He jumped anyways

There's this professional athlete I used to watch on the telly. At one of the less celebrated tasks in his sport he excelled, was likely the best player of all time at that task. There were other players that could do that as well, but unlike them he specialized in it. While they would do what he did and score points, he hardly scored. He did his one thing. Night after night after night. But, like I said, he was probably the best at it ever.

There's this famous photograph of him. He's parallel to the ground, jumping after the ball. The ball is going out of bounds, and if it does so the opposition will gain control of it. It's an event that happens often in a game. It sometimes leads to a point being scored by the opposition, but this is a sport where one point hardly ever makes the difference so many of them are scored. So he's parallel to the ground hoping to catch the ball, flip around, and pass the ball to a teammate before he lands out of bounds. Catching the ball is almost impossible once he launched himself. And, I'm pretty sure the rest of his plan defied the laws of physics. But, he jumped anyways.

When he retired, I stopped watching the game.

A soft voice singing about death

Rewind to a little over a week ago, me and a friend, we take off for Nova Scotia by bike. I fixed up my bike, bought whatever gear I'd need, and we rolled on out. The shape I was in last year, that would have taken me about thirteen days to complete, presuming I took a break on every third day.

Fast forward three days, we hit a city that last year I had hit after two days, and the knee pains hit. We take the rest of the day off, but the next day I'm cycling while cycling ibuprofen and acetaminophen. Two pills of one, wait two hours, then two pills of the other. Continue until the day's cycling is done.

I'm going slow. Real slow. I can't take hills at anything more than the lowest gear and can only put it in the highest gear when going downhill. My baseline is top gear for everything, hills, flats, everything.

Fast forward to the next day, the wind is in our face. My cycling partner, she has to break the wind in front of me all day. Like you see on the Tour De France. All day I'm just staring at her back tire, riding as close to it as I can.

We take the next two days off, and then we try to start up again, but my knee still hurts. We aren't even half done and I'm slowing her down. We agree that I should return to the last city we passed, and go back home by bus while she goes on.

Sitting in the bus, I have one of those movie moments. I'm looking out the window, watching the trees fly by me on the side of the highway, passing the towns I had passed on bike but in reverse order. The MP3 player playing soft sad tunes, acoustic guitar and light touches of piano, with a soft voice singing about death and the ends of relationships.