10%

getting stoked

again.

By InSearchofSvet

April 10^th, 2018

Some cheesy over-hyped writer once said that love lasts three years. I don´t know about love towards human beings, but it definitely happened to me with my cycling.

If you check my strava stats (it´s not a desperate attempt to lure you into my strava) you can see how I slowly got into cycling and gradually increased the number of kilometres ridden, starting with 300 in 2013 and peaking 10,000 in 2016. Some people ride that in like couple of months, but for me it was a very very impressive number. 2017 was a hard year, but I still managed to fit in some 6k here and there. Then the winter came and I suddenly realised that I felt sick just with a single idea of having to ride my bike. I felt slow and weak, I didn´t really have any money to go ride somewhere, and I honestly couldn´t bear riding the same five hills around Barcelona again.

So I stopped for couple of weeks. Couple of weeks turned into two months. But after riding bikes for so many years, I kind of surrounded myself with only cycling related people, and damn the peer pressure can be frustrating. Everyone kept asking me why am I not riding, over and over again. That kind of sucked.

But what sucked even more was that first day of riding after the winter break.

Let me describe that feeling to you.

You know when you sit in the train and look out of the window on the platform, then a train in front of you starts to move, and couple of seconds you don´t really understand is it your train moving or not? It´s kind of a uncomfortable feeling. Well that is exactly how I felt throughout those three hours. It felt like I was standing still, and everything else around me was moving. I was slow and miserable.

As you can imagine it´s really hard to find motivation to get out of the house the next morning to experience the same sensation all over again.

Couple of miserable weeks later our mountain bikes from Merida arrived. Two double suspension twinsies with 27,5 tyres, cause yours truly is a midget, sent from heaven to save my relationship with cycling .

The first rides we did with Justin were not really MTB riding, mostly you could call them "Hike and Bike" or "Hike and not even Bike".

But then came the first time...

The first time I actually climbed a hill without putting my foot down.

The first time I went down a single track without putting my foot down.

The first time we did a ride without hiking.

The first time I did a bunny hop which wasn´t 1cm from the ground.

The first time I didn´t forget to unlock my suspension on a descent.

The first time I felt "The Flow" for a fracture of a second.

And the most important one.

The first time I hit the final steep descent at a perfect hour of a perfect day, when it was already getting chilly, but the golden hour sun made the plants, the dirt and even the trash around me look magical. That moment when I felt that I love cycling again, was so so precious.