It starts with a list.
A dozen or so names, repeated again and again. There are so many more, but those dozen are the ones that really mattered to me. Friends. Family. Mom.
There’s cancer and car wrecks, suicides and overdoses, all-too-young heart attacks and freak accidents. I think of them and I think of their bodies and how they’re no longer here, how they’re just gone, possibly somewhere but probably nowhere. I think of my legs. I feel them, their pain and their power, and I acknowledge how those legs are very much here. I acknowledge, despite all the misery that can often come with bike riding, when those legs feel utterly empty, how powerful they can be. I feel the air in my lungs and try to focus on my respiratory process; in, out, in, out. Not too fast, not too slow, taking in as much oxygen as I need. No more, no less.
Finally, I feel the sun on my face, my arms, and my legs, and I remind myself that I’m here. That I can ride. That I can feel this sun. That I can climb. That I can sprint. I’m here and they aren’t. I exist and they don’t. How dare I wish I were anywhere else. How dare I think of quitting. How lucky I am to be here, miserable as it may be. How lucky I am to be riding my bike. How lucky I am.
And again, I repeat their names thinking of that luck and how unfair it is that I’m here and they aren’t. But life and death really isn’t fair or unfair. It just kind of is.
Still, it’s unfair that they’re gone and that makes me angry and I try to turn that anger into the fuel for my legs to turn those pedals over and over and over. Because sometimes anger is good. Sometimes rage can help us, if we know how to harness it. Because I’m here and they’re not. And that makes me rageful. And I repeat their names and I remember what role they played in my life and I remind myself how they died. And sometimes that’s enough to get me to through.
This is what I call The Dark Place. It’s where I go when things start to get truly brutal when I’m on the bike; when the pain of the climb overtakes the joy of riding to such an extent that it’s almost impossible to recall what being happy feels like; when I need a reason to keep pedaling.
We all have this place. But only…