10 years of love and suspension forks

When I was 14, my cousin Adam was married and I went with my family down to Richmond to attend his wedding.  As a 14 year-old boy, I was just starting to evaluate the whole concept of marriage - weighing the pros and cons.  Already, I'd seen plenty of divorces (this was the early 90s.)

But for their first dance, Adam and his bride chose Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters" - and for me, it was a formative moment.


Marriage could, in fact, rock.  I was in.

Fast forward, sweet jesus, 24 years.  I'm 38 now.  Me and the love of my life, we got together nearly 10 years ago, and this year will be our 7th year of marriage.  I've already written about that week, 10 years ago, and how finding love for me was so closely intertwined with racing SM100 for the first time, so I won't rehash too much of that.  Also, I'm not one to dispense advice on the subject of love, given that I've only ever succeeded once, and paradoxically, once is exactly the right amount of times to be right about it, but it sure doesn't make a person an expert.  

But I will tell you this much:
though they might seem very much alike at times, love is not a suspension fork.
Let me explain.

wild lovers I have blown

Not sure if you've noticed, but suspension is difficult these days.  Sag, air pressure, 2 month service intervals, leaky seals, messy oils, a lack of sex, money problems and... maybe most dangerously OPTIONS.  Everywhere you look: Options.  New shit to replace your old shit.  New standards.  Thru Axles.  Boost.  29er upgrade to your 26er.  27.5 downgrade from your 29er.  Tapered steerers to replace your straight ones.  Plus-sized options for those inclined to go that way, just in case your beautiful, normal sized fork-bride isn't doing it for you anymore.  You see where this metaphor is going...we are bombarded, everywhere we look and read, by an industry that is thrusting more and more options and "standards" upon us.

To compound this problem, the fork you have starts giving you a bunch of shit.
Spewing oil.  Leaking air.  Bitching at you for leaving the toilet seat up.   Just sorta making you feel like shit all the time, and you don't even want to ride it.  It's like, you never really noticed it at first, but one day you looked down and that fork you loved so much when you married it has changed so much, you barely recognize it.

Divorce rates, of course, remain staggeringly high.  Given the predicaments above, of course they do.
To fix the suspension fork you have, it takes time...plus new seals, fresh oil, new dampers, labor, and a set of fresh stanchions is going to cost you about $400 these days.  There's a sign just up the street from where I drop my kids off at school that reads: DIVORCE, $159.

Do the math.  You can get 2 divorces for less than the price of just fixing the fork you have.  For many people, that's a no-brainer.  They've been looking at a plus-sized bike anyway.  Fuck it.    Nothing like a new fork.  The new one, too, is a disposable part, just like everything else on your bike, frame included.  Every piece of that bike will, eventually, fall apart.

As a side note, for the rare few, they simply throw away their existing fork and go rigid.  I've actually been running a rigid fork on my Singlespeed for almost a year now, and it's rough but somewhat rewarding for short rides.  As a continuance of this little metaphor we've got going here, Rigid Forks are the relationship-equivalent to celibacy.  Those that can, by all means, go for it.  But for most of us it's just not an option for very long.

I've got some advice for you, here, kids.  And I don't do this very often, but 10 years in with the Love of My Life, and I think I'm entitled to it just a little this one time.
Love is not a suspension fork.
Take care of the Love you have.
Do something nice for it.  Take it on vacation with you.  Do the hard, expensive work to make it like new again.  Along the way, give it some new oil.  Draw a hot bath for it.  Write it an honest note to tell it you love it and how much it means to you and how truly and fully fucked your life would be if anything ever happened to it, so please be careful out there.  Write a bizarre metaphorical blog post about her for the world to read that compares her to a bicycle component and barely makes any sense, but however you do it, show her you love her.

Cycling is a throw-away sub-culture in an already throw-away world.  That's fine.
But take care of the things that matter.

Up, up, up.

Ragged Mountain Access Meeting - THIS Wednesday.

I've written already about Ragged Mountain, and the nature of public land, and the concept of shared use trail access, and the struggle that our local brass has been battling to try to get reasonable, common-sense, shared-use policies for trail access applied there.  The kind of lesson about sharing that you'd teach your 4 year old.

And it would seem that situation is coming to its necessary and mysterious finale.
You gotta get there.
There being here.

5:30 PM, Wednesday, July 20

Jefferson School, African American Heritage Center

233 4th st nw, 2nd floor

Charlottesville va 22903

SHOWING UP.
That's half of loving something.
Probably the hardest half.

After that, most things tend to fall into place.  Or sometimes they don't.  But the only part of the equation that you can control, you must.

For me and mine, I'll abandon the lectern here, turn the mic over to my beautiful, well-spoken, kind, forward-thinking, calm-yet-firm, love of my life to represent the family while I manage the kids and try to explain to them the same concept of sharing that Shannon will try to explain to grown-ass adults.  Hopefully at least one of us will be successful.

