The laws of physics remain undefeated.
This is why riding a 20-inch BMX bike at 250 pounds (113 kg) feels quite different than it did at 120 pounds (54 kg), which was probably about how much I weighed the last time I jammed my knobby front tire into the cheese grater starting gate at a BMX track. After all, I couldn’t have been 11, maybe 12 at the oldest.
But the gate still drops the same way it did back then, with a jarring buzz and a violent thud. And some of the riders my age still fly around the track like they’re 11 or 12 years old, carving perfect lines through the track’s paved turns and pumping over the rhythm section in perfect sync with the ground beneath them. I assume that, unlike me, they haven’t taken three decades off from BMX racing.
The races are still the same, too. After all, it’s bike racing and, no matter what, bike races have a habit of never changing. Whether from point A to point B in a peloton, around the loop of a velodrome, amidst the Zen-like repetition of a criterium course, or an attempt to master the muck in a cyclocross race, a bike race is and will always be a bike race. That will never change. And BMX is no different: an anaerobic sprint from start to finish that is, all things being equal, usually won by whoever gets the hole shot.
I stare down the hill – which seems smaller than it used to be, though is somehow more daunting – and await the jarring buzz that means “go,” whose chord is compounded by the thud of the starting gate falling into its little tomb in the earth beneath the hill. I do my best to steady my bike in the gate, to roll my wrists up and forward – similar to how I cradle the drops on my track bike – to position my forward foot at the best possible degree to get out of the gate as fast I possibly can. I stare at a spot on the ground just in front of my wheel in order to maintain my balance, a trick I learned when figuring out how to do trackstands.
And just before the gate slams down, just before I get relegated to last place before even reaching the crest of the first hill, just before my 45-or-so-second “thrill” ride begins, I hear a little voice echo through my full-face helmet.
“Have fun, daddy,” my seven-year-old son tells me. He’s standing behind me, waiting for his own heat, which will begin shortly after mine crosses the finish line. And that little voice is exactly why I’m here.
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It’s why, after more than 30 years away from BMX racing – years that mostly found me racing track, road, and 'cross on bikes that fit my six-foot-four-inch frame much more readily than a child’s toy with 20-inch wheels – I have returned to the starting hill. It’s what has possessed me to relearn a sport where crashing is more function rather than anomaly.
It’s neither some mid-life crisis nor the wonder and challenge of seeing if I’m still capable of what I once was. It’s not the idea that I maybe can outrun age so long as I keep my pedals turning; that I can’t feel all 42 of my years if I refuse to let myself accept each and every one of them. It’s not chasing some long-dormant glory that can’t possibly be re-lived on a football field or leaping over hurdles the way I did when I was in high school. It’s not any of those things that brought me back to BMX racing.
It’s far more simple than that: I’m here to spend time with my little boy.
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