Twenty-five years ago on this date, I was nursing a going-away party hangover, cleaning out an apartment, and already eyeing a mountain bike race in Vermont the next morning. That about sums up the June 9th energy across two and a half decades, honestly. Something is always in motion, something is always slightly on fire, and sleep is usually the last item on the list.
The early years were all forward momentum. Moving out of one life and into the next. Then a hard lesson about dehydration, which, for a guy who had been racing bikes for over a decade, should have been unnecessary. But here we are. The basics have a way of humbling you right when you think you've got it figured out.
By 2006, it was muddy Thursday night rides in Montana, and by 2008, a second-place finish in Salmon, Idaho that felt like a first, especially coming off an injury and racing with a sore throat at altitude. A jury duty summons in 2010 turned into a philosophical meditation on bank robbery and civic duty. Not exactly a leap, given the $12 compensation on offer.
Then the forest got weird in the best possible way. A talking rabbit named Bernard, freezing trails, and a body still running on fumes from a 311-mile effort. The next year brought a hail-to-snow epic above Bozeman, where descending 4,000 feet on a 29er apparently fixes everything. Some things are constants.
The years got quieter in their own way. A lazy, beautiful day with Mo in Livingston, beers and burgers and flowers. Desert creatures with their own distinct personalities. A 38-minute film of a whole year because some things deserve more than a paragraph. A flashback to a 2010 criterium that flickered through. A long drive across Montana for a funeral, with Big Timber offering a quiet exhale in the middle. And this past year, Seattle on foot after a broken-down Element turned an itinerary into an actual adventure.
June 9th, it turns out, has always been a day that asked something of me and then gave something back. Usually with mud involved.