Taking Another Leap

I have found a new way to get an adrenaline rush!

Since it was our anniversary this week, Terence and I got to have one of our biannual dates. My mom had generously offered to watch the kids so we dropped them off with her in the early afternoon. It seems like every year I choose what we do, but this time I dug in my heels, trying to get my husband to express an opinion. It might be nice to do something he wanted to for a change, I was thinking. Of course, Terence flat out refused to even hint at a preference. (This is why I always end up choosing.) In the end, we compromised with me picking the activity and him choosing where we ate dinner. Fair enough.

This year I decided to branch out a bit. I was looking for something relatively active and outdoors, so I picked mountain biking. Terence used to do quite a bit of it back in his single days, he has this pretty $500 mountain bike he's only ridden about twice, and besides, I ride mine all the time so I figured it wouldn't be too hard on me. Not far from where my mom lives there is a regional park that has lots of hiking/biking trails so it seemed perfect.

In my naivete I chose the hardest bike trail. See, it's only a 7 mile loop, and since I ride at least seven miles three times a week, I figured it would be the only trail that would make me actually work. Silly me. It didn't occur to me that these trails would be different than the flat, graded dirt roads I ride on out here. We were only fifteen feet onto the trail before I found myself facing a steep rocky drop of about twenty feet into a ravine. It was like sitting on the top of a cliff and deciding whether you want to jump.

Well, I chose life over what appeared to be certain death. Terence shook his head at me a bit, but he didn't protest so I'm assuming he was concerned as well. Instead we backtracked and started out on a trail that looked much easier.

Easier, but not easy, by any means. There were still steep rocky ravines, which I learned you have to take fast or you will never make it up the other side. There is nothing like speeding down a dirt hill bouncing off rocks and wondering if the next rock you hit is going to catapult you off your bike. Got my heart pumping frantically. I haven't felt that kind of rush in awhile! (Mostly because I try to avoid near death experiences.) Plus there was the whole challenge of trying to navigate the narrow dirt path without running into one of the ever-present cacti (this is the desert, remember). I had bike shorts on, so I just knew those spiny arms were just dying to attack my bare legs if I gave them a chance.

We rode about an hour, with the last bit being a grueling stretch of sand. Riding a bike in sand is not for the weak, that's for sure. By the time we reached the truck, I was wiped out. (Terence didn't seem too bad off, all things considered.) But hey, the good thing is, I went out to dinner with nary a qualm about the calories in what I ate. I had earned it!