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i went mountain biking for the first time today.
ok, so the term mountain is used a bit loosely here in the north woods due to our almost complete lack of anything even remotely resembling a mountain or mountains but i am priveleged to live in a city that has a huge park with a couple miles of singletrack. but i digress...
fucking hell! seriously...holy shit.
i haven't had so much fun in years.
i can be kind of a grim guy sometimes, kind of caustic and cynical with a side of gruff but i think i was grinning like a doof-ball all the way back to my house, and that's after working all day with nothing but a banana and a ton of coffee to eat and then making a largely unsucessful attempt at biking some of the trails down by the river, being repulsed first by loose dirt and rocks on all of the climbs and then by a remarkably unattractive couple doing something that looked an awful (and i really do mean AWFUL) lot like fucking in the middle of the trail. i can't be sure because i whipped a quick 180 and rode off to find my eye-bleach and mental rewind/erase button but it very much resembled a weedy looking guy in a leather jacket humping a rather heavyset blonde from behind while she was bent over what appeared to be a double-wide stroller. a fucking baby carriage.
let me repeat that because you might not have caught it the first time, a fucking stroller.
i don't feel like i should have to explain any of the thousands of things that are wrong with that so i'll let you, dear friends, come up with your own lists.
that should give you a fairly good idea of my mindset as i trucked off towards the far side of town to try to hit theo wirth park before the sun went down. let's call it tired and baffled with a hefty dose of "what the fuck is wrong with people?!". finally after much spinning in my eeny beeny little single speed mountain bike gear i crossed highway 55 and saw it. el dorado, shangri la, valhalla...the trailhead.
i cinched in the straps on my de rigeur messenger bag with 20 lbs of crap in in it and rolled into the woods. fucking beautiful. less than 100 yards from a highway, less than 20 minutes biking distance from the center of downtown i had hardpacked dirt rolling and twisting out ahead of me as i rolled deeper and deeper into the trees. i get most of the way through the loop and bite it trying to clean a step-up at the top of a little rise and i don't even care. i start laughing, grab my bike off the ground and ride off to finish the loop. i go back for another lap, and another, and both times the little step up fucks me up and i have to put a foot down so i don't bail again but i don't care. i'm having way too much fun. finally on lap 4 i clear it and i feel totally invincible as i tear through the rest of the lap into the "most difficult" section of the trail, i zip over the catwalk and down through the rock garden with no problems and then fall over like a tree after just barely kissing a medium sized rock with my front tire after deciding to stop instead of dodging it on my way out of the trail.
to answer the age old question i think trees say something like "oh crap" and start laughing when they fall in the forest and no one is around.
about this time i figure i've probably had enough fun dehydrating myself for one day and it's starting to get dark besides. i roll off towards the quaking bog where i know that there's a water pump and drink about a quart of nice cold pump water before i fill up my bottle and head out to go grab some groceries on my way home.
it's just like my man ice cube says: "today was a good day", i'm flithy fucking dirty and so exhausted that i keep zoning out all the way back to the southside. my shirt is stuck to my chest, shoulders and back, my hat is completely soaked underneath my helmet, and the palms of my gloves are starting to feel kind of slimy and it doesn't even register that i probably look like i got run over by a tractor as i grab some random foodstuffs at the grocery after an impulse stop at cheapo that scores me a jesus lizard tape and the full original, un-fucked-with star wars trilogy where han solo shoots first and there's no CGI crap for under 10 bucks. all i'm saying is this is the part where the smoky sounding voice-over guy would do a quick recap and then tell us all that it's miller time if my life was a beer commercial and it feels pretty damn good.
so if you see even less of me than usual and i'm even dirtier than usual when you do see me, that's why.