A great experience the other night. JB and I rode National together – it was a very social pace, not quite what I had intended for my day, but the company and the new ideas for lines and the confidence of someone watching your back ready to call the EMT’s if you endo are things I don’t get regularly since I ride alone so much.
Riding with others is always more effort. If you pick your partners right, that effort is usually paid back and more. The ride is never your ride, its our ride, so you have to be ready to go with the flow for delays, mechanicals, other’s speeds and hangups and things they want to try, the phonecalls and deadlines they must obey, their hunger and fatigue and energy to not let you stop, the things they want to do or talk about or kibbitz with others. Team. The closer you can get to someone with regard to their style, or what they bring to the ride that you want more of, the easier the differences work themselves out. The more team-oriented attitude you bring to the ride, the easier the differences work themselves out. The key is honesty about evaluating others, and evaluating yourself. And enjoying the ride for what it is and not what you thought it would be. Dance with who ya brung. Team.
I am pretty good about these things. I know what I want, I recognize it in others, and I ride with partners when i am of the proper mindset.
My National ride was feeling kinda negative. I felt physically crappy from eating too much mayonnaise and pasta, too much caffeine. Maybe it was climbing 24th St. to start things off, maybe it was that I forgot to unlock my fork, maybe it was that I was not nailing a lot of the big lifts that tell you if you are having a good day, maybe it was that i picked up a nail in one of the tires on the truck and was contending with a slow leak and a trip to Discount Tires. Whatever. I got a few things I’d never gotten before, but I was trapped in my own vibe. Had I gone home, the ride would be remembered as a downer. Hanging out after at Cactus Jack’s, Cactus Joe was feeling good about his ride. His happiness was infectious, and before I knew it, I was awash in the triumphs from my ride and not the defeats. It was just like the positivity I got at the end of the Squealer from BrianC, who ironically I rode with this morning while he and ScottN showed me all the gnar-gnar at PMP including Hairball and 1A, and then saved me from a bent derailleur hanger and a frayed rim strip, none of which bothered me much since the good company kept me focused on all the trials i got instead of the ones I didn’t.
Riding wit buds rocks.
