Rough Spot

The first time down a rough road, you're overwhelmed by every bump and hole and uneven patch. You swear you will never go down that road again, but in life you go where the race takes you. The second time through you know where the big holes are, the highest spots you may trip on and the lowest that you can sink in or buck you ass over tea kettle. You avoid those, but the rattle from the constant pounding grinds on leaving you fatigued and near empty from the ordeal just the same. Season after season you maybe get better, maybe just thicker skinned. More efficient in ignoring the white noise of metal scraping against stone and bodies landing in a muted thud in the manure and mud. You find a rhythm to fight against the pounding. You stay on the ridge, but the beat down remains every time through.

Then it ends as abruptly as it began. You arrive on the tarmac, the smoothness a near silence. Almost with weightless ease, life is a vacuum. Within the confidence of your accomplishment, the aches slowly gain volume. The crosswind becomes a steady gravity and then life punches you in the belly again with the harshness of artillery. You justify the crumbling walls as just cracks in your foundation, desperately trying to hold together with a veneer of calmness.

Under the gaining fatigue, the safest line, the crown of the road, requires too much effort. The low tracks with their unexpected drop offs and fallout of ancient stone surface is easier if not more harrowing. You take the low line only when the desperate path of soft shoulder diminishes, regardless of the risk. In the back of your head you tell yourself that maybe the risk will end your race prematurely, ending the suffering abruptly. But that permanency has haunting repercussions longer lasting than the moment the decision to unpin your number was made.

We don't quit. We fall and get back up. We stay in the race. We get through the shit. In the moments when life quiets down and becomes calm, we check our wounds, reflect. We look to the group around us for protection in the wind. We eat and we drink and prepare for the next rough section knowing we made it through the last.

I already miss the brief acknowledgment, the glance of eye-to-eye respect upon the exit of the rough sections. I wish I offered you even more protection from the wind so you could better regroup between the the rough spots. I wish you were still in the race, but I will remember you for the sections you led through and the family you loved.