“And you’re thinking the same two things, over and over again.”

Hey, how are ya? It’s me, the guy who used to type junior-high-level thoughts into your head. I retired from typing about bikes a few years ago and I learned something. Once you start writing, you try to think in sentences. And once you start thinking in sentences, it’s very hard to stop. I catch myself mentally composing sentences all the time, and to be honest with you, it’s annoying. I needed to find an outlet for these surplus sentences, so I’ve decided to launch a comeback and inflict my head full of sentences upon anyone foolish enough to stumble across them on this corner of the internet. Comebacks are cool, right? I think things worked out for Jefferson Starship? Something about building a city?

“What have you been up to?”, well thank you for asking, fictitious conversational voice in my head. Like most people, I’ve found the last two years challenging. But unlike most people, I was already working from home before the pandemic, so I had my coping system worked out—and that system was bikes. Bikes every day. The twist to my coping system in 2020 was that I could only ride by myself, which made that summer particularly challenging.

So how did I make it? I rode uphill. For most of the summer of 2020. I trolled the depths of the internet and found the Leadville 100,000 Challenge. The challenge was simple, ride 100,000 vertical feet in about 10 weeks, and get a belt buckle that will make any finisher of the “real” Leadville want to punch you in the neck. I figured that I’d need to shoot for about 2,000 feet a day, so I could take a day off per week, and avoid riding in the rain. I wouldn’t count any Zwift rides because that would be incredibly sad. 

I finished the challenge and I would like to say that the experience made me a better person, but that would be untrue. I learned nothing—except for the vertical footage gain of every climb in the greater North Bergen County area. It did make me a better climber, and warped my perceptions of gaining altitude so much that I am no longer intimidated by any incline. I may be destroyed by an incline, but not intimidated. But was it a transformational experience? Nah, it was mostly me panting and swearing my way up hills.

After that, things became more normal. There were group rides, there were races. Sadly FBF disappeared, interrupting a summer Tuesday night ritual that I had maintained for 25 years. (Will it come back? I hope so, but that’s down to the whims of the National Parks Service.) I will discuss the 2021 season in future entries, but here’s a teaser—I didn’t win anything.

So what will this comeback to typing about bikes look like? I predict a lot of rambling (I am getting old after all), I don’t envision a lot of race pay by play because again, I am old. I am fast enough to see what happens, but the only effect I can have on a fast race is by crashing into a potential winner. I can predict that I will get slower and slower in the coming years, eventually coming to a complete stop, as we all do, but I can assure you, even if I get older, I will never mature past the sixth grade.