So I was flying up to san Francisco yesterday morning to catch a flight over to Honolulu for work. Anyway, on the flight up to sfo, I pretty much saw the last 5 or so years of my life flash before my eyes. No fright of death or anything like that – just flying over California waxing nostalgic.
Took off on a clear day out of sd, and saw the marines pt’ing it up at the marine corps recruit depot. Saw some running the obstacle course – I think they had their ‘kill’ faces on. The rest were doing pushups. Passed over ocean beach and wished it well – won’t be back for a week and a half or so.
Then I got in to reading the book I’m working on – ‘the dharma bums’ by Kerouac. Jack (ray in this book) had just finished Christmas mediations back at home in north Carolina and now he was back on the road hitching to California. He hitched, took a bus and stole aboard a train up to san Francisco – all to get up to meet his buddy at a cabin refuge before detail as a summer forest ranger began. Just jack and his rucksack. Made me reminisce on the days I spent in Europe back in ’99-‘00. Just me and my rucksack. Friends came, friends left – and I traveled and traveled. Somehow I fit grad school in around all that. What great times, though. I never hitched or rode boxcars, but boy were those some mad times. Saw it all on a shoestring and never had a care in my own dharma way. I started to wonder if I had lost the old spirit.
Just then I looked out the window and there was Hermosa beach, manhattan beach, el Segundo and LAX right below and another phase of life. Work. But not just work in san diego, this was the time I was on location in el Segundo back in ’04 and ’05 at the boeing plant – but still working for the navy – doing tests on the payload of a satellite that was set for launch in just a couple months. Usually when I think of that period I think of how stressed out I was with the work and how I wasn’t really able to do what i truly wanted to do at the time, which was train and race bikes. Instead, as we were flying over Hermosa I remembered the good times when steve, greg and I would go out to dinner after a hard day. We discovered some great places to eat up there and boy did we eat like kings. Just sticking our noses in the wind, pointing to a new place and saying, “yeh?” It was all on per diem, so there was never any heartache when the bill came – just the mild heartache that we had to go back to work the next day! A brief smile, but then I remembered how much of a godforsaken pit greater LA is. Oh…
By then we were just above LA and I saw the san gabriels out to the east. Snowboarding. It’s amazing to me – I only went snowboarding on 3 trips (10 days total) this season. Last season – ‘06/’07 – I did 45 days. Man, was I in to boarding back then. It was the new thing to do and it sure was fun – just different. At the beginning when I was still learning, I would ditch work on Wednesday for the mountain and then go back for more snow on Saturday or Sunday. The days in between were for letting the bruises subside! From the very beginning I had the crazy idea that I wanted to race snowboard cross (SBX). Absolutely ridiculous. Lots of people can be dreamers and visualize an end state of being, but it’s a lot less that actually go through with it and complete the journey. I can tell you the exact moment that I decided I wanted to try snowboarding, too. It was at the valley of the sun stage race (road bikes) in Feb ’06. We were watching the Olympics – of course – and SBX was on. The racers barreled down the hill like bats outta hell. Yeah, I had to do that. It’s still fun and I still love it, but for some reason I let work get in the way this year. I honestly can’t let that happen again.
Now we were over central California and I thought of merced and fresno. Great early season bike races about 5 hours drive from san diego. Sometimes I went to these races alone, sometimes with a friend and sometimes with a team. From ’03 all the way through ’06 these races – and bike racing in general – was pretty much all I had on my calendar. I remember my first year of racing in ’03, I traveled all over socal and central cal by myself – kind of a lone samurai bike racer. You know, I can tell you the exact moment that I thought I might want to try racing bikes, too. It was july of 2001, and I was traveling up the east coast from venice, fl to Philadelphia, pa to pursue rowing. I had just finished grad school, but was a bit out of sorts. I had just gotten a flush letter from TRW aerospace out in LA and I was questioning the whole engineering thing in general. So I decided that I was young and that I should move up to philly to see if I could ever make it as a rower. ‘Make it’ meaning making the national team, of course – there is no professional rowing circuit in the US. I was halfway up the coast and was staying with my dad in Wilmington, nc for a week or so. I was in no rush to get to philly – I think I took a month driving up the coast and staying with friends along the way – bumming it again. So I was at dad’s and wouldn’t you know the tour de france was on. I had lived in france and even been on the champs elysee when lance won his 2nd tour in 2000, but for some reason it just never resonated with me back then. But I was watching the TdF at dad’s in ’01 and all of a sudden I was hit with the enlightenment that “maybe I should try racing bikes? Bike racers get paid. Rowers don’t. could I be a bike racer?” and that’s about all it took. new circumstances and new notions. at that moment I decided that I would start in philly as a bike messenger with rowing on the side and try to find an engineering job – but in that economy there was no easy pipeline to engineering jobs, especially in philly. I started racing in philly, but it’s when I moved out to san diego in july ‘02 that I really took the plunge.
And all of a sudden we were touching tarmac in san Francisco – time to keep this ball rolling out to Hawaii for work…
