I could not take any more....so I popped smoke and called for an evac out of the festering neon distraction. I had become combat ineffective, a shell of the person I'd spent so many miles building up. It's amazing to me that after a year of laying off the distance, the fire to go long never went out. It ate at me, clawing my insides until I wanted to scream from the angst of holding it in. So I ran, packed the only things that matter to me, and went south to better trails; leaving behind everything else not required to bike, ski or take care of my dog. Nothing else would be required, because nothing else, IS required. I had compromised myself based on a faulty premise....so I fixed it. Every time I make a move, my footprint gets smaller, more refined, more efficient and reflective of the core that is me. I am left now with everything I truly need....and it all fits in a truck and a trailer.
She draws from me a level of energy every time, the serpentine track of tan underlying a sea of grass. The sound of my freshly lubed Chris King Hub rings into my ear along with the staccato crunch-snap of quartz and feldspar sand beneath my tires.....
The intent in my latest move was to be closer to the siren that calls me toward the rocks. I can't escape her, so I might as well join her....a fatal dance that I accept. I'm a big believer of training like you fight, and fighting like you train. If I intend to ride 300, I will dance with her, every day, until I can read her every curve in my mind, anticipate her temperamental moods and lead with authority.
The climb up here was proper, out of the lower Sonoran Desert and into the Sonoran Highlands....her smooth curves cutting in and out of the ridgeline, traversing cliffbands and cutting across vertical curved reefs of Shindaggers....
As my mind wandered along with my bike, I find myself in that long state that I often seek. A place where the time disappears and the shadows move around me as the sun arcs low against the winter sky. It's a state of consciousness which is defined by nothingness....no worries, no thoughts and no pain. Just breath.....heartbeat.....and pedal stroke. How I long to live like this!
My lunch break is taken in a copse of Juniper which act as a windbreak to the cutting western blow, chilling me to the bone once I stop. I position myself between two granite boulders in the sun, absorbing the thermal radiation flowing from the mass, and chew on my lunch....working fast and hard to gulp it down so that I may get moving once again.....time spent stopped is time spent cold.
Turning for home, I cycle across the savanna, framed by massifs which hold the early winters snow just below an infinite sky blue. A blue which drives the wind against me, slowing my return.....the succubus extracts her final cut for the day. How I long to be back, paying from my body, her personal toll.
