Hoppin' Happy!

Definitely not mad, that would be crazy!

Back in the days when I was teaching riding skills clinics, I learned to start with how to hop the bike over an obstacle, usually a log. While some might consider this a more advanced skill, it was a good place to start because it requires a significant back and forward weight shift, and movement of body weight is fundamental to all bike control. Secondly, when students saw me clear a two foot high log, just brushing it with my tires, I generally had their attention for the rest of the class, which is also a goid place to start.

At some point in that class, I'd say that a bike isn't really controlled with the arms, but rather the hips, as the center of the body's mass. Where the hips go, the weight goes. Then, when I injured the nerve that enervates my left arm, I learned that the arms are pretty useful for moving the hips around on a bike. No arm pull meant no snap forward of my hips, and that meant I couldn't hop logs, pretty much at all. Somebody could write a song about one part of the body being connected to another part of the body, being connected to....

My body has been recovering, and this Saturday I ran the 7 Sisters running trail race. My finish time was over eleven minutes slower than when I raced in 2024, but I was infinitely faster than last year when my body wasn't capable of running at all. It was also good for perspective of how fortunate I've been to inhabit the body I inherited. Even running a lot slower, on a day when conditions saw a lot of people set PR times, I won the 50-59 age category, which could be renamed the "old mountain biker" class, as the top three finishers all were exactly that!

Today I headed back out there to collect water bottles I'd dropped on the trailside during the race. Convenient, the quite fun Earl's mountain bike trails overlap the course for a quarter mile, so that's where I dropped the bottles, adding some mountain biking to my collecting duties! Bonus, I really like those trails, the kind that aren't hard to ride, but require a particular skill set to ride fast.

When placing bottles before the race,

 I hide them under leaves, but during the race,

 I just drop them by a recognizable landmark.

I lost only one to someone cleaning up.

With time, physical therapy, and exercises, I'm steadily regaining my skill set, including the ability to clear some, but not all, downed logs. With the wind we've been having, I found a "not all" one across the trail on my bonus miles after reclaiming my water bottles. It would've been at my limit, especially on an uphill, even with full deterity in my arm.

I didn't have a saw to cut it out, but the woods are full of more manageable sized logs that serve as effective levers, so I was able to pry it off the other deadfall that was propping it up and lower it about six inches to where someone might be able to ride it.

Hmm, I started to wonder if I'd recovered enough to be one of those someones, so grabbed my bike, headed back down the trail, and took a run at it. I was far from smooth, but it actually happened, I cleared the log! Sort of like the race, I've definitely done much better, but heading in the right direction to regain that "better" feels quite satisfying right now.

Why mess with success? Well, because sometimes messing around can bring even more wins. Out of the popular Earl's area, I came upon more uncleared trees on the trails that conncted me back down to my street. The first was probably as high as the blocker I'd levered lower before it lost that six inches of height. Too high, right? Yes, but I tried anyway, and while I didn't clear it, the dragging of my chainring was gentle enough to avoid any damage to it.

I'm getting there, 

but not yet ready to teach a clinic on this set.

If at first I don't succeed, give up and keep riding up the trail! The thing about woods, the trees fall, and in a half mile I was given another opportunity to further exercise my recovery on a slightly more manageable mass across the trail.

This one I cleaned. I might've

even looked like I knew what I was doing.

I've heard that shite happens, yes, but now, I happen to be happily hopping!