Training wheels, part 2
I graduated from high school in 1986 and left for a state university about an hour away. Being an underclassman, I couldn’t have a car on campus, so I took my ten-speed with me. Going from a high school with about 200 students to a university with 10,000 was a bit of a shock, and with my closest friends away at other schools, I felt somewhat overwhelmed. I gradually became friends with a girl on my dorm floor named Bonnie. She was pleasant and rather quiet and seemed, as I was, to be struggling to find her place. I soon learned that she had brought a bike to school too, and sometimes after eating in the dining hall, we would ride away from campus and out into the neighborhoods surrounding it, looking at the houses and noting our path so we didn’t get lost. In one newer subdivision we noticed that all the streets bore names of women, and we theorized that these were either the developer’s children or his girlfriends.
Six years later when I returned to the same university for graduate school, my bike came with me and sometimes served as transport from the townhouse apartment I shared with two roommates to the liberal arts building where I spent most of my time. On my way home one afternoon, I decided to alter my route from the street to the path that ran parallel to it so I wouldn’t have to dodge traffic. Instead of waiting for an opening in the curb to get onto the path, I got the brilliant idea of riding over the curb. A second after my front tire hit it, there was a loud CLUNK. I made it onto the path and then stopped to have a look. My front wheel frame was dented from hitting the curb. Brilliant, I thought. I managed to get the hobbled bike back to my apartment and then attempted to pound out the dent with a hammer. The result was not pretty, but it was functional. Thus was my first go at bicycle repair.
In 1995, I bought myself a new bike. It was a metallic purple Giant mountain bike. (For those unfamiliar, Giant was the brand name, not a description of its stature.) At the time I was sharing an apartment with my future husband, Tony, and one night both of our bikes got stolen from our second-floor balcony where we stored them. Miraculously, the police recovered his red Schwinn, but my silver no-name was gone for good, which was just as well because the Giant was way better. I even had a purple helmet to match.
We liked to ride during the winter, which is when the nubby, fat mountain bike tires came in handy on the slushy roads and sidewalks. We would put on several layers of clothes and warm gloves and those cold-weather headbands that cover your ears and head off down the path that ran behind our apartment complex. We stayed to the side streets that were less traveled, avoiding the ice but rolling gleefully through the snow. Afterwards back at our apartment, we would clutch mugs of scalding chocolate hot enough to thaw our frigid fingers.
In a few years, Tony and I ended up living and working in Houston, Texas. Houston is an immense, sprawling, and car-centered city, and I remember going for a bike ride exactly once during our entire tenure there. But it was in Houston that the first seed for road cycling was planted in me. I was working at an investment company at the time, and one of my co-workers was an accomplished triathlete. One day I heard her trying to talk another co-worker into training for a bike ride called the MS-150, a two-day, 150-mile ride from Houston to Austin that raised money for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. I’d always liked riding my bike, and I was intrigued by the idea and listened in for a bit, mentally filing the conversation away.
While living in Houston, Tony and I married, and in 2001 his company transferred us to England, where our son was born and I became a full-time, at-home mother. It was a role I had never anticipated playing, but at the time it made perfect sense because we were overseas. Plus I was breastfeeding, and even though I found motherhood exhausting and at times baffling, I felt strongly that I wanted to be the one who cared for our son while he was still so small.
In 2003, we were sent back to Houston. Several months later, I learned that Tony’s company sponsored a team each year for the MS-150, and around February of 2004, e-mails went out announcing that training rides would soon begin. The prospect of riding 150 miles in two days fascinated and excited me. Tony had trained for and run two marathons by this time, and I could not join him because my various joints protested mightily when I ran. But I remembered well that dangerous and free feeling from my earlier bike-riding days. So I thought about joining the team, but in the end I didn’t. Even though I greatly wanted to resurrect that dangerous and free feeling, mothering our young son was my first priority, and I felt guilty about wanting something for myself while he still needed me so much. And frankly, I was afraid of making a fool of myself by not being able to keep up.
Our daughter arrived in 2005, and I began to feel uneasy about my marriage even while I was pregnant. At first I attributed the increasing erosion of our connection to one another to the stresses of work, family, parenting, and life in general. I knew that it was not uncommon for couples to go through peaks and valleys, especially as circumstances in the relationship change. But I also knew that valleys, left unchecked, could sink deeper and deeper. Unfortunately, it was in this direction that we seemed to be headed.
As I struggled with the travails of motherhood and an increasingly unsteady marriage, in January of 2006, we found ourselves in Oklahoma City. Tony received a promotion and a transfer to a new position, and the preceding two months had been a stressful whirlwind: our house in Texas was put on the market, which meant working around showings and open houses; we made two trips to Oklahoma, first to explore where we might want to live, and then to house hunt; our son’s birthday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas came and went in close succession; I searched for a preschool that wouldn’t drain our bank account; and I was still breastfeeding our daughter, who was not yet a year old.
While I strove to settle us into our new home, unpacking and organizing our things as I got Jack ensconced in preschool and cared for Baby Anna while Tony traveled for work, I became conscious that my stomach was in a perpetual knot. I slept restlessly when I slept at all, and my gut was in a state of constant churning that left me feeling sick much of the time. My doctor referred me to a gastro-intestinal specialist, who scheduled me for a colonoscopy. After the procedure, the G-I doc said it was refreshing to examine such a pink and healthy colon, something he rarely saw in his line of work. (I suppose that was meant to make me feel better.) The usual recommendations for my symptoms – choose healthier foods, exercise regularly – were moot because I did those things already. So he attributed my ill feelings to stress and told me I needed to relax. Gee, Doc, ya think?
