My First Ride - Guest Post

For those of you who don't know me, I'm PedalHound's very lucky girlfriend - we'll see if he edits that out - ha. ( ED: I never edit the truth) When I first met PedalHound one of the things that impressed - and maybe threatened - me about him was his absolute passion for mountain biking. I wrote about it a while back as something I aspire to - there is nothing in my life about which I am as passionate as he is about the whole world of mountain biking. I love that about him.

So it was pretty exciting for me last Sunday when I got to go for my first official mountain bike ride with PedalHound as my coach and guide. Before we get into that though, you need a little context. I spend a lot of my life in dresses and heels. I enjoy live music, live theatre, and people watching in downtown coffee shops. I pay way too much for my haircuts and own way too many pairs of shoes. I am, to most appearances, a girly girl.

But there's another part of me - the part the grew up in the foothills of the Rockies. The part the misses skiing through 6 feet of powder and gutting trout. The part that prefers the smell of campfire to perfume and sleeps better when she can see the stars. The part that played university basketball and lettered in three high school sports - a part that has always taken second chair to my intellectual pursuits and that has been outright left behind for a while. I found that part of myself on the trail on Sunday.