Besides being the year of the global pandemic, 2020 marked two momentous and significantly more positive events in my life.  I retired, twice.  I checked out of the corporate meat grinder after 35 years and I retired from bike racing after 24 years.  

True, the day job paid the bills but racing created the memories:  years of road trips with friends, sleeping in dive motels, eating at greasy diners and drinking more beer than I care to remember.  Work, train, eat, sleep, race, repeat. All great fun.  Let’s see, first race, February 1996 Lajitas, Texas, back when we were still arguing whether full suspension was really going to catch on.  Last race, February 2020 Rocky Hill Ranch, Bastrop Texas, right before the wheels came off the world.  And because I’m a nerd who saved race numbers (see first pic) and wrote the results on the back of each one, here are some stats:

And that’s not counting the multi-day races where I kept the same number for the whole series, organized rides where they give you a number but don’t keep track of results and the random outlaw race where they don’t need no stinkin’ numbers.  A flood of memories on that wall.

Not to say I will never race again.  Even if you’ve graduated to the “distinguished gentlemen’s class” like I had it’s still hella fun to line up and go hard with like-minded folks for a few hours.  Something about the shared experience of suffering.  But if I race in the future it will be as an independent journeyman just out for a few laughs.  Now I’m primarily interested in riding to explore, riding to unwind, riding to ride.  And with that day job thing out of the way, I’m thinking I’ve got a lot of exploring, unwinding and riding to do in the coming years.

Now, when I conceived of this post my original idea was to share some of the race photos I’ve taken over my 24 years.  A virtual stroll down memory lane.  Unfortunately, just before we moved our computer had a major glitch and lost its hard drive taking with it the thousands of photos I had accumulated over the years.  And I know what you’re thinking, you had a backup, right?  Yeah, but I accidentally deleted the backup trying to restore the drive.  I’m an idiot.

Losing 20+ years of photos is a gut punch roughly equivalent to that of losing a pet.  Besides bike races I had photos of vacations, weddings, graduations, and holidays all lost, corrupted or pixilated out of recognition.  Even now, months later, I find it painful to write about.  But picking through the electronic detritus I found one folder that for whatever reason was spared by the digital meltdown.  One folder of one trip back in 2009 to our favorite place to race, Terlingua TX.  So for my Texas racing friends, here’s a truncated trip down memory lane, a snippet of good times had.  Enjoy!