Vol. 122 - Welcome to the Team
On commitment, being a good teammate, and living to ride
Ever since he took his first independent pedals when he wasn’t quite three years old, my son has been inseparable from bikes.
In the four years since, he’s taken to mountain biking and every Tuesday from March to November, we do a five or six-mile trail ride in the woods near our home. When he was just four and five, he did some monster rides totaling ten, twelve, and eighteen miles. And soon, when he’s just a few inches taller, he’ll join me at our local velodrome to learn how to race track bikes.
Once, when we were riding home after notching a dozen miles on the cart paths at a local golf course that was closed for renovations, I asked him why he loved his bike so much.
“I just feel like I was born to ride,” he said.
We’ve known as much since those first few pedals. Hell, even before then, when he would spend HOURS tearing around our town’s pump track on his strider bike.
Which is why, two years ago, we started him racing at our local BMX track, which is just thirty minutes up the road from us in Burlington, North Carolina.
The track operators are great and the community super welcoming (they even start every Friday night race with a series of strider-bike races, meaning our daughter gets in on the action, too).
Our son starting winning almost immediately, quickly progressing from the beginner to the intermediate classification (BMX has three classifications: beginner, intermediate, and expert).
In his first year-and-a-half racing as a beginner, he won more than half of the races he entered, including a statewide race down in Charlotte. However, since moving up to intermediate, he has yet to notch his first win. He knew as much going into the new classification. We had many long discussions on those car rides home from the track about how a new class meant stiffer competition. But we also discussed the idea that stiffer competition will make him faster, even if winning doesn’t come right away.
Thus far, he seems to understand and accept the tradeoff. That doesn’t mean racing intermediate hasn’t come without its frustrations. I’ve had to wipe away plenty of loss-induced tears. Still, whenever Emily or I remind him that he should only be racing BMX as long as he enjoys it, he reminds us that it is one of his favorite things in the world, even if he isn’t as dominant at the next level as he was at the first.
As last season came to a close, an email landed in my inbox inviting our son to be on our track’s official race team. Burlington BMX has had a team in the past, but it seems that was more of a loose affiliation of riders wearing the same jersey at local and regional races rather than a proper bike-racing team.
This new endeavor, however, was formed in hopes to create a stronger unit, a proper team, to represent Burlington BMX at local, state, regional, and even national events.
Like we often do when it comes to these types of commitments, Emily and I sat down with our son and had a long discussion about honoring your word and your team and coaches, about recognizing the parents and volunteers and the untold hours and money we put in to make sure our kids are having fun. We talked about how this commitment was longer than what he was used to (the typical six or eight week youth basketball or Little League teams he’s thus far been a member of) and that if we told the team we were going to be at a certain race, we had to make sure we were there.
I told him the same thing I’ve told him several times on bike rides in the past, whenever we find ourselves at the bottom of an imposing hill climb.
“We don’t have to start,” I always say. “But if we do, we have to finish.”
(After that, I’ll usually throw in our shared mantra that we can “never let the mountain win,” which charges up his innate and undeniable competitive juices.)
From there, I leave it up to him. We can go up or we can go around. But if we go up, we go all the way to the top. And nine times out of ten, he chooses to ride up the hill.
And so, after saying all that and confirming our son understood what it meant to sign his name the agreement the BMX team sent over, we left the decision to him.
Did he want to commit to being part of a team for most of the year, of driving further afield than ever to race his bike (nothing crazy; three or four hours max. We’re not allowing him to be that nuts about this shit just yet), of challenging himself against better and faster racers than he’s yet lined up against?
Without hesitation, our son grabbed a pen and scribbled his name at the bottom of the team agreement (which was more of an honor code than anything else), thrilled to be a part of his first bike-racing team. Makes sense, considering he was “born to ride.”