{"id":61108,"date":"2020-06-10T01:30:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-10T09:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/with-age-comes-an-appreciation-for-brakes\/"},"modified":"2020-06-10T01:30:00","modified_gmt":"2020-06-10T09:30:00","slug":"with-age-comes-an-appreciation-for-brakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/with-age-comes-an-appreciation-for-brakes\/","title":{"rendered":"With age comes an appreciation for brakes"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve always known I could go over the handle bars. That’s what kept me from really opening things up when heading down hills on my mountain bike.<\/p>\n

I imagine crazy hypotheticals such as a brake breaking, a tire coming off or a list of other catastrophes that end up with me flying.<\/p>\n

I assume this tentative nature comes from childhood experiences. I think. At this point it’s a matter of me remembering copies of memories so who knows how it really went down. I do know that I used to ride with no one hand, then no hands because that was the fourth-grade flex. I remember riding around town or to the river with friends and getting close enough to rub tires, “on accident.”<\/p>\n

[What you can see and hear while self-isolating<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\n

I also remember bombing down a hill and the front tire wobbling. I remember the sickening feeling of a loose shoe lace wrapping around the pedal of my Huffy. I remember the chain grabbing the leg of my Carhartts and laying track.<\/p>\n

At some point I took my first flight over the handle bars. I came around a corner a little hot, missed the turn to the gas station but figured the tall grass would slow my progress. However, there was a shin-high rock hidden in the grass that stopped the progress altogether. I was approached by a man in logging attire who asked me, almost laughing, if I was OK. I remember being more confused than hurt. There was no blood and I managed to tell him I was fine.<\/p>\n

I’m not offended the dude laughed. Not everyone has the same response to bearing witness to a shocking event in which the participants appear to be fine and in some cases, it’s an odd yet uncontrollable reaction. Two buddies and I were robbed of $6 at gun point in college. As soon as the thief ran away and the cops were called, we started laughing. Weird.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I have good biking memories too. The first time my hands shared the handle grip with the head of a salmon and I returned home a triumphant provider. I remember a particularly good day in which there were at least two on each side, handle through the gills, tail swatting at the tire, trying to find its way into the spokes.<\/p>\n

I contemplated all of this over the weekend as my buddy, Dave, and I started the 4-mile trip back to the dock on a logging road that was steep in spots, but in pretty good shape. At 39, the rush still exists, but a fully-developed prefrontal cortex, housing information about the possibilities, makes risk assessments that it didn’t at 13.<\/p>\n

While I agree with the “send it” ethos, I don’t want to send myself into unconsciousness and my buddy into the role of first responder.<\/p>\n

I rode the brake hard and squeaked down the first of three steep declines. I gave Dave plenty of room so if he went down, I wouldn’t go off the road trying to avoid him, or run him over.<\/p>\n

The road flattened and we casually chatted about hunting as we finished the route back to the boat which was tied up at a dock an hour or so from town.<\/p>\n

It’s funny how riding bikes went from a simple mode of transportation and investigation as a kid to a satisfying mode of exercise which warrants something cold from the cooler and an afternoon of nothing more than being out of cellphone range.<\/p>\n

• Jeff Lund is a writer and teacher based in Ketchikan. “I Went To The Woods,” a reference to Henry David Thoreau, appears in Outdoors twice a month.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I agree with the “send it” ethos, I don’t want to send myself into unconsciousness. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":61109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[149],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-61108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-outdoors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61108"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=61108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}