Christopher McDougall on The Daily Show

In case you missed it earlier: Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run, was a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart this week. Normally I'd embed the video below; however, since I've already written a review of the book, I added the video to the end of that post. You can check them both out here.

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Wonderfully Made

(Admin note: this one got a little carried away. Two separate stories, without much common ground unless you’re really reaching. I reached, and mashed them both together here. You can be the judge of how it all came together.)

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“The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.”
- Leonardo da Vinci

“For you created my inmost being;
You knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”
- Psalm 139:13-14 (New International Version)


When I was younger, everyone wanted to fix my feet.

Shortly after I learned to walk, my parents noticed that my toes turned inward so much that I often tripped over myself. My pediatrician observed that my femur and tibia (thigh bone and shin bone, for the anatomically challenged) were excessively rotated towards each other, and that my ankles rolled inward as well. He recommended an orthopedic specialist, who prescribed a lot of bracing and splinting.

Healthy bone development became an indelible crusade of my youth. As a toddler, I slept with a rigid brace that kept my legs in a spread-eagle position, with a metal crossbar to hold them in place. Once I became more active, I wore leg braces like a young Forrest Gump. And when the braces became intolerable, I used various types of orthotics in all of my shoes.

I also had to do a nightly stretching routine that included sitting with my legs crossed – what used to be called Indian style, but now is “criss-cross applesauce” at my daughter’s kindergarten (we’re much more PC nowadays, I guess) – for as long as I could tolerate. I couldn’t tolerate very much at all; a few minutes at a time would be excruciating.

**

Around that same time, a man named Bill Bowerman was pouring molten rubber onto a waffle iron, experimenting with designs for what would become the first modern-day running shoe. Nike’s Waffle Trainer debuted in 1974, triggering the biggest running boom in American history, and inspiring countless other companies to turn their efforts towards grabbing a financial share of one of the most rapidly expanding consumer markets ever seen.


Over the ensuing years, most advances in running shoe technology were geared towards augmenting the apparent shortcomings of natural biomechanics. They cushioned our heelstrike with air pillows or gel chambers or elastic grids. They prevented our pronation with rollbars and medial posts. They limited our ankle motion with stability devices or rigid platforms. The underlying philosophy was that our feet were ill-equipped to sustain a habit of regular running, and that in order to make such an activity comfortable, a shoe had to compensate for the deficiencies of the human foot.

But what if they’re trying to fix something that wasn’t broken to begin with? Barefoot runners, as well as a growing number of podiatrists and orthopedic doctors, will tell you that’s precisely what’s happening.

Think of it this way: if you were engineering the perfect weight bearing structure, you’d create an arch. If you wanted to include ideal shock absorption, you’d allow that arch to flex slightly upon impact, with cords of variable tension supporting the structure on all sides. For dynamic energy transfer, you’d create it with several interlocking components capable of movement in multiple directions. For durability, you’d make the building blocks out of the hardest, strongest material you can find.

Well, guess what you’ve just designed? The human foot! 26 bones and 33 joints crafted together to form a perfect arch, held together by more than 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments all working in harmony. And yet, for the better part of 40 years, the prevailing philosophy within the running shoe industry is that God somehow made us imperfect or broken, and they took it upon themselves to fix us.

Even worse, when we strive to correct what doesn’t need correcting, we often end up causing more problems than we solve. Any adjustments made at the foot and ankle are compensated at some point higher up the kinetic chain – most frequently in the knees, hips, and low back area. It’s quite telling that while all of the protective and comfort features of modern footwear haven’t decreased the overall injury rate among runners in the past 30 years, our rates of lower back disorders are higher than ever. (That’s something of an oversimplification – for example, there are certainly other factors involved with back pain – but there’s no arguing about which direction the numbers of both injury groups are trending.)

Thankfully, shoe manufacturers have begun to recognize the value of doing less; that maybe the best solution to injury prevention isn’t to create the perfect corrective device, but to eliminate many of the features that had already been attempted. The result is a whole new category of “minimalist” or “natural running” footwear that allows the foot to maintain its normal biomechanics. Several shoe companies have embraced this movement, including some of the biggest names in the industry.

