I may have mentioned, once or twice before, (I'd link to the post, but I'm too lazy to look it up) that I'm a wuss. A wimp. A weenie. (I believe I also commented on how these terms all begin with "w," but what the heck, it bears repeating).
Anyway, I really am. A wimp, I mean. Somehow I've ended up doing any number of un-wimp-like things, like dirt bike racing and playing rugby...but still, underneath it all I'm a wimp. I'm clumsy and cautious--which I guess is a better combo than clumsy and fearless--and things that other people don't give a second thought will send me into a cold sweat.
Take, for instance, last night. I'm currently in "easy week," so I had no Monday oval workout. I could have skated my normal trail route for the prescribed "recovery skate," but I felt like something different. So I joined six other inliners for a Group Skate.
An urban Group Skate.
On a very busy trail.
So busy, in fact, that by the time I had skated to the bathroom a mile down the trail, I had already seen more people than I usually see in five of my normal rural trail skates. So busy that sometimes we'd be passing a walker on the left while a fast biker passed us on our left and another fast biker approached us from the opposite direction. So busy that I was mentally thanking myself for deciding to wear my kneepads, and mentally questioning whether I should also have invested in some Depends (good thing I hit the porta potty before we started!).
The people I skated with were very nice about my phobias, but they didn't seem to share them. They took turns babysitting me at the back of the pace line; I had no trouble keeping up with their speed, but I couldn't match their guts. Downhills, road crossings, tricky passings of multiple bikers--all resulted in me losing the pack and then--along with the babysitter of the moment--having to scramble to catch back up.
This went on for 18 miles.
Still, after the turnaround at nine miles I was starting to feel a bit--just a tiny bit--more confident. My skating partners were very good about positioning themselves at road crossings and yelling "clear" over and over as I made my cautious approach, and eventually I was hardly slowing down before the roads. Well, except for that one time when I stopped at a road crossing and the old guy in the dress shirt and tie who was riding a bike rode past me into the street and then turned to his right directly in front of me just as I began skating again...but really, we were hardly moving and so I didn't consider it a traumatic event.
As we began our cruise home, I was thinking...yeah, this trail is pretty nice. I'm getting used to all the traffic. It's not so bad; maybe I should do this again. Yeah, this is fun...
And that's when I heard the sirens.
Loud sirens. Coming up the road behind us. Sirens that were soon revealed to be attached to a large fire truck, which was soon revealed to be heading to...a car/bike accident. Surrounded by emergency vehicles and spectators, on the road right next to the trail we were on. I didn't look as we skated by, but my fellow skaters mentioned that the biker was still on the car hood when we went past. (I hope the person was OK; I never heard any more about the accident on local media, so I hope it wasn't as bad as it seemed at the time).
Suddenly wimp, wuss and weenie don't seem like a bad idea.
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