Why I can eat anything I want today

I freely admit that I’m no athlete, never have been.
Although I wonder, if in another time, after Title IX, when legislation gave girls equal access to sports in public schools, if I could have been.

I only remember a girls’ soccer team when I was in high school, and even then it was intramural, nothing particularly official. The girls who played on it were considered not quite weird, but a little out of the ordinary.

Add to that my somewhat disorganized childhood, and maybe it’s no surprise I never learned to ride a bike until I was thirty. My kids thought this was hysterical – fortunately they were too young to be mortified by a mother teetering around while her sainted husband ran alongside. The amusement continued through my biking apprenticeship – like the time I lost control, careened down a sloping driveway at a local college and landed in a collection of rhododendrons.

So let’s just say biking does not come naturally to me.

And yet here we are at Cape Cod, bikes in tow.

Today we went for what I thought (actually hoped and prayed) would be a brief run on the Cape Rail Trail. We were exploring a section we hadn’t covered on previous trips – a section that looked deceptively short on the map.

There was a lovely breeze and happily today the trail was thin of traffic, so I didn’t have to deal with the know-it-alls in their neon spandex who suddenly whoosh up to your elbow with no warning or fleets of tippy kids who zigzag into your path.

And there were unexpected delights along the way:

But there were also Mt Kilimanjaros to be struggled up. At one point as I toiled up just such a hill I ran out of gears to shift down to.

We also had a few stretches in which we had to leave the path and share the main road with drivers who have no idea how inept I am or what the odds are that I’ll just lurch right into their path. 

And of course my nemesis, the posts at each street crossing. For some reason I’m inexorably drawn to their magnetic field and each time narrowly miss riding directly into them. 

Yet in spite of the sore hands from my death grip on the handlebars, my tired legs, and other sore and unmentionable parts, we made it back to the Promised Land: our parked car with air conditioning and soft seats that supported an entire derriere.

10 MILES!

Next stop: ice cream sodas.