I wasn’t sure what to write for this one, I went back and forth with paragraphs about when Steevo and I had first started hanging out, about how we spent the better part of 6 years driving around the country chasing cyclocross races and about when he got hurt and decided to focus his efforts and interest more on rocks and mountains in the fall time than on smashing pedals in the mud.
I thought about writing about how after 13 or so years of hanging out we have never really had a petty argument or yelled at one another. I was going to tell you the story about how this past weekend, how we stayed at a hostel with one of the strangest and one of the most unnerving humans I have encountered in a long time. Then I realized it’s already Wednesday evening, that the race we saw in Rochester Saturday is ancient history, that the soreness in my legs from hiking up and down the two tallest peaks in New York state is starting to fade and that the coming weekend is closer than the past one.
I thought about how bike racing was just a catalyst for a friendship that doesn’t necessarily need bikes to survive, that the world is more than just tape around stakes in the ground, than results, than pit bikes. The world is mountains and streams and bears and people, kind ones, crazy ones and ones that you are capable of forging a friendship with. (People that it is, not bears, we’ve all seen that film.)
When the car hit the highway proper and Steevo queued the Get Up Kids, it could have been any year from 2008 forward, the difference was there were no bikes in the car. Sure we went to Rochester to catch the first C1 of the year and the racing was good, and if it’s any indication of how this season is going to play out I think we are in for a heck of a ride, but our objective for the weekend was the Adirondacks.
We went from the heat to winter conditions on top of Mt. Marcy, from the raucous to the serenity of Mt. Algonquin on a crystal clear day. Fueled on coffees and gas station snacks we covered a lot of ground in 3 days, and it left me thinking what natural wonders are in close proximity to the next big race weekend to convince Steevo into another weekend of maxing it out.
