Don’t Call It a Comeback

 

Fall is a blessing and a curse, but let us now focus more so on the former, thank you

Forgive the sentimentality, but fall is a time of reflection,  and TDM can hardly believe the difference between today, and one year previous.  On that day, TDM lay pickling in a hotub in MOAB, watching legions of bikes ride past on their return from digesting the Whole Enchilada, and wondering why his body would bother to attack him now.  To say he had the back injury coming is fair cricket, but it sure felt like an injustice at the time, and it took two months to walk unaided, and another four months to even think about a four mile ride on pavement.  But bodies can repair, and gradually yoga, walks, and careful progression on the bike brought us to the present,  where the body and mind are once again focused on railing dirt and drawing lines on maps (with a healthy side of dog walking and poop bagging, but that is another story).

In his previous missive to you (the nonexistent reader), TDM acknowledged that over six months of physical stillness might be a bit of a challenge to a kinetic soul, and yet asserted a proof of mental motion as the lone requisite for personal happiness… mobility, he said, is in the mind first, and the body only as a secondary effect.  Perhaps this is true, but if homeboy thought that his active mind would simply forget about adventures of a physical kind, then a moronic branding is probably in order.

In fact, physical plotting commenced only moments after the previous assertion was published, at first mapping out mundane  adventures like a successful walk to the kitchen to make a smoothie, and then the mailbox, and then…finally…the car and the world beyond his home.  At five months the act of walking a (slow) mile alone in the forest was akin to pulling off the Waldo Triple Crown…a huge success, but then one night he randomly bumped into the Wednesday night ride crew, who were pedaling up the mountain to sample the Mac in spring glory mode, and suddenly he could see with clarity how much he missed being amongst it with the wolfs and ninjas of his crew, and with that revelation  the depth of his remaining frailty was realized.  Suddenly the mental calm was gone, replaced by  a lot of dreaming about navigating the world outside his mind, and the deep seated sense that he might not regain access to that physical plane again.

Harnessing the panic, TDM then focused on one goal: He would be there for his crew’s annual June Oakridge A La Muerta Shuttle fest.  As the day approached, TDM was concerned (maybe more like petrified) that he would never survive the day, but he committed, and counted the steps (& poop bags) of recovery  like rungs on a long, long ladder.

And then, four months later, we zoom in on a disquieting van, bristling with eight bikes on the back, and eight dumb smiles on the faces of those inside.  TDM is wedged in the back row of this treacherously stinky van between Yeti-Wheel and Blurry Frank (who is extra blurry at the moment), and his smile is particularly obscene, for he is exactly where he wants to be.

And now we come to the present. The bliss of fall riding has settled in, and it is not lost on any of us that, after a whole year of pointing fingers at beer-stained maps, the season for the big rides is now.  In the future there will be a day when each of us is unable to dabble in this season the way we do now, and that is OK.  But for today,  through the lens of one calendar year, TDM is clear on this: that bombing trails with friends may not be necessary for general contentedness,  but  it’s a ass-ton more fun to gain or loose 23,000 feet with the wolves & ninjas of his pack than it is to dream about it.

Soon there will be more entries on these pages to celebrate that fact, including some really cool stuff from the Elkhorns and Tollgate areas…among others, but right now TDM is too busy riding and working on trails and basking in the glow of a working (if weaker) body to talk about it… see ya’ll out there!