I Have a Bike, You Can Ride It If You Like.
Last weekend my lovely wife allowed me to attend the Midwest Singletrack Summit at Landahl Park in Blue Springs. Basically, this was a weekend of bikes, my kind of deal. There were presentations about bikes, independent films about bikes, trails on which to ride bikes, ramps from which to launch bikes, booths with freebie bike products, demo bikes to test from big manufacturers, and, of course, food and drink. .
Several of my biking friends were among the faithful. We rode. We dined. We talked bike stuff, you know, like shaving legs and such. To my chagrin, I was tired and sore after a couple rounds on the rocky, technical trails that challenged my atrophied winter mountain biking prowess. I had had lofty goals of endless miles for that Saturday, with a possible race registration on the following morning. How sadly mistaken was I. .
As we stood around refueling and recovering from our day's riding reverie, talk turned away from things with wheels. Although I still gazed dreamily at the phantasmagoric array of bikes parading past us, I was reaching for my billfold. Not because I expected to find funding for an impulse buy, or two, but because I had new pictures of my girls to show.
And there it was, the "ahhaha moment- in which all delusions of myself as action-adventure X-games hardcore biker dude came crashing down on me like a fuzzy fleece unicorn blanky. I'm a daddy and a hubby, first. And I wasn't the only one caught.
We discussed the triumphs and pitfalls across the spectrum of child-rearing, from my potty-training nightmares to a comrade's teenager tribulations. If any of the actual lycra-clad "hardcores- had eavesdropped on our conversation we probably would have been asked to turn in our helmets and exit in our mini-vans sans bikes, sans machismo. Oh well.
The whole weekend was like that for me. Here I was, unleashed in the big city without the possibility of changing dirty diapers, emptying the potty, or being spit up on, yet that's what my brain was doing.