Vibram is far and away the leader in this regard, with its revolutionary Five Fingers, which is little more than a protective layer of rubber on the soles of your feet. Running in Five Fingers is a transformational experience; they enable you to mimic barefoot running almost precisely, without the threat of puncture wounds from broken glass or rusty nails. Danish company ECCO, famous for their luxury dress shoes, has a running shoe called the BIOM which promotes the natural motion of the foot in a high-performance trainer. The Newton company bases its whole product line on the premise of maintaining barefoot biomechanics as closely as possible.

Even Nike has gotten in on the act. The shoe giant invests heavily on research and collaborates with some of the best coaches in the sport to analyze the foot’s natural motion. The resulting product line is called Nike Free – whose initial ad tagline, ironically, was “Run Barefoot” – with the goal of combining the normal biomechanics of barefoot running with the cushioning and support of an everyday trainer. It’s almost like the process is coming full circle, back to the time when running shoes were little more than protective covering for the soles of your feet.

(Admin note: all of the shoes mentioned above will be reviewed here in the near future, starting with the Vibram Five Fingers next week.)

Of course, you can always run barefoot as well - just like people did for centuries before the sneaker was invented, and like an increasing contingent of modern runners are demonstrating every day. So perhaps our feet aren’t broken, after all – and if we let them work in the way they were originally designed, we won’t have to deal with bigger problems further down the road.

**

Fast-forward about 35 years from the baby thrashing in his crib against a metal contraption intended to fix what was thought to be broken. I have a son now - and when he was a toddler, his ankles rolled so far inward that the medial malleoli (the bony prominences on the inside of each ankle) nearly touched the ground. He frequently stands with one leg turned inward so far that the toes point backwards. He has a hard time sitting cross-legged.

Discussing these findings with his pediatrician and a local orthopedic surgeon, I had two separate but very similar conversations:

Me: Is this something we should be concerned about?

Doctor: Does it cause him any pain, or prevent him from doing anything?

Me: No.

Doctor: Then we should just leave it alone. Things tend to work out on their own.

It seems that conventional wisdom in the medical community is almost the exact opposite today than it was when I was a child. Instead of trying to fix things that look like they’re imperfect or broken, we let the body work the way it was designed. We resist the temptation to correct God’s creation with technology, and in most cases, we therefore avoid causing bigger problems down the road.

On some level, I inherently knew this premise even as a youngster. I ravaged against the metal brace so fiercely that my parents soon gave up on it. (To this day, my dad’s main recollection of that experiment was how the noise of me banging the hell out of my crib nearly drove him insane, and how many holes I smashed into the drywall with the metal rods. Needless to say, he wasn’t a big fan of the brace, either.) Likewise, the walking braces were quickly abandoned due to noncompliance, and when I moved out of the house as a teenager, one of my first defiant acts of freedom was to throw my orthotics in the garbage.

I still managed to play sports as a kid, and maintained an otherwise healthy active lifestyle. Later on, as I evolved into a runner and triathlete, I latched onto motion control and anti-pronation shoe models for several years, but eventually bid those particular crutches good-bye as well.

To this day, my thigh bones still turn inward, my shin bones still have an unusual curvature to them, and I still can’t sit cross-legged for more than a few seconds. Whether I would have been better off following the doctors’ instructions for all those years, I guess I’ll never know.

There’s one thing I know for certain, however: God didn’t make me broken. And of all the reasons I could give for venturing into the world of barefoot running, there’s a simple one that speaks the loudest to me: I’m doing it just the way He intended.

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Awesome Summer Apparel Sale!

With the last weeks of summer winding down, the folks at Wilderness Running Company are having a blowout sale on summer apparel. All of their warm-weather gear is at least 20% off, with some items marked down even further. Best of all, you can still use my blog discount (details below).

They also provided me a couple of sale items to help promote, so you’re getting a two-for-one product review post today.

Before we proceed, though - and on the subject of WRC – their special offer on Salomon XT Wings ends today (Aug 20th); if you want shoes, socks, and shipping for $100, this is your last chance.

I was given two items to review: the Salomon Trail Runner Zip Tech Tee, and the Sugoi RSR shorts. I flipped a coin and decided to start with the shirt.

Salomon’s Trail Runner Zip Tech Tee is made of an extremely lightweight fabric called actiLITE which is also very effective for moisture transfer and rapid evaporation. This mesh fabric is so thin that you can see light through it, but (thankfully) not so thin that your nipples are showing. (I know that’s an odd spec to detail, but it seemed important to clarify.)

