“You Wanna Do What?”

My 50th birthday was this year in April! Back in February, Bruce made the mistake of asking me what I’d like to do. It took me 10 seconds to reply. “I want to go on a big bike ride. ” I’m pretty sure he thought, “Oh, like a day of biking. That’s easy. Okay.” I sent him the link. I found a company in Oregon called Bicycle Rides Northwest. Six days of biking. 350 miles. Spectacular scenery. 24,000 feet of elevation gain. Go big or go home.

It got quiet on his end for about 10 minutes. I could tell he was looking at the website. Then he texted back, “I thought maybe we could take a trip to Death Valley…”. I didn’t really want to go to a place with the word “Death” in it on my 50th- that I’m closer to reckoning with my mortality at 50 is obvious. It didn’t feel like the right way to mark my 50th, and after all- it was MY 50th. “Nope. I’d rather do this bike ride.”

I’ve always been really active. As I’ve already mentioned in previous posts, walking and hiking are a passion for me, but as a kid so was my bike. When you are a kid, getting a bike represents freedom! I got my first bike for my 5th birthday and when I turned 9, I decided I needed a dirt bike. The one I wanted was $150, so my parents agreed that if I saved $100 from my newspaper route, they would pitch in the last $50. That dirt bike drove me through countless mud puddles, extended my kid territory beyond the confines of Foothills trailer park over the viaduct and all over the towns of Kemmerer, Diamondville and Frontier, Wyoming. I could go swimming, build forts with friends, go to any park or dirt pile I wanted. For my 50th, I felt the need to get back to my roots- I wanted to spend my time doing the things I love.

If Bruce weren’t so motivated to save our marriage, I might have gotten more pushback, as bicycling hasn’t really played a huge role in Bruce’s life, but I kind of had the advantage. We’ve spent a lot of our time together in our marriage working towards Bruce’s goals and dreams. He wanted to be a dairy farmer and we worked on that. We wanted to buy a farm- we worked on that. He wanted to build a new milk barn. We worked on that. I felt like it was my turn to see if he would work with me on one of my dreams. He agreed! So on March 7th we registered.

Now all we needed was to get bikes and start training! That’s right. Three months from the big ride and we didn’t even have bikes. I was riding my stationary bike several times a week, but 40 minutes of indoor cycling doesn’t cut it when you are needing to be physically capable of riding up to 70 miles a day for a week straight. All the training info I could find said you needed at least 4 months of solid training to be able to pull off the ride successfully. I kept this tidbit of info quiet and got busy searching Facebook Marketplace for bikes. We found a good used Trek for Bruce at Bob’s Bicycles in Boise and also met Shawn there who was a wealth of info for what we needed for gear. I found a used Trek road bike on FB marketplace for myself and we were ready to start!