“When you are afraid, do the thing you are afraid of and soon you will lose your fear of it,” Norman Vincent Peale (author of The Power of Positive Thinking) famously said.
Around in circle my feet go, through the phases of the pedal stroke. I pull the pedal backward and upward, my sticky shoes gripping the dangerous little pegs that stick out of my new purple pedals. This part of the stroke reminds me of the moonwalk, the flat bottom smearing across the floor as the heel slowly lifts up until the pedal finally joins my whole foot at the top.
For a moment, I can feel my skis underneath me as I skin up the mountain. The pull backwards as the skin engages in the snow and I pull my body upward. I am missing one of my hamstring muscles (or at least part of it) from an ACL repair and I imagine I can feel the gap as I pull my right foot backward.
The next part of the stroke is easy. Stand on your pedals and push down. And I mean push, all the way through your gluten and into your quads. It’s the downhill part of the stroke, driving my skis into the snow and just pushing. It comes so naturally that I almost forget I’m on a bike, except that I am petrified of falling off the damn thing and snapping my arm off. Again.
My legs are fine, but the rest of my body is so stiff it is amazing that I can maneuver my bike through any of the rocks at all. I can hear Obi Wan’s voice intermingled with Lambonics, as I chant over and over to myself, “Let Go, Luke. Just let the bike roll.” I can hear myself chanting out loud for loose arms, just like I would have while rowing or paddling, but I cannot trust myself or bike enough to make that happen. Even when I thought I was loose, the video proof showed a traumatized girl holding on to her purple grips for dear life.
Well… at least my arms are getting jacked!
I have moments, moments when I feel like the bike and I are doing something together. Moments where I forget that I am biking and just let my legs flow underneath me like they were on Superstar less than two weeks ago. Seriously? Less than two weeks ago we were riding the lift and I felt like I was flying. And now, every time I start to feel myself fly, I squeeze the brakes so hard that I can feel my upper body move just too far over the handlebars for comfort.
I cannot seem to let myself move from the middle of the tire and onto my edges.
“Tip it to rip it.” I can hear the phrase in my head but I can’t seem to get there. “Tilt the bike and not your body,” I repeat to myself as I come into the berm, and every fabric of my being seizes up and I fight the lean. Leaning means falling and that is something my body never wantsto do again.
Except this time, this trail, has the most beautiful berms I have ever felt in my life. The trail literally grabbed my bike from me and tilted it, pulling it over and across the trail without any effort on my part. I am not really sure what happened, but it felt right, it felt good. I was on my edges and for a moment, I was skiing down the bike trail with my eyes wide open in surprise. It’s was glorious, my bike demanding trust as it swung me around the turn without any direction from me. I couldn’t fight the tilt, the trail just put me there.
And so I kept going, trusting my bike more and more with each turn and even letting the bike go just a bit on the traverses. I could feel my old self coming back, the one that would choose the A line and that moment of levitation as you soared over a rock before coming back to earth. The one where the bike feels more like an extension of yourself rather than a metal horse with which you keep fighting.
It is happening. Not in big steps, but in moments, tiny little moments, where I feel glimpses of the biker that I was before snapping my arm in half. And so I keep doing the thing that I am afraid and little by little, I will find comfort in the rhythm of the motions, in the flow of the bike as it weaves through the rocks and breeze on my face as I fly through the forests. With every ride, my body is remembering the fun and playfulness that is biking. And I am, too.
Merisa Sherman is a long-time Killington resident. She is a bartender, KMS coach, and local real estate agent She can be reached at [email protected].
