Humility: A Lesson Most Needed and Least Often Acknowledged
I have been a cyclist for almost 30 years now—longer than many of my cycling friends have been alive.
That hobby grew from a life-long quest to be the sort of athlete (and man) my father would respect. My father was a four-sport letterman in high school, captain of the first state championship football team in my home town. He was a small young man, but fierce and the sort of hard worker that made him a coach’s dream. By the time my father graduated high school in the 1950s, he had lost so many of his teeth that his dentist pulled the rest, and my father has had a full set of false teeth since his late teens.
I was never able to be more than a bench warmer on my school basketball teams, a marginally fair golfer, and briefly a triple jumper my senior year of high school. Mostly, though, I joke that I am a “try” athlete—and it is something I cannot let go, despite knowing without qualification that my father loves and respects me in the exact ways I have always wanted. Any perceptions of failure that exist between the two of us are entirely my insecurities.
My cycling life has had three stages—a beginning decade of learning to ride and race at a high level, a middle decade that was interrupted by my doctoral program