Growing up

Today I turned 34 years old. Yes, it's true, I'm getting older. Which reminds me, this probably isn't the best year to start racing my mountain bike since I'm at the upper end of the 30-34 category. Funny to think that I have a bunch of friends in their 40's! When I was a kid just starting to ride, I used to think the 30+ guys had it made. Most were way faster than me and all had sweet bikes. I'm not sure if the current me would have impressed the younger me with my skills and bikes but hey, at least I'm still riding! Of course, today more than ever before age is all relative. Look at the local fast guys. A good majority are over age 30 and absolutely flying. To be honest, from my perspective I'm anything but old. In fact, I feel like I'm just getting warmed up.

So all day at work I wrestled with the decision to ride or not as I'm still not feeling 100%. When I arrived home I decided to head out on the road bike, nice and easy, for an hour or so. It was a good thought but after 5 minutes I decided to flip a U-turn and hang with the kids instead. I swapped the road bike for the mountain bike and headed over to the local church parking lot to cruise with my 4 year old. She's been riding without training wheels for a couple of weeks now and - parent bias aside - she has some serious skills. I followed her around for about 15 minutes before my 6 year old joined us. We each took turns being the leader and burned a few hot laps around the building. Fastest time was 55 seconds. My son likes to ride over curbs and today was taking them both directions. Dropping them is no problem, but riding up resulted in a few abrubt stops when his momentum wasn't sufficient to carry him up and over. He hasn't quite figured out how to lift his front wheel so speed at impact is the key to success! All told I ended up with at least 30 minutes of easy cruising which probably did me more good than my originally planned ride. Plus, I got to spend some quality time with the kids which is really the best birthday present a parent could ask for anyway.