The fabric is treated with ClimaUV which is equivalent to SPF 35+ ultraviolet resistance, and with X-static mesh to resist odor-causing bacteria. Flatseam stitching makes the shirt feel very comfortable against your skin, and it has a droptail hem in back for those of you (like me) who prefer to go tucked instead of untucked.

This version of the shirt comes with a half-zipper, which provides a performance benefit like cycling jerseys with more effective cooling in hot weather or on long climbs. I’ve found that shirt zippers are a personal preference thing; I’ve never really liked them, because the collars, when closed, seem to sit a bit higher than on non-zipper varieties of the same shirt.

Regardless of whether or not you like the zipper feature, WRC has you covered: both versions are on sale this week.

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If you’re a tall runner like me, you’re always on the lookout for a comfortable pair of high-performance running shorts with a long (7” or greater) inseam. I’m happy to recommend a great pair in the Sugoi RSR shorts.

I found these to be extremely comfortable from the moment I tried them on; the Hexlite fabric is very light and silky, yet provides great ventilation for moisture wicking. Two large mesh panels assist with air flow, and the zone construction provides an excellent anatomic fit.

Further contributing to the overall comfort, the shorts have a breathable mesh liner and very soft drawstring elastic waist. WRC’s sale page says that the RSR weighs just 5 oz, which is as light as minimalist shorts with much shorter inseams. They also include an inside key pocket and a rear zippered stash pocket to carry small items along the trail.

I’ve worn these shorts on runs of >2 hours, and I would definitely feel confident to stretch that time out for several more hours without compromising comfort. If longer-style running shorts are your thing, the Sugoi RSR is a strong choice; if you like shorter styles, WRC has those on sale as well.

Finally, for all of the WRC sale items: use coupon code R&R10 to get an extra 10% off your entire order in addition to the discounted price. That means that your minimum discount will be 30% on these or any other summer gear:

Salomon Trail Runner Zip Tech Tee

Salomon Trail Tee (no zip)

Sugoi RSR Shorts

The sale prices are in effect until September 20th or until their stock runs out, so take a look around Wilderness Running Company soon to grab some great deals on warm weather clothes. The timing is perfect to still get some use out of them this season, while stocking up in advance for next year.


See previous product reviews on sidebar at right. If you have a product you’d like reviewed, contact me at info@runningandrambling.com

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Carmel Valley Fire Tower

"Set up high I'm strong enough -

to take these dreams and make them mine -
Can you take me higher?"
- Creed, "Higher" (video after post)

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One of the most prominent structures in Carmel Valley is a fire tower at the top of the ridge line:

Click to enlarge - it's much easier to see

Its formal name is the Sid Ormsbee Lookout, although most locals just refer to it as the tower or the lookout (my 5-year-old daughter used to call it Frog Mountain, because she apparently thought the tower looked like a frog – but that’s a separate story). For most of the 20th Century, it was an inhabited post manned by the California Department of Forestry, to keep watch over the Los Padres mountains and communicate an early warning in the event of wildfires.

Modern technology such as aerial surveillance and satellite imaging eventually rendered the station obsolete, and the CDF stopped staffing the lookout more than twenty years ago. Today the tower stands boarded up and abandoned as a relic of an earlier time.

Still, the empty tower remains visible from nearly every point in Carmel Valley, stubbornly keeping its lonely sentry high atop the ridgeline. When I first moved here, it seemed to beckon me every time I looked at it, like a siren’s call that I couldn’t get out of my head. When I finally hiked up to the lookout see the sights and visit the ghosts of days gone by, it was one of my coolest first memories of living in this valley.

A decade and a half later, my 11-year-old son heard the same siren call.

For the past several months, he’d been asking if he could hike to the tower, so my wife and I took advantage of a perfect weather day on the last weekend before school started to escort him there.

The most direct route to the tower is via the trails of Garland Ranch Regional Park. Starting from the Carmel River bridge at the park’s entrance, we would eventually climb 2300’ over almost 4 miles to reach our destination. Elevation is gained pretty quickly in Garland Park, as you can tell from this shot shortly after starting the hike. The open area is known as the mesa, and sits at about 700’.

The views get better and better on the way up, but they were obscured slightly on this day by drifting haze from a forest fire in the nearby Santa Cruz mountains. There has to be a little bit of irony in seeing smoke while hiking to an abandoned fire tower, right?


