this time we left our little compound and hit the open road. I had given myself a pep-talk, telling myself that it was okay to make mistakes and that it is the best way to learn. I was feeling much better. I told myself that I wasn’t going to worry about looking stupid in front of people. I had already made an ass of myself so it couldn’t get much worse. I was ready to feel frustrated and stupid but determined that it wouldn’t stop me. What I wasn’t prepared for was fear. But suddenly, as my bike just took off on seemingly flat yet haphazardly paved asphalt, there it was. When you are a kid and the road starts to disappear under your wheels all you think about is the speed and the wind in your face. When you are twenty and haven’t been on a bike in years, all you think about is how much that asphalt is going to hurt when it smacks you in the face. So by the time we reached our turn-off point to start trail riding, I was in quite a state. I couldn’t wait to get off of the road and onto hard-packed dirt. Yes, it would still hurt to fall but at least my face wouldn’t come off. But the entrance to our trail was not what I expected. It was a hill with rivets and valleys and rocks; a large dirt hill that we needed to ride down. I watched all of my teammates go before me and I made a quick decision that riding down that hill would be one of the worst choices I could make. If I was going to have use of my limbs for the rest of the ride then I would need to walk down the hill. So I got off of my bike and began to walk down the hill while the rest of my team watched me from the bottom. Nothing like having an audience to your cowardice. Dave encouraged me to get on my bike and ride but I refused.
When I finally made it to the bottom, Dave asked me to ride in front. So now every mistake I made, every time I slowed down, every time I fell off, reverberated back through the entire group. Only when the rain started did Dave finally let me fall back and allow the rest of team to continue on without me.
[1] There is no such thing as an aesthetically pleasing bicycle helmet. They are dorky and uncool. The only people who can possibly wear them and look halfway decent are the guys in the Tour de France because if you are male and wearing spandex then no one is looking at your head.
photo by: sabellachan http://www.flickr.com/photos/sabellachan/216587690/
No comments:
Post a Comment