Teaching and Mountain Biking (or why Thursday is the best day of the week)

I wrote this piece in the “before times” (2016, specifically and published it on a now dead blog). I liked it so much I’m resurrecting it here. It speaks to how I used to order my life by different days/times of the week (teaching and mountain biking). We all did in various ways. Now in the pandemic February of 2021, it’s ZOOM meeting after ZOOM class, and then more ZOOMs, etc., and all the time seems to run together.

If you are a community college professor and teaching classes M-TH,  you know what Thursday afternoon means. 

It’s getaway day…time to get off campus because you’re not needed again until Monday.  Classes and office hours are done and your bag is packed.  It’s likely stuffed with a few papers but that’s okay.  It’s that groovy in-between time before the weekend workload kicks in (lesson planning and grading that happens all through Friday, Saturday, and Sunday).

If you’re reading this from the perspective of any other profession, you might be thinking “that’s a pretty nice deal,”  and you’d be right. But I want to convince you not judge me. Let me explain why this teaching and mountain biking go together and a necessary deal.

Every job has “those moments”, where the week is filled with meetings, projects, and a rising sense of pressure.  It’s no different for teachers in their work with students and all the other associated side-junk that goes with it. This all takes a different kind of toll,  and if you’ve been in the teaching game for any amount of time you know that there’s an accumulated back up that tends to press down against your shoulders, against the back of your eyes, or maybe even your heart.

Some weeks, the pace is relentless and stifling.  If you line up enough of these weeks in a row, you’ve got yourself a recipe for oodles of stress, lack of sleep, and the feeding of other bad habits.  In my case in the past, that meant keeping the comfort food and soda close as a way to pass the time while working and grading.  Cue weight gain, hypertension, etc.  But that’s another story (with a progressively healthier and happier outcome).

Many teachers start the academic year with intentions of finally achieving that ever-elusive work-life balance ratio.  So the balance part (getting off campus on a Thursday) comes with the trade-off of time.  If I am leaving work at 2PM, I’m trading two hours for grading papers later in the weekend.  I’m also placing myself outside of a place one colleague called the “getting sucked in” zone, which can be a revolving set of email, grading, and whatever problem happens to walk in your door (outside of office hours, of course).  It’s inevitable that it will happen and returning from “the suck” is nearly impossible. But the one truth here is that those issues can be addressed later on, 99% of the time.

The actual getaway pays back the mind and spirit in ways that are just plain essential.  For many, that means meeting up with family at the park, getting to a local soccer field to coach up the kids, or working on some personal writing. No matter the choice, it’s all about feeding a part of the self that we often neglect as we spend the better part of our days supporting the work of students.  And we love that, but it comes with a cost. So teaching and mountain biking MUST go together.

On this particular getaway day, I found myself in the Frederick Watershed mountain biking.  Once I arrived at the trailhead, a young couple parked in a car nearby kept shooting me annoyed looks as I began gearing up in preparation for my ride. Before I took off,  I mentioned that they should “mind the Bears while I’m gone,” which elicited some surprised talk between the two in between drags on a smoke and a pull on a bottle of liquor.  Kids.

What followed was an extraordinary ride, where I broke all my personal records: overall time, segment times. You name it, I smashed it.   And I could feel it, too.  The tension of the week passing through my legs and into the pedals, pushing me up over rock and root, and over all the tricky corners of the trail.  It was just one of those days.

So it was a day full of surprises.  I always expect to be pulled into something on a Thursday, but I made it out. I didn’t expect to break my old records, I didn’t expect to see a young couple in the parking lot working out their teen spirit together (or see them later in another spot while driving home in various stages of undress, nor on a previous getaway day seeing two people walking out of the forest with shovels in hand looking like they just did super illegal). But it all went my way.

Just a Thursday afternoon Frederick…the best day of the week.