Sweat pours down my forehead saturating my eyebrows. I slide my right index finger inside my sunglasses and swipe the left, then the right, with a flick like windshield wipers disrupting the waterfall for a moment.
The mercury rises to 98 degrees on the hottest day of the year to date, and I’m loving every, single second of it.
I dream of this during the chilly, wet Oregon winters: The sun beating down on me with everything it has to offer, cooking me deep to my bones.
Ahhhhhh ….
It must have been those icy 10-degree below zero days in late January that prompted my parents to pull us from school in Wisconsin to drive to the sun-drenched humid climes of Florida each year to visit my grandparents.
By the time I reached ninth grade, it became my training retreat for track, sweating endlessly on a short running track at the local park. To have some fitness when I hit Florida, I ran a few times a week in those icy conditions with a face mask, the ice crunching beneath my Adidas Gazelles covering frozen toes.
Whatever the price, the payoff came with the scorching sun squeezing sweat from every pore.
On this day I’m halfway up a very steep climb on a gravel logging road that climbs 500 feet in the first half mile, a few 50- to 100-yard flat stretches intensifying the sections where the road reaches skyward.
I’m lost in my climbing rhythm, pedal strokes synced with my breath. I can feel my heart rate thumping in my forehead. My mind keeping a constant health inventory.
I’m well aware guys my age sometimes crumple over and die in conditions much more tame than this. I chuckle, thinking to myself that my Guardian Angels will send a pickup truck up the climb forcing me to stop before I do any serious harm to myself.
I glance over at a few cows in a meadow, that reaches up the hill to the base of the forested mountainside, and look far above to the tree tops another thousand feet ahead, my ultimate goal.
It just doesn’t get any better than this, for me. I convince myself that I must remind my wife and daughters that if, someday, they find my body deep in the woods, in the mountains, lifeless, they must know I wouldn’t want it any other way. I would have gone down with a smile on my face.
A day or so later I would see a post online posing the question: How do you want to die?
A no brainer for me.
Give me my bike.
Crank up the heat.
Send the road toward the heavens.
Nirvana
This week’s question, how would you like to go if it happens on a bike ride?
Man, do I really have to die?
I’m 71, but I think I still have a lot left in me. Lots more aches and pains, and this year has really sucked. Nothing tragic, just niggling stuff, surgery, PT, other random stuff. I have half the miles I should have by now, but fuck it, I’m going out.
So, dying on a bike, huh? Sorry, not doing it.
I’m not saying it has to happen soon, just how you want it to happen. Personally I’m planning to live to 130 …
Tough one, but here it is:
I return home from a great day on the bike, I sit down out side and tell my wife all about how it went, take a sip of a post ride beverage and expire. Bury me it the garden in my bike clothes!