In recent years, when the weather tips into Autumn/Winter, I tend to find I stop *riding* my BMX, and instead I just ride it, like a bike. For transport and exercise.
I don’t know exactly why. As a kid in the early 80s I’d be out in rain and snow and hurricanes. But then BMX was a bit more like scrambling back then, on knobblies. Not so technical as it is today. And I was young, and I could not contain my energy or ambition.
I guess the idea of smashing my face on wet, cold, hard winter concrete feels less fun than bouncing it playfully off warm, pillow soft summer concrete. I don’t know.
But every year when I feel it in the weather, that I’m just going to ride and I’ll need to re-learn everything again in the Spring, I have a vivid dream of how it felt when I was a younger man, infinitely braver, stronger, and more confident than I am now. I’ll dream I’m powering out a long uninterrupted flow over an almost videogame urban environment.
It sort of makes me happy to feel that, but it also makes me sad. Because every Spring, when I get the opposite feeling, the one that says “get out there and see what you can do”, what I can do feels slightly diminished year on year. I never seem to recapture where I was the previous year. It all feels incrementally less.
But in this once-a-year dream, I’m always in my prime.
Pic of me in 1981. My first year of BMX.
by Awkward_Importance49