A quick story to fill in some of the gaps up to present...If I claimed to remember learning to ride a bike it would be a stretch. I have a very blurred memory of the event, but I believe it happened pretty quickly. This was before training wheels and helmets were a necessity. All you needed was someone to hold the back of your seat for a couple pedal strokes and then the resilience to allow you to fall a few times without deciding to give up and watch cartoons instead. I do however remember my first bike race! It was a sprint in Spearman, TX. I was seven and it was the summer of the ’84 Olympics, I had been matched up against the fastest dog in the neighborhood. I think he was a black lab, but I’m certain he liked to chase bikes. I was winning by half a dog length when I looked back to make sure my ankle wasn’t about to become a chew toy. Before I turn my eyes back to the road in front of me, my front tire sunk into a bike eating pothole and my chin was sliding across the pavement. After a handful of stitches and more than 20 years, I am still asked about the scar on my chin on a regular basis.
I wanted to race BMX just like every kid – or every kid I knew at the time. We built dirt tracks all over the neighborhood and in the surrounding woods. Our moms would take turns dropping us off at Cheehaw Park in Albany, GA where there was an amazing dirt track with huge jumps. We rode all day everyday and would take breaks to get motivation from our favorite movie, RAD! Like all of my friends, we moved on to freestyle bikes and then skateboards… My mom was the coolest in the neighborhood so naturally my back yard had a half pipe and the street in front of the house had multiple launch ramps, boxes and rails, not to mention at least 3 kids with attitudes drinking our Kool Aid. I also wanted to be a distance runner which was different than any of my friends. I did many junior races with a decent record and 1 triathlon… Oklahoma City, won the 10-12 year old category! Mostly, I just spent my childhood playing. Constantly. Unfortunately, we also liked to be dangerous and one afternoon a trampoline/sprinkler incident led to me having stretched knee ligaments and the development of Osgood Schlatter’s disease. This put an end to my very young running career. So I continued with the typical evolution of an active boy as far as I knew in south GA. I became more interested in girls, playing in bands and working my minimum wage jobs to pay for gas and fast food. And then it was off to college.
With the idea of getting around campus, I bought a cheap mountain bike a few months before I thought I’d be leaving for college. What actually happened was that I fell in love with the bike and I went out looking for the trails we used to ride when I was much younger. Unfortunately the woods surrounding my neighborhood were now just more neighborhoods. There were no trails or woods to be found. I did find some trails on the other side of a narrow highway and visited them practically everyday during the summer after high school. I also liked to surprise my girlfriend and shock her parents by riding my bike to their house. We only lived about 15 miles from each other, but this was in a town with a lot of fast two lane roads and drivers who have never seen a bike outside of a subdivision. Maybe I’m lucky… it had never even crossed my mind to buy a helmet back then. The summer came to an end and I was happy find out that Georgia Southern’s campus was crawling with bikes and several of my new friends in the dorm were equally excited.
I’ve wanted to race mountain bikes since my freshman year of college. I used to ride my fully rigid (clearance sale) Diamond Back all over Statesboro and we would have midnight rides on campus several nights a week after studying. I came across the Georgia Southern mountain bike team in the woods one afternoon and rode with them for a couple hours. I was able to ride along side them and outride some of them…. Yet, they weren’t very friendly and I never saw or heard from them again. I think a lot of it had to do with my ‘WalMart-ish’ bike and I didn’t have the money to buy a nicer one. So, on one really fast midnight ride I crashed and my wrist, lower back and that bike were never the same. I didn’t ride much at all through the rest of college as I moved to Georgia Tech and continued to get busier with studies and figuring out how to pay for the real world.
Every spring between ’98 and ‘03 I would get the itch to go riding and would go bike shopping. I didn’t have nearly the money for the bikes I wanted so I would rationalize why I should concentrate on work rather than risking being relatively broke and potentially broken again. I was living the consultant lifestyle where you didn’t know who was going to write your paycheck from project to project. I had been laid off from projects twice before and was told that my latest contract was going to end 6 months prior to initial thought. So, after being a consultant for several years and not having time to do anything but work, worry, eat and gain my freshman 15 a few years late, I hired onto a full time position which to me simply meant less money but more free time and stability. I could consider a hobby!
With my first salaried position and my first ‘bonus’ (which was not nearly what my imagination had led me to hope for) I did some serious mountain bike shopping. I bought a previous year’s model at a clearance sale and went directly to the nearest trail. I was so eager to get out there that I didn’t wait to get a helmet, water, food….or directions. I ended up lost in the woods for a couple extra hours and as it was getting dark, I started to wonder if this was really something I wanted to get into. Before my next ride I went out and bought all of the essential supplies.
Some time (years) passed and I had gotten a few miles under my belt. I was proud of myself if I got out of town a couple times a month and rode maybe 10-15 miles. I would often take my dog with me and he loved to run the trail right on my back tire. He runs as hard as it takes to keep up and I have to stop more often now to keep him from completely blowing himself up. I was alone at the ’96 Olympic trail in Conyers when I reconsidered my hobby again. I went down hard and could not lift my arm. I hiked back to my car which was over two miles away while dragging my bike and then after asking for directions, drove myself to the emergency room. I had a “shattered” clavicle and had to have a steel plate and a series of 8 screws permanently installed. Yikes! This kept me off the bike for a few months and took a lot of the fun out of riding until I met some great friends who are usually up for riding at any time.
Now I ride often and begin to feel unlike myself if I go more than two days without getting on a bike. I’ve been lucky enough to incorporate bikes into my lifestyle. Weather it is riding to the store, bar, work or on a quick road ride, the track or on some of the great trails that surround us in Atlanta. Bikes have kept me young at heart and have reminded me what it was like to be a kid instead of constantly worrying about the everyday grind that beats so many of us down until we settled into a recliner talking about the good old days. Everyday is a good day and the opportunities just continue.