After about two hours of hiking, we arrived at the tower. There’s still a dignified air about this building, like its importance shouldn’t be forgotten just because time has passed it by.


The tower is also the official end of the trail, which seemed like a good spot to kick off my shoes and cruise around barefoot on top of the valley for a while.

(Incidentally … do you recognize the hydration pack? I reviewed it here.)


View from the tower looking west, towards the Monterey Peninsula. When you’re up here on a clear day, you can see the outline of the peninsula into the ocean, and even the town of Santa Cruz across the bay. Even with the hazy fog and smoke, it’s still a pretty sweet view.


There are various grassy footpaths around the tower, so I jogged around for a bit and ultimately followed one to a rocky outcropping looking over the valley to the south.


That’s where we took a brief rest.

Looking at this picture afterwards, something occurred to me: if I’m going to keep showing pictures of my bare feet, I need to pretty them up a bit. A shave and a good clipping, at the very least. I’ll work on that for next time.


Eventually it was time to put my shoes back on and begin our return trip downhill. From the lower ridgeline, we took one last look back at the tower before it dropped out of sight from the lower canyons.

I don’t know if my son was affected in the same way after his first visit to the lookout as I was after mine; afterwards, he mainly just reported that his legs were tired. I have a theory though: that every time he sees the tower from now on, he’ll remember that he was able to hike there, and be reminded that difficult tasks aren’t so hard once you make up your mind to do them. It might also give him the same appreciation of this area that his mother and I have always shared.

Of course, when I explained my theory to him, he just shrugged his shoulders - so I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

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Music note: There weren't many bands who rose higher and fell quicker in a short period of time than Creed; they're a cautionary tale to any band who has a few hits and starts believing they're the second coming of U2. It's almost an embarrassment today to admit you were a fan ... but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was a big Creed fan. This song still bounces through my head sometimes in the midst of a long hill climb.

Creed, "Higher" (click to play):

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Mix My Granola Review

Last month I received a generous offer from the folks at MixMyGranola.com to sample their products in exchange for a review. It’s a brand new company, started just last year by three co-founders who sought to make the perfect granola mix.

They concluded, properly, that the perfect mix varies for everyone – so that’s what they set out to provide. MixMyGranola offers a truly unique ordering process that allows you to completely customize your mixture, with an endless variety of options.

The best way to explain it is to walk you through the process. Click to enlarge any of the following screen grabs …


The first step is to select from one of four different types of base mix: organic, low-fat, French vanilla, or muesli. As we go along, keep an eye on the box on the far right; it accumulates the total charge as each new ingredient is added.


Next it’s time to add some fruit. As a point of clarification: from this point forward in the report, the screen grabs are only partial shots. In addition to the fruits shown here, there are eight additional choices further down the screen.

Of course, you know I’d put strawberries in mine; I also included some blackberries for good measure.


After selecting your fruit, you move on to nuts and seeds. There’s a huge variety of ways to customize your order here: more than 10 different varieties of nuts, and 6 different seeds, including the mega-nutritional chia seeds that I mentioned in the Monkey Shake review.

(You know what else you can get? Hemp seeds! I’m pretty certain these won’t get you high - but wouldn’t it be interesting to try? To paraphrase Jimi Hendrix, you’re not necessarily stoned ... just beautiful. [scroll to 3:50 mark] Go on - tell me you're not a little bit curious now.)



Another cool feature of the ordering process is that at any point along the way, you can click on the nutritional calculator underneath the subtotal and get the nutritional values of your customized mixture. It’s a nice tool to have, because …


… the next screen is the “extras”, where you can really rack up the calories, as well as add some pizzazz to your mixture. There are gummy bears, candy corn, jelly beans, and other assorted sweets.

You could also go in a whole different direction here and make a spicy or salty mix, with things like wasabi peas, mustard pretzels, or sesame sticks. I prefer the sweet route over the spicy one – at least when it comes to granola – but you could make a great mix of either variety.


This last page is just plain cool: a whole set of “enhancers”, which are powders and extracts to add a killer punch to your mixture. Who couldn’t use a little extra caffeine? Or quinoa or spirulina or green tea powder? These are great options to increase the nutritional value of your mix without much of a caloric cost.

Customized label

The end result is a customized mix (complete with an individualized nutritional label) that comes to your door a few days after ordering it. The containers are 16-oz each and are 100% recyclable.

