Intervention
“How ’bout I come by your house around 8:00 or 8:30 tomorrow morning?” The question came from half centenarian Kent Petersen (I wanted to write half centurion, but that’s something slightly different.) He was calling during his birthday trip from Issaquah to Portland (his route, my guess at his route) which is Kent’s way of relaxing. Spend a day riding almost 200 miles, camp out, finish the ride meet people for a day, camp out (declining at least three offers of a place to sleep), meet up with more folks through the day, then ride the 210 miles or so home. You should note that “meet people” usually means riding with them. Since Kent forwent owning a car decades ago (he and his wife raised two son sans automobile long before people thought it was sane) and he rides everywhere getting out for a 200 mile ride is just a nice way to spend a day.
We’d emailed earlier in the week when he was letting people know about his trip. I’d written “I won’t, however, wait for your arrival to do my first ride of 2009. Hopefully.” Kent didn’t say anything at the time. We did agree on a Sunday breakfast at my house, he likes our chicken’s eggs. It was, if I do say so myself, a good breakfast. Well, except for the burnt toast. Home roasted coffee and eggs from the chickens being the house specials. I do fry up some mean hash browns using olive oil too. That may become a house special if cooks in general continue their neglect of that fine choice of potato preparation. (You used to be able to get good hash browns anywhere. With “used to” being the key element of that statement.)
We did our usual fall into conversation and rambled through politics, the pros and cons of buying vs renting your housing, Thomas Pynchon, mutual friends, and cycling. Oh. Yeah. That.
I needed to go visit Beth Hamon, Kent was supposed to meet up with Beth in the afternoon. We agreed to ride to her house. But by this time it was well after 10:00, I needed to be home by noon for family plans, I needed to clean up from breakfast and my bike needed some attention before rolling out. (Did I mention that one of the things we talked about was my not really planning things out?) Jennifer said “leave the dishes”, Kent said “why don’t you change clothes while I tend to your bike.” and I ran out of delays. Time to ride.
It was a cross between a Foreigner and Madonna moment. I essentially haven’t ridden (once or twice a month doesn’t count) since last September. It took about two miles to warm up and enjoy the peddling and mobile conversation. By the time we’d ridden the whopping 7.5 miles to Beth’s house I wheezed, I coughed, I panted, my thighs burned, my back ached. My heart rate got up and stayed up. My speed, Kent let me set the pace, started slow and stayed there. We were less than half way to Beth’s when I realized I was going to have to spend no time there and rush, to slightly abuse the word, back home to meet my wife and in-laws for our day’s plans. That I did.
I rode. It felt like the first time, easily out of breath, weak and slow and injected with the joy that bikes seem to bring everywhere. Stay tuned to see if I ride more.
Posted on March 8th, 2009 under Bicycling • 
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