Friday morning hooky

I met Leif at Red Butte for some late season singletrack
riding Friday morning. Leif has a unique
talent when it comes to cycling.  No matter how hard we’re riding, he can always
carry on a conversation. We could be
bombing down an unusually tight section through the trees, or grinding our
way up a loose gravelly climb, he’ll be
sitting right on my back wheel talking to me about anything that comes to his mind. It doesn’t slow him down either. How he rides like he does and retains his
ability to construct complex and grammatically correct sentences
when his heart rate is above the red line is a marvel to me. But that’s Leif, maybe all the lutefisk he
ate in his Swedish upbringing (in Wyoming!) has something to do with it.

Today he told me about his reticence for taking the GRE, his
early days of racing “way back in the mid-nineties”, and about the time he had
to be hauled off the race course in an ambulance and was chewed out by the emergency room doctor for having pure electrolyte drink running through
his veins. At one point he asked me a
question on a steep, leaf-covered uphill switchback. I tried to answer coherently while
maintaining my pace and getting around the switchback, but I failed. My back wheel slipped and I put my foot down,
something Leif never does because it would interrupt the conversation.

Leif, sitting on my back wheel as usual, had no choice but
to run into me. He didn’t hit me hard,
but it was enough to throw off his balance. I looked back in time to see him fall to the downhill side of
the switchback. There was a wooden
retaining wall below him and he was dangling over the edge. His arms were about six inches above the
ground at the bottom of the wall while his legs and his bike were on the trail at
the top of the wall.  Oh, how I wish I’d brought my camera!

With no camera to take his picture, I did the next best
thing—I helped him up. I grabbed a leg
and an arm and pulled. He was unharmed
and his bike didn’t get a scratch. It
was almost the funniest thing I’ve seen on a bike in a long time. But what was funnier was that Leif kept the
conversation going through the whole incident.

Now that's a gift.