We all remember our first bike ride. As a kid I’d rip around my neighborhood on my Mongoose BMX, and it was everything to me. It meant freedom; I could ride wherever I wanted to go. It meant friends houses, jumps off curbs, and fishing poles to the bay. As a kid, the possibilities seemed endless, but as we grew into adulthood, we gradually forgot to appreciate this unrestrained independence. In my teens, I skateboarded, surfed, played other sports in high school, but nothing quite captured that childlike sense of freedom. Maybe it was the aspect of seemingly unbounded exploration that was so alluring as a child. As children we were confined to wherever our feet could take us. (But my buddy John lives like a mile away! I ain’t trekking a mile to see him. He’s got a cool dart gun, but it’s not that cool.) However, with a bike...

At the beginning of college, my friend Alex (@SingletrackSampler) and I decided to take whatever bikes we had laying around and hit the local trails of Tampa. My rig was a Cannondale mountain bike from the 80s (the kind that still had those osymetric chainrings) and Alex had a piece of shit Kmart dud with the biggest plastic waffle on his cassette. We had no idea what we were getting into, but we drove to Alafia Mountain Bike Park just outside of Tampa and had ourselves a blast. We went in headfirst with no clue what double diamond meant, but dear god we knew after. Countless endos and shin scrapes later, we called it a day. We had a shit ton of fun, but mostly we found a passion for something that we hadn’t experienced before. The endos became less frequent and our shins began to look more presentable.

A year later, I transferred to Florida State University in Tallahassee to join the track team as a pole vaulter. Though I was there to jump, I used whatever savings I had on a Gary Fisher mountain bike. Tallahassee has some decent trails to rip around, and it was a great way to stay in shape during the downtime. Unfortunately my track goals got squandered by ulcerative colitis. It was tragic. You spend almost a decade working towards a goal, your whole identity is wrapped up in this persona, it was my passion, and it was stripped from me. For me, being an athlete isn’t all about the competition. It’s the controlled progress, the goal setting, it’s what we think about as we doze off to sleep. In a sense, it gives our lives a further purpose; it gives us aspirations that transcend adult responsibilities of putting food on the dinner table. As a student athlete, I felt empty. Performing well in my classes and finding a job upon graduation wasn’t enough to inspire me, I needed more.