Get A Bicycle

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live.”
–Mark Twain.

25 days from today we will stand at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, point our front wheels South and start peddling towards Los Angeles. June 5, 2011. This date is exactly 30 years from June 5, 1981, the day that the US Centers For Disease Control reported the first case of AIDS in the US (though it wasn’t until a year later that they began to call it AIDS: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome).

Some stats:

• An estimated 33.3 million people worldwide are living with HIV/AIDS.
• 2.6 million people are newly infected with HIV each year.
• Close to 2 million people die from HIV/AIDS each year.
• Of that 2 million, more than 300,000 are children.
• 76% of those deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa.
• 25 million people have been killed by the disease.

When I think about why I’m waking up at 6am to get my tight bike shorts on, throw back a cup of coffee and get out on a training ride, I think about the size of this pandemic (that word scares me) and know that it’s the least I can do. And while many of us are struggling to make ends meet, or facing relationship challenges, or wrestling with the myriad of uncertainties that nip at our heals at any moment in the pressure-cooker of this thing they call the modern world, these sobering statistics gives me pause. And snap me out of being self-absorbed with my own struggles. Or as my friend Willard recently reminded me, “we are not the envy of the world because of our iPhones, iPads, air conditioning, fast cars, and so on, we are the envy of the world because we have ICE CUBES.”

Thank you Willard.

My 60's Italian Bianchi meets the Golden Gate

A week ago Tyler and I road 70 miles from Presido to Olema and back. Riding across the Golden Gate Bridge in the morning on a clear day is simply spectacular. Yes we have ice cubes. We also happen to have the most beautiful bridge in the world. Over the course of the next 5 hours we were beside the Bay, in the valleys and along the fields and dairy farms of Marin County, through the redwoods and across the streams of Samuel P. Taylor State Park, and winding our way down highway 1 with the Pacific Ocean, its blue as deep and dark as twilight, rolling out forever.

Somewhere along this ride, pushing up a steep hill, I remembered riding BART the other day. A woman sat down across from a young man. The man said, “How you doin’?” The woman said, “Okay. Good. Good. I’m good. I’m fine. How you doin’?” The man said, “I’m having a hard day.” The woman, maybe 10 or 15 years his senior said, with great enthusiasm and conviction, “Let. It. Go.” She looked him in the eye, “Whatever it is. Let it go. It’s not doin’ you any good to be holdin’ on to it. It’s probably not even yours. Let. It. Go. It’s just gonna fester. And you don’t want that. Just let it go.”

She didn’t know him. And he looked to her like his Aunty, perhaps. She gave him wisdom. And he listened. He was a bit broken, this kid. A vet from the Navy. Trying to get through school. He just learned that he wasn’t getting credit for a class at a JC he had taken, which meant he had to repeat the class and another year of school. He was so upset. The woman coached him. On BART. In public. With full voice. As if he was her charge. She cared so much for him. Almost moved right into him. He calmed down. Just needed someone to see him. To bear witness. Then she wished him luck and got off at MacArthur Station. As did I. The young man stayed on the train and sped off into the rest of his life.

How often do we see people caring for complete strangers?

And here I am, on this ride, pulling my ass up the steep incline of Highway 1 from Muir Beach towards Green Gulch Zen Center, 60 miles into this ride, and for whom? For my own well-being, yes. But mainly to benefit people whom I will never meet. For complete strangers who need care. And on June 5 I’ll be joined by 2500 other riders who will do the same all the way down the glorious coast of California.

And Mark Twain, we will live.