Mudslide!

This past Sunday morning, which is referred to locally as Catholic Easter since Orthodox Easter will be celebrated this coming Sunday morning, I got up early as is my custom, jumped on my infamous Carrera, and headed up Vodno. Vodno is the mountain that hugs the entire city to the south. I love riding my mountain bike on Sunday mornings because the city is dead asleep and it's quiet and I do not have to compete with hardly anyone for the road. As I ride up the mountain, more and more of the city comes into view . . . it's a great time to pray . . . and sweat . . . they go well together.

Since it is only the beginning of the riding season, the mountain is tough, really tough right now, my legs just can't do the entire 11 kilometers to the top, and so about half way up I take a mid-mountain road across the face of the mountain and then come down the other side. This gives me a challenging 12-mile ride, which ultimately just makes a circle back to my house.

On this morning's ride, I was on the mid-mountain road just a gettin' it across the face of the mountain when I came around a hairpin curve into pure confusion. Where my road should be right in front of me was now . . . a new mountain! There were trees and boulders and earth 30 feet high . . . right across the path where the road should be! I grabbed my hydraulics hard and came to a shuttering stop just prior to making contact with the first boulder. A huge mudslide had taken out the whole road! I had two possible choices facing me; either I could go back the way that I had come, or I could pick up the bike and climb up and over all the rocks and trees and debris and on the other side of the mudslide, continue on my chosen path. I chose the later and climbed over.

As I continued along the mid-mountain road I wonder when the mudslide had occurred and what damage had it caused up and down the ravine from where it had come. Then the thought occurred to me that I often let mental mudslides wreck the path that I am on, much like this mudslide had wiped out my mid-mountain road. There are those old tapes that I let Satan play in my head that lead to defeat over and over again . . . essentially a mental mudslide. Get out of my head Satan-butthead! That’s Dr. D’s Diagnosis of the day.