Scared? Check!

My son Luke and I, Last Thanksgiving

My friend gave me this great little yoga bag with the good intent of trying once again to get me to love yoga. It is peppered with inspiring sayings such as –

“Dance, Sing, Floss and Travel”

“Life is full of setbacks. Success is determined by how you handle the setbacks”

“Friends are more important than money”

“Jealousy works the opposite way you want it to”

“Your outlook on life is a direct reflection on how much you like yourself”

And the one I think of every single day that I take off down the road on my bike

“Do one thing a day that scares you”

Easily done. Check that.

This morning not even a mile from home a large black SUV swerved right at me coming within arms distance while traveling about 40 mph down a wide enough for four cars, street.

Close call. Stomach flipping, heart pounding, fear filled, close call.

Don’t know what the heck that driver was thinking. Whether it was deliberate or if they were, early though it was, affected by drugs or alcohol or most likely just not paying attention, matters not. They still managed to scare the wits out of me.

That incident, just one example of the many crazy fear laden moments that cause me to achieve the daily fulfillment of the yoga bag mantra- “Do one thing a day that scares you”.

I know that even for cyclists who ride often and really well and have years of experience, cycling can be perpetually frightening . Cars and crazy drivers aside, on any given day on my ride to work there may just happen across the trail kamikaze squirrels, rattlesnakes, deer, turtles and turkeys all rightfully in their own little place in the universe at the exact moment, I squeal into a blind curve.

Rattle Snake on the Parkway

There is also particular to this time of the year, the dreaded leaves. I adore autumn especially the outrageously beautiful color changing of the leaves. Yet from a cycling perspective there is another dark side to the famous fall leaf. At some point through the transformation from beauty to wet and mushy pile of compost they extract a substance, slippery as all get out, that quickly turns any given bunch of leaves into bad-ness incarnate.

My one bad bike accident involved leaves.

While waiting to be x-rayed, one of the attending doctors said something like,

“Leaves was it? Surely you jest?” ( Either in my memory he was British or I am recently reading too many English novels)

Surely not, I said.

Wet mushy leaves are as terrifying as walnut husks, little fat acorns, broken glass, fallen branches.

There is too, the being in the middle of nowhere with a flat, the sudden rain or hail storm miles from home, the thankfully infrequent encounter with a slightly crazed homeless person and the most basic one act that many non-cyclists consider sheer madness - the clipping in of oneself to the frame of something on which you travel quite fast with only the tiniest bit of tire surface in contact with the earth at any given time.

So yes, doing one thing nearly every day that scares the heck out of me – accomplished. Check that.

Love my bike. Love to ride. Happy Autumn, truly my favorite season.

Stay tuned for next weeks information on our big event of the year, "The Run to Feed the Hungry"