And as long as you do the same, and so does your neighbor, and so does your riding buddy, and so even do the people who oppose shared-use access to Ragged Mountain, and as long as we're all there as voices of reason and sanity, even if those voices disagree on some of the specifics, I'm pretty sure we'll get a deal done.

Here's the good word, straight from the tippy top of CAMBC, and I'll sign off:

Fellow Mountain Bikers: Parks Advisory Board (PAB) public meeting on Ragged Mountain is scheduled for THIS Wednesday, July 20, 5:30 pm (details/location below).  At this meeting the PAB will open the floor to public comments for Ragged Mountain.  Speakers are limited to 3 minutes each.   First, let me catch you up on what we believe is the current process The PAB currently has the list of options B, C, D, and E to work from.  At this meeting next week, they will hear public comments, but will not make a vote. A 30 day comment period will follow this meeting At the next PAB meeting (August 17), they will take a vote, and that recommendation will go to the Parks Department, and ultimately City Council.   At some point in the early Fall, the Parks Department will recommend to City Council/Planning Commision a plan.  Council will likely accept that plan.  Our intent is to cover every issue, in a factual, non-confrontational, way.  We intend to be courteous and respectful of the wishes of the hiking only advocates, but we also are firm in our belief that a shared use system as outlined in Option E meets the goals and the preferences of our community.  Jon calls this a WIN, WIN, WIN strategy; WIN for Ragged Mountain ecology (large areas set aside for environmental protection) WIN for Passive Use (specific trails for hiking only, quiet, scenic spots) WIN for Active Use (responsibly designed shared use trails that support mountain biking) Thank you for your support over the last few years;  we are on the homestretch, but the outcome is very far from certain.  We need to finish strong.  Please let us know one way or another if you are able to speak at the meeting and by all means, hit us up for questions.   Meeting details: 5:30 PM, Wednesday, July 20 Jefferson School, African American Heritage Center 233 4th st nw, 2nd floor Charlottesville va 22903 Front door is on Commerce Street

All the dirt you wander through

Married White Male seeking reality-altering, mind-bending, enormous, terrible bike ride.
Tomorrow.
Late notice, I know, and I can't leave until noon, because, you know, MWM and all.
But still, world-distorting, life-affirming, massive, and wonderful, and awful bike ride sought.
Until there's progress, at least there's this.
Will pay gas.


Up, up, up?

Enterpainment

Enterpainment.  The word of the week.  Use it in a sentence.  Be cool.

Allow me to generalize.  It's the only thing holding us together:
As humans that are existing in an often monotonus and repetitive daily grind, it's natural to seek out a project - something to remind yourself that you are actually alive and capable of dealing with real, genuine adversity.
As cyclists, this is sometimes where riding your bike and trying to ride your bike faster meet.  Training.  Where fist meets the tree, and skin meets the road.  Going faster is pretty uncomfortable; this thing we call fun, it hurts sometimes.

We tend to forget the pain, of course.  That's the nature of the human psyche, and an important component in the forward propagation of our species - we have a tendency not to recall just how bad it felt.  Childbirth.  Heartbreak.  Intervals.  These are the things we tend to block out, and thankfully so.  Otherwise, there wouldn't be races, or love, or a reproducing population in general.

nameless, faceless road rash.  OUCH.

On that same topic, Pokemon Go is taking the fuck over.

Consider this situation: you're out there riding intervals, up on the parkway somewhere, head down, hammer down, swerving a little, doing your usual thing which is basically augmenting the monotony of your reality with a little adversity.  Enterpainment, as you know.

And behind you on the same road, here come a couple of 17-year olds in their Mom's honda, staring at some bizarre, virtual reality world of Nintendo-based genius that only exists in their phones and their heads.  Head down, hammer down, swerving a little.  Sound familiar?  It should.  They are, without a doubt, augmenting their own reality with some man-made adversity themselves, fully distracted from the monotony of their lives.  Not so different than you are right at that moment, except they're about to run you over.

We have way, way more in common than not.  Sure, we are going about self-imposing our respective forms of challenge in different ways, but we're all on the same road, and that's actually the problem.

It's your right to forget how to deal with adversity, but do so at your own risk - lest you lose the ability to actually deal with trauma when it finally comes knocking at your door.  It will.  Same goes for hunters, hikers, street racers, naturalists, and even triathletes, and all the other people and their forms of entertainment that we find bizarre but have to share the world and the road with anyway. It's either infuriating, or it's like looking in the mirror at a brick wall.  Or more than likely, it's both.

We live in a Brave New Weird World, getting weirder all the time.

In fact, sometimes it's not even a world at all - just a virtual reality version of the world that is indistinguishable from the actual world.  But no less weird, or new, or brave.


Have caution: get used to it.

Up, up, up.