"And all she wants to do is ride [Gertie] ride..." is the perception from my camping commerades this weekend! And they are so wrong (and to my surprise, so right).
It's not really true that I love to ride [mountain bikes], but that is the way it appeared to my fellow campers as we ended my first mountain bike ride in about 12 years yesterday. Believe me, the reason wasn't that I was determined that I finished the ride first. It's obviously not because I ride all the time, or that I'm anything close to "in shape," that I finished the ride first. It's because of my blood type. No joke.
As a kid, back in the days before the easily applicable Advantage flea deterent for pets, my pets had flea collars. Are you old enough to remember those? Or cheap enough to think they can miraculously banish the plague of fleas from your pets? Well, let me tell you: flea collars don't work. Because some blood is better than others, and I know this because I am the better blood, I am O+, and the fleas, in fact all blood sucking bugs, LOVE ME. As a kid I had rings of flea bites at the base of my socks, and in other various parts of my body, all the way up until the pets died. My parents and I breathed a sigh of relief (for different reasons: they because an extra duty was gone, me because the flea bites were).
Back to the camping/hiking/riding/kick Gertie's ass 4th of July trip: The fact that I finished a 2 and a half hour uphill, undeniably technical (i.e. big, loose rocks and steep steep inclines for a long long time, for you novices) ride, with an undenialble heavy and out-of-date mountain bike (fewer gears than they have now!), on an undeniably hot hot day, AND after 13 years of NOT being on a bike OR a mountain or any combination thereof, is NOT because I am a pro. It's because every time I stopped I was bombarded by Horseflies, who continued to stick to me, bite my skin, pinch me, suck my blood, and swarm around me some more to find an even juicier point of entry. Even as I rode on they bombarded me. It felt worse than being a slow-moving human circled by vultures (which, yes, has happened to me as well... I don't know why I don't avoid nature altogether....)
Anyway, I was identified as a mountain biking shark: similar to the nature of a pool shark; I faked being a smoker and out of shaper with a fake heavy bike with fake non-shock-absorbing forks and fake fatigue at all the right places and ended up first because I was faking it all the way. But if they knew, oh if they knew how bugs bug the essence of my soul, they would have understood that all of that hilly torture was NOTHING compared to Horseflies wanting a piece of me.
The funny thing is this. It is the fact that, despite the soreness in the cooch area due to "unusual sitting on a bike seat," the fact that I finished first over many experienced riders this weekend got me all pumped to go riding again. So, instead of leaving camp and going back to the boring foggy City, I went to my parents place up north, hosed everything down, returned the borrowed camping gear, and! hopped! on! the out of date mountain bike! for a quick trip to Pheonix Lake! Holy Crap! What has happened to Gertie? There were no Horseflies today, and my legs were jello from yesterday's ride, so I took a few breaks. BUT. I finished. And I loved it, and I can't wait to get in the saddle again. Hoo-ha!
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Post Script: I CANNOT WAIT TO SLEEP IN MY BED TONIGHT! Screw that blow-up mat crap...
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