Everyone is asleep & my body keeps telling that I should be, but my mind is spinning from our wonderful valentine’s weekend on bikes with my husband and three kids, ages 1, 5 and 7. It all started with an article in Bicycling magazine about this crazy guy who hooks up all three kids in an unbelievable configuration to travel across Canada all summer long. The article was so inspiring that I immediately befriended Joe Kurmaskie on facebook, bludgered him with lots of questions and read two of his latest books, Momentum is your Friend and Mud, Sweat & Gears.
The last book was personally inscribed, “To Chad, Shawn, Breckin, Peep & Thatcher, Stray Well. Cheers,”
Somehow this clearly indicated that I needed to get back on a bike, especially since I couldn’t run, because of a foot injury. It has been a while…ok, a REALLY long while. Growing up in the country where every home is on large multi-acre plots, I remember my friends and I riding everywhere we wanted to go. My next closet neighbor-friend was definitely a bike ride away, not a walk and my closest-in-age boy cousin and I would take our bikes to the creek, practice jumping them, perfect our bunny hops, tow skateboards and whatever other wacky and probably totally dangerous activity we could think of. As I remember it, I didn’t really have any fear of bikes until one summer day when I crashed going WAY too fast down the big hill by my house on my brother’s bike wearing jelly sandals. I’ll spare you the details, but it ended badly with stitches in my head and a brush to scrape the road particles out of my skin every morning. I still cringe when thinking about it. It’s not that I didn’t “get right back on the bike” afterwards. Of course I did, it was the way things were done in our family, but I will always remember having a fear or perhaps a healthy dose of respect for them from that point on.
So, Chad enthusiastically adjusted the seat on his old mountain bike and hooked up the trailer for Thatcher to ride in, and I started out the next morning. On a side note, I think that part of Chad’s enthusiasm was related to the fact that this shifted the attention from him dreaming about bikes to him supporting my bike dream. You see, Chad has been spending the better part of his free time (which is not much) looking at used bikes. Ever since his Ironman, he got some illness that made him want to look at bicycles the way some men might look at porn or play fantasy football. Of course, that is an exaggeration, but it had escalated to the level of me noticing and teasing him from time to time.
As I pondered our first ride, the only problem I could really see is that I live in Mission Hills. Being an appropriate name, our neighborhood is at the top of a hill. Actually, it is more than a hill. In my humble opinion, the roads leading into our neighborhood are switchback eligible, but with property values being as they are in San Diego, I suppose that is was/is not an option. Luckily, I didn’t have to think about THAT until the way home and kept reminding myself that bikes have brakes and only go as fast as you want them to on the way down.
A couple of weeks later, I have bought a used road bike and am packing up our gear to go camping ON the bikes. After two different bike-child configurations, we finally find something that is doable—not easy, but doable. Initially, we thought we could tow Breckin on her own bike. This proved to not work AT ALL. Then we borrowed an additional trail-a-bike from friends and tried again. I thought that we would put the heavy panniers on my bike with the only the trail-a-bike since Chad would have a trail-a-bike and fully loaded trailer. I got on to test things out minutes before I thought we would leave for our little trip and um, no. The bike I had purchased and LOVED while pulling the trailer around town will not work for this. It is just too light and the loaded trail-a-bike was pulling me all over the place. I had no control and if I fought for it, we became a shutter-y mess.
I really had to stay strong at this point, because after all of the energy I had put into the trip, I was having a hard time watching it crumble around us. I think Chad could sense this and he even offered to go over to a bike shop right then and buy a touring bike for me to ride. After a bit of a discussion, we head back home and as a last ditch effort we put a stripped down “racing version” of the trail-a-bike on my bike and tried again. This time, we achieved success or at least, some sense of control, but it meant that Chad would be pulling our ENTIRE load minus one child on his full suspension mountain bike. His road bike or tri-bike would not pull the weight, and I think he had been waiting for this test run to see if this was actually going to be fun for us before purchasing an actual touring bike. Honestly, he was having a hard time seeing the girls rise to the challenge. He wasn’t with us when we trekked around Costa Rica last summer. He didn’t see how an adventure can turn these girls from wimpy and whinny to tough and proud. I kept reminding him that he needed to stay optimistic, make it fun and don’t let them know there is any other option. ;-)
More to come tomorrow, but for now I will leave you with a photo of Chad’s rig and a happy Thatcher just hanging out in the trailer at camp. He actually couldn’t wait to get moving again the next day and kept climbing in there while we packed our gear up!
by Shawn
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