As far as taste goes: it should be good - because you made it! The ingredients are 100% natural, and organic whenever possible, further ensuring a high-quality product.

I really enjoyed the mixture that I made, and I would definitely recommend using MixMyGranola from time to time. The primary drawback is the price, especially when you account for shipping. My order cost about 15 dollars, which (with my big appetite) was only about two servings worth. It's more expensive than buying the ingredients and making your own granola at home, but much more convenient and less time-consuming.

Considering that, I think it would be ideal if you like a unique combination of tastes and don’t feel like mixing and matching from store-bought products, or if you like difficult-to-find ingredients and don’t have access to a good health food store. It would also make a great gift for any athlete or health nut.

Finally, there are a couple of ways to make MixMyGranola more affordable: First, if you buy in bulk, you get 5 orders for the price of 4, and pay shipping on just a single order. Or – you must have known this was coming – I’ve arranged for a coupon code to use.

If you buy from MixMyGranola.com and enter the coupon code RAMBLING, you’ll save 10% on your entire order. It’s a good chance to try a cool product from a very unique company.


See other product reviews on sidebar at right. If you have a product you’d like reviewed, contact me at info@runningandrambling.com.

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Changing the Rules

You should exercise more. You should eat less. You should make better food choices. You should make your overall health a higher priority.

Well, duh.

You’d be hard pressed to find someone who can honestly claim ignorance to the basic tenets of weight management – and yet, the American obesity epidemic continues to grow at an alarming rate. If simple knowledge doesn’t help people, what will? That’s the question we considered for our most recent Monterey Herald column.

Some of these ideas might sound silly, and some might even be controversial (would you like a “sin tax” on your next box of Oreos?), but they all make fairly good sense when it comes to changing our collective lifestyles and giving people an effective (read: financial) incentive to take their health more seriously.

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Running Life 8/13/09 “Fighting Obesity”

The Center for Disease Control recently sponsored the first “Weight of the Nation” conference, where it was announced that the medical cost of obesity in the United States each year is $147 BILLION. Almost one-third of American adults are officially categorized as obese, with rates in many (mostly Southern) states approaching 40%. Even Oprah Winfrey is overweight again.

What’s the solution? The CDC has a standard laundry list of recommendations to stop the obesity epidemic, but it’s the same things we’ve been told for years: healthier food choices, lower caloric intake, more physical exercise. This is all old news, yet obesity rates continue to rise.

So we’d like to suggest some changes in perspective for all of us – the first of which is to encourage support from selected “influencers” who can connect with large numbers of people.

One such program is right in our backyard: the Big Sur International Marathon’s JUST RUN program. As we said, the formula for what works is no secret: less food, more activity. The Just Run program instills this lesson in elementary school children, and gives them opportunities to make healthy choices from a very early age. Good habits start young, and increased funding for programs like this can attack the obesity problem at its roots.


Our educational system can go one step further and make physical education mandatory in all schools. Programs can be supported with minimal cost, even at schools without a dedicated PE teacher – all it takes is a committed volunteer to get students walking or jogging every day. Isn’t healthy activity just as important to our kids’ quality of life as art, music and great literature?

Parents play a key role as well. We should teach our kids to be participants in athletics instead of spectators. Modern-day sporting events (and their accompanying advertisers) emphasize tailgating, beer drinking, and pigging out on unhealthy food just as much as they inspire sandlot games and schoolyard shoot-arounds. It’s our job as parents to remind kids that the real fun of sports is in doing, not watching.

Professional sports leagues can even get in on the act. Imagine if championship sporting events had associated running races, like a marathon on Super Bowl Sunday, or a 5K before the local pro golf tournament. Have the pro athletes make an appearance beforehand, or provide the runners with discount event tickets to encourage participation, and you can draw huge numbers towards healthy activities.

Another approach is to borrow a page from the anti-smoking playbook, and make it cost-prohibitive for people to be unhealthy.

For instance, what if you had to pay for exorbitant cable or Internet screen time in the same way that you pay for excess usage of water or electricity? Since obsessive screen watching makes people less active and more obese, how about creating a graduated “sin tax” beyond a certain threshold? A similar fee could be tacked onto junk food like cookies or pork rings at the grocery store, or against most fast food menu items, which might make people think twice before grabbing another Big Mac at the drive-thru.

