Y--Where YOU Become Part of My Adventure

image from here

You know what they say:

Whatever doesn't kill you will only make you stronger.
I'm alive to tell the tale, so I must be so much stronger.

Can you tell I'm posting from vacation? Do I seem farther away? More relaxed? More tired? Can I share with you my adventure?

My brother-in-law Matt (I have two--this is the tall one) suggested a sixty-minute downhill mountain biking adventure for yesterday afternoon. How do you react when such an activity is proposed? Well, I was ready--I'd brought my padded biking shorts. I was willing--I've been riding my bike 5-6 days a week. And I thought I was able.
Today I am sorely mistaken.

When you like a movie, do you forget the bad parts? That's how Matt remembered this ride--so beautiful, gorgeous scenery, blah blah blah. He conveniently forgot about the steep inclines and descents, slippery shale spots, and loose boulders. About ten minutes into the ride, he remembered. But then it was too late.

What do you do when faced with a seemingly insurmountable task? Do you whine and cry? Do you cuss and spit nails? Do you pout and frown? I've done these in the past, that's for sure. But I was slightly embarrassed that I was so inept on this ride, so I decided to suck it up and get back to the truck the only way possible--down the trail.

And it was hard. So hard. I've ridden that trail multiple times when I was younger--with my dad, on a horse, never noticing the treachery and danger that waited around every turn. Have you ever wished, with every aching muscle in your body, for a horse? Neither had I until yesterday. We actually passed three equestrians, and I secretly hoped that the exhaustion on my face would soften their hearts to the point that they would scoop me up, bike and all, and patiently carry me back. All the said was "We were expecting to see you. Your group is waiting for you up there a ways." Sigh. No escape.

I fell a few times--slick spots, tough spots, stupid not-paying-attention spots. Bumps, cuts, pedal gouges and many many bruises. Flat tire. I quickly learned that if something looked too hard, it WAS too hard, and my best bet to preserve my body intact was to walk that cursed wheeled machine to safety. I've never walked so much on a bike ride ever.

You are waiting for the end of the story, aren't you? Not yet, my friend. I know. That's how I felt on this interminable ride.

Matt had a crazy head-on collision with a Yamaha--head over handlebars, tire bent to 90 degrees. Where was I, you ask? Probably still a mile back, missing all the excitement. He was bloodied but not broken, so on we trekked.

Brad rode just ahead of me, stopping frequently to check on my progress. At one point, I was close enough to overhear Matt tell him, "it's mostly flat here for a while." Sweet relief. I didn't hear this addendum: "Except for the steep parts!" That, my friends, was the understatement of the day. I glanced up the trail, saw Brad waiting just before the next turn, and then I evaluated. The trail at this point was lots of loose shale, uphill on the right, a fairly steep 25-foot drop-off to the river on the left. Can you see where this is going? It's nowhere good, that's for sure. I hit a rock, over corrected, and I knew I was falling. The bike and I slid off the trail to the left. How can you describe what flies through your mind as you face certain death? All I could think was "Grass. GRAB THAT GRASS!"

Next thing I knew, I was suspended on the side of the mountain, holding a tuft of mountain grass for dear life, with my sister's mountain bike caught on the back of my shoe. You couldn't have done it on purpose if you'd tried a hundred times. But that was a tender mercy for the day--neither Karen's bike nor my battered body had to be hauled out of the third fork of the Rock Creek canyon. Since I wasn't hurt and I knew Brad had seen me fall, I just waited for what seemed like a long time for him to reach me--maybe two minutes. He was half-laughing incredulously at the scene ("You looked like Wiley Coyote hanging there!") and half-concerned that I was hurt. After disentangling the bike from my shoe, he helped me up the incline where I evaluated my appendages and then began to shake with shock.

But what could I do? What would you do? Back on the bike to finish the adventure, of course. All told, our sixty-minute adventure--hampered by a flat tire, two serious crashes and a completely inexperienced me--stretched into a two-and-a-half-hour comedy of errors. All my kids had been left with Grandma and Aunt Karen, who were nervously waiting at the bottom of the canyon with nine kids and a suburban with no keys (mistakenly left in Brad's pocket). Evie was sad, kids were bored and tired and dirty, and Grandma and Karen were quite concerned, since we were over an hour late.

But, like Matt said as he was changing my tire at the speed of light, "Well, you can say that you really did something."

Today I'm not as sore as I thought I'd be. I'm bruised and scraped over most of my lower body, but I'm not broken--in body or mind. But I can tell you:

I really did something.

And I'd do it again.

Do you think I'm crazy?

Linking up to Y on Jenny Matlock's Alphabe-Thursday.