Because I Can

I have always been a little perplexed by the whole idea of blogging or facebooking or tweeting or whatever you want to call it. Why on earth would anyone want to spend their precious time to read about me or something I’ve got to say, usually about me. Now I do get it when it comes to impacting the world like it did recently in Egypt or other parts of the Middle East but if I wanted to be entertained by reading something I usually find it more interesting and worthwhile when I pay for it. That said, Larry seems to think there is value to our team in us telling stories that pertain to cycling so if you’re actually going to take time to read this, I’ll do my best to make it tolerable.

This one will only encapsulate the Masters Mountain Bike World Championship I did on Friday as opposed to be about it. It’s really going to be more about something that’s been whirling around inside my head for a few weeks now and, as is usually the case, song lyrics and common sayings become more profound to me when such whirlings happen.

In the last month I’ve been home for a total of seven days. I’ve raced five times but to do so I’ve traveled door-to-door 152 hours and crossed 26 times zones.

Now some might think it’s to win world championships and that would be a good guess but it’s not the real reason. The real reason is because I can. I’ve ridden my bike 365 days a year, year in and year out for the last dozen years. Everyone, bar no one, that hears that thinks I am either crazy or a fool and I guess they wonder why? The simple answer and only one is because I can.

Many years ago my sister-in-law’s mother died of a painful cancer (what cancer isn’t painful) at an age that I believe was much younger than me now. I have never forgotten how I sobbed in my office on the phone when I heard about it. My father-in-law died of prostate cancer at a young age a few years ago. I held him only days before he died and I felt the grapefruit-sized tumors in his abdomen. My wife beat breast cancer twice and lives in fear everyday that she’ll have to do it a third time. The last time, in 2006, she underwent chemotherapy and after the first treatment she got spinal meningitis. So if the cancer wasn’t going to kill her maybe the meningitis would or maybe just leave her paralyzed and in a wheel chair for the rest of her life. Oh yeh, she also had 10 surgeries that year including ones to remove the cancer, two mastectomies, a hysterectomy, an ovarectomy and multiple reconstructive surgeries. While she was going through all this she told me the worst thing about it all was the possibility she would not see her daughters graduate from high school.

A few weeks ago my teammate Chris Lyman gets hit by a car riding his bike and the first paramedic on the scene didn’t think he was going to live. Mick and I visited him in the hospital a week later and it was a sobering experience. He had survived but it was still questionable whether he would walk again. I’m really happy to report he’s on the trainer spinning the cranks with one leg waiting for the other one to heal and apparently using hand cranks to complete his workouts.

I went to South Africa and Brazil for world championships this year. In Pietermaritzburg we would drive past the shanty towns every day. That was another sobering experience. Most of the dwellings were nothing more than cardboard shacks, something you would think homeless people might seek shelter in. The second time we drove by I noticed there were numbers painted on the side walls (if you could call them walls) and realized they were actually postal addresses. These were people’s houses where they live, most likely their entire lives. Now I am not a religious person but the only thing I could think of was ‘there by the grace of God go I’. It also dawned on me that the two bikes I brought to South Africa were worth more than the people that live in these dwellings probably made in their lifetimes.

I guess I am more or less an agnostic in my understanding of the term. I just don’t think my brain is big enough to grasp the complexity of God but for whatever reason, I am eternally thankful that I was born to my parents and not one of those in a shanty town in Pietermaritzburg. It hit home again yesterday as I drove past the barrios of Sao Paulo.

On the plane home today I found myself thinking about the portion of the line in the Jackson Browne song The Pretender, “… get up and do it again. Amen.” As I thought about it, it was the first time I actually focused on the word amen. Yes, amen! Thank goodness I can get up and do it again. Because I can!

Oh yeh, the bike race on Friday. Does it really matter what happened? Not really. Not really.

I finished second but the best part about it was that I did it. Because I can.

Now go buy a book.

Thanks, Rob