Four Years

It was the middle of March in 2020 when we realized life needed to come to a screeching halt. Covid was among us. The SARS-CoV2 virus was contagious, the clinical sequelae severe and the deaths were starting to stack up. We went into various forms of lock down.

Confined at home, for the most part, many of us cast around for things to keep ourselves busy. I realized that I hadn’t been on a proper bike ride for eight months.

While my cycling had been intermittent for the past two decades, this seemed to be an unusually long time. So I went for a ride.

First Covid ride

May 2020

And then I went for some more rides. A LOT more rides at first. And I puttered around in the garage fixing up my old bikes. And rode some more.

The Covid crisis, and the past four years, corresponded with growing independence of my offspring. It also corresponded with a traditional midlife crisis period of my life.

I decided I did not want to stop riding until I am physically unable. I had ridden at the exercise/enthusiast level since I was about 12 years old, albeit in a geographical region that had seasons. I was able to race two spring seasons at the end of high school and joined my college race team in my first year. Once I graduated, I rode bikes pretty regularly for another five years, this time in lovely year-round climate San Diego.

Then about two decades of life intervened and took me away from regular riding.

Thus, my Covid-induced conviction that I wanted to return referenced the kind of frequency that I was maintaining in my late teens and early 20s. I intended this not merely to be a Time of Covid thing, but I wanted to maintain riding as we slowly returned to some semblance of normal life. And I’ve been doing pretty well at that. It is rare that I do not get on a bike for a reasonable length ride for more than a week. I don’t think I’ve gone over 10 days between rides in the past four years. I even get on the trainer in the garage now and again when the weather is bad or the light has gotten away from me. As I did last night.

It has been a successful four years.