My father’s heavy, white Oldsmobile, in neutral, had just begun to pick up speed at the top of the three mile hill.  By the time I careened by him on my blue, steel, Japanese twelve-speed; his speedometer climbed to fifty miles per hour. The twelve-speed, Centurion, a gift to mark the start of my teenage years, provided more of a ticket to freedom and danger than most parents would have expected. Even though it was at least a forty mile round trip, I liked to see how long it would take me to cross the Massachusetts’s border and ride back home again.  Momentum from the “Speilman Highway” pushed me about a third of the way up my street toward our house, where the Oldsmobile caught me. My father’s voice rattled my taught belly:

“New Horizons” he yelled, “Would you want to live at New Horizons?”

I flinched at this grim possibility, nearly spilling my bike into the road-sand. The residents of this assisted living facility strengthened their non-disabled and semi-functional limbs on the various machines at the gym where my parents and I belonged. I knew that some of the residents had been born different, but others had been hurt in a variety of careless accidents. Winter’s grit had not been cleared from the gutters and made spring cycling especially risky.

The Olds slowed to fifteen miles per hour while I climbed the remainder of Deer Run’s mile long hill. My father continued, 

“Miss Track Star! You won’t be so cute anymore when you lose control of that bike. You know they would have to shave off all of that pretty dyed blond hair when they staple your skull back together.”

What my father said was all true I thought. I was a “star” at my country, regional middle school, where no other girls and only two boys had beaten me in the mile run that fall, and I would look pretty awful without hair.

I promised my father that I would avoid the long winding town highway, but since we lived on top of a hill in a region that is referred to as The Litchfield Hills, I doubted if I could avoid speedy descents all together.

Long after I passed my driver’s test, I still preferred to ride my bike to my various part-time jobs. This was of course, more than a decade before the price of gas climbed to nearly four dollars per gallon and a few years before it was considered really cool to save the ozone layer.

In late September of 2009, when I purchased my Specialized Dolce (sweet in Italian) racing bike, I didn’t realize that my recent stomach flu was actually an early sign of pregnancy. I purchased the bike in order to compete in a duathalon that I had been volunteering at for the past few years. After earning a slight bonus, when my seventh and eighth grade students improved their scores on the state test, I decided that I deserved a new bike. Two weeks later when I discovered that I was two months pregnant, one of my doctors, also an endurance athlete, advised me not to ride a racing bike while I was pregnant.   I continued to ride my much slower hybrid bike to the gym, to Whole Foods and to The Victoria’s Secret at the local strip mall. My husband claimed that it wasted time to get groceries using a bicycle, so I timed myself. 

“It’s nice out,” I would tell him, “and I need the vitamin D.”

“You drive a convertible,” he would reply, “and are you sure that it’s safe?”

Even when I was more than eight months along, it took me fourteen minutes to reach Whole Foods and twenty-two minutes to ride home with my backpack full of essential goodies. When my babies’ due date passed, my aerobics instructor warned me that my water will surely break while I am riding home from the gym and what would I do then? I wouldn’t have my hospital-stay bag full of cosmetics and pretty, post maternity clothes with me, if the ambulance had to retrieve me from the side of the New London Turnpike. Now that my daughter, Annie Rose is out in the world, and no longer being bounced around inside me on runs (including a few races) and during daily Cardio Blast or Cardio Kick classes, I can ride my Dolce again. If my father, now Grandpa Paul, gives Annie a bicycle for her birthday, it probably won’t be the racing type. It has been more than twenty years, but he still reminds me that he once clocked me going down a steep, curvy hill at fifty-four miles per hour.  One of my goals for 2012 is to attend church services more often, and the other one is to improve my time in the Shamrock Duathalon by at least three minutes. I know that my dad will be there to cheer me on regardless of how many years he has been worrying about my risky riding.