Highway 20. Coming or going. It doesn't matter really. What was ahead or what was behind, the anticipation and the satisfaction play on equal footing in my mind. (Crash into me and I come into you ...) CDs on random. Jack Kerouack and pushing that jack - on the road I went. I had no concept of what I was about to get into, with the Red-Head or with The Race that Changes.
Phone calls and bike rides. Runs in the hills behind; swims in the lake. Soerbet in the heat under an awning with a couple from Wenatchee. Steak Dinner at the Duck Brand before heading home ... On Highway 20. Radio pumping Rancid and Dave Mathews, knowing that she was there. She didn't care. She just liked to be around me. I knew I had to grab onto that and hold on with everything I had. It was precisely that feeling that pushed me away, running scared before returning and confronting the smile and the embrace that I will never leave.
At some point we all quit talking about what it was we were going to give up to maintain this freedom we felt and what we knew to be good and righteous and whole. Youth. We moved on to jobs and the nasty undercurrents of the desperate masses.
I'm imagining now, I find some solace in the training toward ultra-races. I get to still be in touch with that youthful idealistic energy that is the world and it keeps me going in my current "real world" life. Without Tri-Geek-Dom, I'm not sure who I am, or who I would have turned out to be.
The personal, unutterable darkness and lightness confronted and moved through and beyond. Joy.
