The Most Fun You Will Ever Have

The most fun you will ever have will not actually be very fun. At least not until later.

They call it Type II fun, but if we’re being honest, we all know that sometimes it escalates to Type III or Type IV. This is the kind of fun that requires pushing your bike up 6,000 vertical feet in one day, just to crash your way down the other side of the mountain. This kind of fun is cold and wet and buried in a thick layer of grime. This is “three loads of laundry” worth of fun.

Soaked through after three hours of racing in a downpour, and having all the fun.

This kind of fun hurts and bleeds and laughs and usually leaves you smelling awful. This kind of fun has cactus spines in its knuckles and dirt under its fingernails. This kind of fun has scabby knees.

To have this much fun, you usually need to take at least one break to sit down on the side of the trail and cry your face off because “OMFG this is so hard and not any fun at all.” You’re confused, because this is the most fun day of your life – you just don’t know it yet.

This kind of fun gets up before the sun and walks through semi-frozen rivers before the sun hits the hills and melts the frost off the grass. This kind of fun gets lost because it’s having too much fun to look at a map, and this kind of fun refuses to backtrack, because obviously it would be more fun to make a loop even when the loop involves three hours of trudging through sandpits and prickly bushes. The term “bush-whacking” was invented for days like this.

This day was “fun”

This kind of fun forgets to put on sunscreen and never brings enough food and always underestimates how long it takes to have this much fun. This kind of fun is hot and tired and has blisters in just the weirdest places. This kind of fun bonks and cries and yells and then gets over itself and laughs about the bonking and the crying and the yelling. This kind of fun fantasizes about tacos and ice cream and pizza and really anything that has calories, because this kind of fun does not GAF about recommended serving sizes. This kind of fun could eat a goddamn house.

This kind of fun hurts and cramps and whines about the weather, because you can’t have this much fun on a beautiful 70 degree day. It has to be above 90degF or under 30, or at the very least raining like the second coming. Riding a bike on a beautiful day is fun alright, but it’s not this much fun. This much fun requires sleet and ice and thunder and lightning. This kind of fun has numb toes.

Sometimes you are just having too much fun to even notice the new hole in your leg!

This kind of fun gets way more fun once you’ve taken a shower and eaten a plate of tacos and scrubbed the muck off your bike (this kind of fun usually leaves that task for later). Sometimes it takes days to realize how much fun you actually had. You won’t truly know you had this much fun until you look back on a day that ended with you getting seven stitches in your face and think “man, what a ride, I can’t wait to do that again.”

This is the most fun you will ever have, and it isn’t even fun.

Syd Schulz

Pro mountain biker.

Average human.

I write about bikes and life and trying to get better at both.

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6 thoughts on “The Most Fun You Will Ever Have

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