its a sweet whip

"S'that your whip?" with a nod to the mountain bike.

"yeah. It's nothing fancy, but I dig it."

"It's a sweet whip."

~a smile~ "I think so."

"Whoa, wait... disk brakes too?" ~an answering smile~ "niiiice."

And so that was the conversation from Friday that served to reiterate that I know NOTHING about mtb except that it's abbreviated mtb in a text message and that "whip", "ride", and "mtb" are interchangeable when referring to mountain bikes in certain settings.

But despite that lack of education, Saturday I was throwing around words like “cog”, and “whip”, and “gear”, and “sh*t!”, and “tree!” like I had a clue what they all meant, all while huffing through the woods sounding suspiciously like a twenty year 2 pack a day smoker on her very own mtb...

There was an occasional scream or squeal of glee-omgIamgoingtodie-fun.

"Uh, TOM???"

"Uh, Ginny, just ride over it."

I could totally tell y'all a story here, but I don't think it counts as a real bike wreck or fall unless there's blood & stuff. #prettysure

And, besides, it.was.AWESOME!

It was kinda the most fun I’ve ever had on a bike, ever.

Shhh. Don’t tell OC, my road bike, I was cheating on her... but honestly, this was so much more my speed and style than road biking. I will even argue that when you consider there was one ditch that I looked at and couldn’t bring myself to ride through. I will next time. I just needed to re-acclimate myself to riding off road before attempting badass level 7.

Today I was definitely squarely in badass level 3... maybe 4... for a few minutes...

And to be honest, this whole thing... well, it was just like riding a bike.

The last time I rode a single-track type outing was with a fellow BMX kid back in 1992-ish. We both had what we called mini-mountain bikes. They were BMX in size, but fully geared, and we tooled around the woods near our house on them for a summer and fall...  by the spring I think we’d both moved onto bigger and badder things.

My thing was a horse named Ringo (cos I was a Beatles fan) and his thing was a cute 8^th grader named Rebecca or Samantha or something like that (cos he was a boy).

Regardless, it’s been 20’ish years since I’ve been on a bike in the woods, and about 3 minutes into my ride today I thought, “I have found my winter cross training”.

For shizzle.

In fact, if I wasn’t training for a (race) this spring, I might take up mountain biking as a bit more than a cross training sport. I can totally see how this could be my new sport for a while. Kinda like how a few years back I was really into swimming... and then I came back to running after the break...?

Only, I don’t need a break right now. I just need a really intense high quality cross training adventure once a week... 

cos, yeah... this, today... this didn’t suck.