Birthday Ride

With the Santa Anas blowing LA is a city of clear skies and warm temperatures.

As cyclists we may measure time a bit more observantly than some. Sure, we follow the course of a year the same as everyone else. But each year is another season spent on the bike. Each year is a self-contained string of high points, misses. It’s the way we mark each year that gives us our perspective.

Thrash settles in for the first climb.

It comes up in the way we talk about our riding with other cyclists. Even for those of us who no longer race (if we ever did) it’s not uncommon to mark previous years in the course of conversation.

On a climb that long a head-start is really only useful for getting into position for pictures.

I’m ahead of where I was this time last year.

It’s been five years since I could climb that in the big ring.

I’m always lousy in January.

How anyone flies over washboard I’ll never know.

The odd feature of this life is that we can get lost in the routines of training. Base miles in the fall and winter, intervals and early races in the spring, riding hard all summer long. We don’t always look up to make sure we’re keeping it fresh.

Jens and StageOne picked me up and stuck me on the fire.

But eventually we mark so many years we hit one of those personal milestones. Thank God for friends. While I let my birthday slip quietly by last month, a friend is celebrating his 50th birthday. As is true with the gift of cycling, he doesn’t look it. To celebrate, we rounded up an 18-strong group to break our routine and do something a little different.

It takes only one mistake to give up a wheel on a dirt road climb.

As is typical of many Sundays, we climbed one of the canyon roads in Malibu but this time dropped into the San Fernando Valley to climb Dirt Mulholland which I mentioned in my recent post when I went for a ride with Spencer from Ritte Racing. From the Valley, Mulholland is a six-mile climb with a few respites, though it’s all work.

Refueling with StageOne (right) and others once the pain was over.

Stepping out of the routine can help reminds us of the bigger picture, celebrating life in the unusual even as we’ve worked celebrate it by establishing routines to make the most of the time we have.

Birthday boy Hockey Stick was all smiles at our regroup at the top of the climb.

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about riding a dirt road, but it’s something we don’t usually do and it was a way to mark the occasion, and a way to entice friends who aren’t local to come up for a ride we’ve promised each other to do annually.

I lose street cred for living in a place this warm in January.

Here’s to marking occasions with a special ride.