Roundabout
Spent the past 5 days riding up the California coast on my bike “Geronimo,” from San Diego through LA, to San Luis Obispo up the one fwy through San Simeon, Big Sur, Monterey, Santa Cruz, San Francisco and into Oakland. Stayed with friends and family along the way, had some good conversations and some wild experiences. Had to make my way back to SD through the hellish yet scenic plains of the Central Valley, now I’m back up north of LA in Camarillo to help finish a job I started in February.
Still haven’t really had time to digest everything that had happened, a lot for me to comb over, things don’t really hit me all at once. Something about myself is I typically have delayed reactions, which sometimes is a good thing when contemplation and being measured is in order, but can also be the thing that hinders when times call for me to be more in the moment. Runs like that force me to realize that, where I have long blocks of time to be able to think on the wind, to be present in what I’m doing on the road but still inside my head with enough time and distance to gain perspective against my life. Runs are a time to get comfortable being uncomfortable, see what you’re made of, see what you’ve got, see how you react, then see how you measure up. Now’s that it’s all said and done I’m just processing it, what I could’ve done better, what it all meant, what causes me to want to do such things in the first place.
One thing that happened I’m still processing is that fact that on Thursday 7/8 I’d wrecked off the Cabrillo hwy near the One Brewing Company, some 2 hours south of SF. I was moving easy at 60 mph on a lone stretch of road, asphalt freshly paved, smooth, and blackened. I’d sort of drifted off in my mind, not really thinking about anything in particular, when suddenly I was coming in too fast, too hard at a wind. Squeezing my breaks, my back tire began fishtailing, I rode it out a while sliding what felt like an eternity when the back end kicked tossing me over the handlebars onto the road. Something took over, I’d no time to really think about what was happening, I rolled around once off my right knee and popped right back up on my feet, I turned behind me and saw Geronimo in the street, not a soul in site. I ran over and picked it up off the ground, pushed it just off the shoulder and stood there with it a moment, one or two cars passing by not even stopping. I checked myself, nothing, I checked my bike, not much except some cosmetic damage and a small miss alignment of the handlebars (left hand controls is what touched down to the ground, I’m lucky my hand wasn’t crushed). Dazed I started it up again to my amazement and rolled off to the next gas station to just get off the rode a bit (this is about 7 hours into a 9 hour ride).
As I moved along I laughed in relief and in disbelief, I still can’t really believe it. I got lucky, real lucky. It could have been a lot worse, that could have easily been that, and no one would’ve known, no one would’ve seen, maybe no one even now would’ve known what had happened, just sudden silence. But it happened and I just kept rolling, bike mechanically absolutely fine, still ran like a champ the rest of the trip, me only a slight sore knee, and that was that.
A lot more happened after that, and I’ll get to them, but that’s what sticks out to me right now. In a way I’m surprised that brush with death didn’t really leave a bigger impact on me during the run, still I hadn’t really thought about it much until right now. In some ways things like that are less scary to me than doing other sorts of things in life. You’d think a close call like that would embolden you in some way, but I’m not sure it effected me like that or even if it should (I even thought of never mentioning it to anyone). I still approach life at the same speed, the same embrace, I feel alive, but maybe a little more so than before having walked away from that impact, or maybe I’m still just numb and in a daze. Runs for me are meant to realize things like that, the sort of mixed embrace of life and death, one informing the other. Maybe now is it only coming into my conscious mind how close that was and how grateful I am to still be here. I’m realizing there’s still so many things I need to change and be better at, I sort of already knew that going into it but now it’s solidified in my mind. I don’t know if that was what I needed to set things straight, but maybe it was, it’s at very least something for me to think about. Right now after days of travel, constantly moving, my body’s just tired. Maybe something will reset itself in this time at rest here in my hotel room in Thousand Oaks, still gonna be a long week in front of me.
This is just me checking in, no fancy words, no elaborate overstatements, right now I’m ok, I’m still here. I’d said before the trip I wanted to give myself more experiences to write about, I certainly already have enough of that and a lot more I want to get to, but maybe I got more than I bargained for with that one. It does feel my calling to do these things, capture them, then use them in some creative capacity, but at the cost of what, my life? I don’t know, it’s not my intention to be so heavy handed, I don’t have a death wish, but to what end and how far am I willing to push myself for that? I’m always analyzing risk vs reward, do the benefits outweigh the cost, and in order to gain anything you have to put something on the line, you must be willing to sacrifice to achieve anything worth while. I’d spent too much time idle, playing it safe, afraid to lose what little I had in some small corner of nowhere but never did I receive any satisfaction out of that. I’d said that this was going to be the time where I pushed myself further out of my comfort zone in more ways than I thought possible, something I’d been dreading but needing to do a long time, and so far it’s been worth the while. I know what I want to do, and where I need to go from here, only now I’ve come to realize I need to be willing to pay the ultimate price if I’m going to get there.