Insurance companies can base their premium rates on physical fitness tests like the ones that used to be given in grade schools. Cardiovascular fitness is the most important predictor of overall health – and if you struggle with a one-mile walk, chances are that your health is lousy. People can be recertified at the local track every 2 or 3 years, just like smog inspections, where an independent timer verifies your best mile time, and your insurance rates would correspond to your result. Would that make you take your fitness more seriously?

Sure, these ideas may sound crazy – but that’s indicative of a larger problem as well: a complacency to let things carry on the same way they’re currently going, and a reluctance to make dramatic moves towards changing course. If prioritizing our health continues to be seen as the “counterculture” approach, we’re in for far more troubling costs in the days ahead – both from a health standpoint, and a financial one.

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Enjoy the Ride

Before we get to today’s post, a couple of follow up notes from the past couple product reviews …

* Yes, I’m aware that Monkey Shake sounds a lot like “Shake That Monkey”, a popular Too Short song from a few years back. I briefly considered working that angle in there, but decided that I couldn’t justify an honest review of such an openly Christian company by embedding an obscenely oversexed rap video. And no, I’m not including the video in this post either – but if you’re interested, I’ve already given you all the information you need to Google it, you freaks.

* A reminder about the Salomon XT Wings review: the sale I mentioned at Wilderness Running Company ends on August 20th. Shoes, socks, and shipping all for $100 if you use my coupon code (R&R10). Get them here.

That’s all for now. Moving on …

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My son starts middle school this week (yes, in mid-August – I think these kids need to band together and hire a lawyer for some kind of class-action suit), a transition that naturally causes you to take stock of where the parent-child relationship has been, and where things might be headed from here. I found myself pondering the situation a bit during a bike ride the two of us shared in the Sierras, so I’ll include some photos here as an accompaniment.


Our ride started in the ski village of Bear Valley, and followed a recently forged single-track up to Lake Alpine, where we could circumnavigate the lake on the beautiful trails I've described before, and return to our starting point.

I never really did this kind of thing as a kid; I rode my 10-speed bike all over the neighborhood, or to and from the store, but never into the wild on a secluded trail. Even if my father had been into off-road biking, I doubt that it would have been my thing. I was the soccer/basketball/baseball kid, the one who joined every organized sport during the school year, and filled my summers with swim teams and sandlot games. If there was a field of competition, I would seek it out – and more often than not, hold my own pretty well. But individual endeavors didn't really draw me in.


So sometimes when we wind our way through these trails, my instinctive reaction is to compare my athletic upbringing with that of my son – and in almost every possible way, he’s a remarkably different kid.

Furthermore, it often seems – to his mother’s and my occasional frustration - as if the child is a study in contrasts. He‘ll spend hours in the pool or swimming in the ocean, but doesn’t want anything to do with a swim team. He does challenging, hilly hikes but is intimidated by the thought of going out for cross-country. He loves long adventurous bike rides like this one, but had to be dragged to his first MTB races.

In short, he doesn’t like to compete, but he likes to exercise outdoors. I was just the opposite – I was competitive at everything, some of which happened to be sports related – so this is the side of him that continually surprises me. And yet, it’s the side that becomes more and more endearing as his skills develop in each activity.


After all, this is how we grownups tell ourselves we’re supposed to be: interested in exercise primarily for the sake of fitness and emotional well being; not worried about our abilities in comparison to anyone else; experiencing the world one step or pedal stroke at a time just for the joy of discovery. And while we may succeed at this to some extent, there are so many ulterior motives to our training regimens that the whole process grows hopelessly complicated. My son doesn’t have that problem. He’s a remarkably different kid than I was – and I mean that as a compliment, in the best possible way.

Besides, he’s starting to rub off on me quite a bit. For one thing, I now have a consistent riding partner around. I never used to take my mountain bike on vacation before – but in the span of just a few weeks this summer, I had two awesome riding experiences (this is the other one) that I probably wouldn’t have done without him alongside.


My outlook about his outlook is coming around as well. I’m thinking if these rides instill nothing more in him than a desire to do something similar at the next stop in our travels, that would be great. If he grows up to be the guy who rides his bike all the time just for fun and fitness, I can probably live with that, too; a year or two ago, I don’t think I would have been able to say that.

So he’s riding off into a bigger world than what he’s known before, with his primary goal to enjoy the journey. I guess it’s not such a bad way to go through life … and I know I’m looking forward to following him, wherever his trails may lead.

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