It’s about bikes, because, in the end, it seems like it’s always about bikes.

One winter, almost 20 years ago, Schwinn had a training camp for the riders on its and Yeti’s gravity team. Schwinn owned Yeti at the time, if you can imagine such a thing today. Back then, Schwinn was a scrappy bunch of bike nerds in Boulder, Colorado, trying a fresh reinvention of the storied brand after a long downward spiral that had culminated in bankruptcy.

It wasn’t a hardcore training camp—more a bonding experience—and as teams do, they invited a few journalists along to watch and ride. I knew it involved motorcycles; what, specifically, I wasn’t really sure. As we pulled up to a large barn somewhere between Fort Collins and Greeley, I noticed the sign out front read "American Supercamp, a motorcycle skills school."

Inside, the owner, ex-racer Danny Walker, greeted us and introduced us to a pair of brothers named Tommy and Nicky, two of his guest instructors. I’ll admit: I was a little surprised because, well, they were even younger than me. Nicky was a teenager, to be exact.

RELATED: Nicky Hayden Dies After Car-Bike Crash

At some point that day, as Tommy and Nicky were ripping around the inside of the old barn in a clatter of four-stroke smoke, the Schwinn racing team manager who’d organized the whole thing said something that stuck with me.

“Watch these guys,” Dave McLaughlin said. “They’re gonna have amazing careers.”

I didn’t know anything about motorcycles and racing. Still don’t know much, in fact. But Tommy and Nicky weren’t ordinary instructors; they were already accomplished racers, and Schwinn had worked out a sponsorship deal with the brothers, which included bicycles for training and Schwinn Sting-Rays to run around on in the pits at the moto tracks where they raced.

Nicky riding one of the Stingray pit bikes Schwinn gave him Dave McLaughlin

The season before the Schwinn camp, Nicky won a national Supersport title on the road and was set to step up to the Honda factory team for the AMA Superbike series. But we were at Supercamp that day to ride flat track, and there, Nicky was truly in his element. He had, after all, started racing flat track when he was three.

Flat track is very simple: mass-start, with a pack of racers doing laps around a flat, unpaved track. As its name suggests, there’s no banking; flat track involves literally sliding through the corners. Racers at the top level go well over 100mph.

Not us. Well, certainly not me.

Most of the crew rode motorcycles regularly. I was there with professional athletes like 1992 World Downhill Champion Dave Cullinan, World Cup winner Elke Brutsaert and Yeti’s Marla Streb, a phenom talented at both XC and DH and who would be on the cover of Outside in a few months. To top it off, we were joined by Mert Lawwill, the legendary motorcycle racer and star of On Any Sunday. Lawwill was designing rear suspension linkages for Schwinn and Yeti.

I’d ridden motorcycles maybe twice in my life to that point, and never like this. We started our little Honda CR100 dirt bikes and began turning circles on the cramped dirt track set up in the barn. Faster and faster, with Nicky or Tommy or Danny or Mert shouting at us to lean the bike a little more and try to get the back end to cut loose just for a second. We did drills, like where you’d plant your left foot, lift your weight off the bike a bit and lean it and then slowly open up the throttle, spinning the bike in a donut as you spun in a circle on your planted pivot foot.

I easily had the worst learning curve of the bunch. I was too timid, too slow, hopelessly stuck with a bicycle-centric worldview where the lever on the left side of the handlebar is the front brake. As I got faster, I’d panic when I felt the wheel slide and ease off the throttle, only to have the rear wheel catch traction and I’d go flying off the bike high-side. Then I’d give it too much throttle and spin out into the hay bales. I must have laid it down at least a dozen times; thankfully those little CRs are almost indestructible.

But slowly, I started to get the hang of it: that magical sensation when you go into a corner with just the right amount of speed and lean the bike with your weight in exactly the right place and the rear wheel begins to slide. And then—here’s the most improbable thing about it all—to get through the corner, you stay on the gas and point the front wheel to the outside of the corner and countersteer, and somehow the whole bike just arcs cleanly through the turn.

I’d just started to get crudely proficient at it, and then Danny Walker broke out the hose. In flat-track racing, they water the corners to make them slick to help you slide. Back to square one.

The whole day, we were out there. As the Schwinn and Yeti riders, joined by Mert freakin’ Lawwill, did hot laps around a slow-rolling chicane of hapless bike journos, Danny or Tommy or Nicky would come roaring by on their big 450 class bikes and shout a piece of advice to us.

I’ll remember the patience that he showed with a guy he didn’t have to. I’ll remember the skills that, even that day, were so obviously and evidently on display.

Tommy and Nicky, especially, could’ve ignored me. I wasn’t exactly showing some hidden savant-like talent for motorcycle riding, after all. And I was a journalist; the point of the camp wasn’t for me, it was for the team riders to spend time with each other and Schwinn-sponsored guys like Tommy and Nicky.

But they didn’t; in addition to passing bits of advice from the bike, they’d stop and watch me, critique my form, or pull me aside to show me something: how to position my weight properly so the bike wouldn’t instantly slide out, or some countersteering technique to keep from high-siding, or the patient, 146th reminder that the left handlebar lever was the clutch, not the brake, and why was I braking anyway?

Ultimately, I stopped being self-conscious about being so bad at it. But I don’t think Nicky and Tommy ever cared to begin with. They were just two young guys who loved anything on two wheels, loved roosting around and loved riding.

A surprising number of guys in motorsports ride bicycles. Former Supercross champ Ricky Carmichael loved the aerobic fitness he got from riding “push bikes.” Downhill mountain biker Aaron Gwin started out as a motocross racer, and John Tomac’s son, Eli, is a top AMA Supercross racer. And NASCAR is full of guys who trade firesuits for spandex, from Carl Edwards to Matt Kenseth to the most recent high-profile convert, Dale Earnhardt Jr.

One of them is gone today.

Nicky Hayden died Monday. Last Wednesday, May 17, he was out for a training ride on his bicycle near Cesena, Italy, when he was hit by a car and suffered severe cerebral damage and other major internal injuries.

He was 35.

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The prediction that I heard almost two decades ago was solid: Hayden would go on to win the AMA Superbike series and jump to road racing’s top level, MotoGP, where he won the overall series in 2006, dethroning five-time defending champion Valentino Rossi.

But here’s the thing: because I don’t really pay attention to motorcycle racing, his career isn’t what I remember about him. Instead, I’ll remember that cold January day almost two decades ago when, thanks to bicycles, our paths briefly crossed.

I’ll remember the patience that he showed to a guy he didn’t have to help. I’ll remember the skills that, even that day, were so obviously and evidently on display. And I’ll remember that day we rode, as Tommy and Nicky spun effortless laps in a cramped barn, drifting, crashing into each other, and the sound of laughter and the ceaseless circles of riding, of two wheels, of life.

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Joe Lindsey Joe Lindsey is a longtime freelance journalist who writes about sports and outdoors, health and fitness, and science and tech, especially where the three elements in that Venn diagram overlap.

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