During a long training ride, I passed a girl crying.
She sat alone at a picnic table alongside the Minnetrista pedestrian path, surrounded by a mountain of books and a sweating cup of something cold. As I rode by, she wiped her cheek, her face blotched red with the kind of pain that instantly pulled me back to devastation.
I wondered what had broken her open: a boy? a loss? Whatever it was, I felt her.
Her image stayed with me for the rest of the ride. Excuses ran rampant on an endless day of training — heading home to finish the 80 miles on a spin bike at the Rec, splitting the distance over two days, or stopping at sixty and calling it a strong brick-run day — anything to make the miles move faster.
Later in the day, I found myself back on the street where I grew up. The driveway to 1525 — now a blue house — once felt much wider. So did the street. I turned right from Macedonia onto the dead-end street that still held the first thirteen years of my life.
The road felt longer. Before I knew it, I was gliding down the “big” hill my friends and I raced as kids. I remembered the time I jumped off the back pegs of my black-and-red Mongoose, my cousin steering straight toward a parked car, and flew down the hill on my stomach until I skidded to a stop outside my house, skin burning with road rash.
Later, I’d reminisce with my mom about that era — the Pogo stick years. The screeching springs of that bumblebee-striped stick must still echo through the neighborhood nearly twenty years later.
I kept riding, tracing the old road toward the open valley at the end — where the wild, overgrown yards had once stood. The trees that once erupted wildly from the ground were gone. The air used to hum with mosquitoes and the smell of damp wood. Now it’s open, bright, breathing again.
Back then, the trip from 1525 to the end of the road felt like twenty minutes. Today, I was there before I could blink.
Even as you grow bigger, the world doesn’t seem to shrink.
It’s only when you return to the beginning that you realize how small it’s always been.
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