I have an important message for all active Colorado guys who are slightly on the competitive side and want to enjoy the outdoors with your girlfriends: Love the one you’re with.
If you’ve got something to prove – such as how you can make it to the top of whatever peak in under however many minutes, or how you can hit a million miles per hour going down whatever pass on your road bike, or how you can better a seven-minute mile, or how you can ski or snowboard down the steepest bumps in Colorado – chances are the only race you’re going to win is the one to a fast breakup.
I know your intentions are good. I understand you just want to share your passions and create that long-lasting bond – as you should. Just understand it’s a process and you can’t force it. She’s a bit like a flower and will bloom when she is ready. All you can do is make sure she gets plenty of water and sunlight, but not too much. Try not to step on her, drown her, dry her out or pluck her from those roots before she is ready. She must be cultivated, and (no pun intended) fertilized properly.
(OK, feminists, I can hear you groaning and moaning. All this applies for the reverse scenario as well, when the woman is better than the man.)
That means no buying her equipment that is way beyond her ability because you want her to have the fastest and the best stuff like you. On the other hand, don’t even give me the “It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot” argument, either. Your old boots/skis/bike probably are not going to fit her properly and chances are the stuff the tenant before you left in the garage isn’t going to work for her, either. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve had to argue the need for shorter skis, bigger surfboards, looser boots and bike shoes that weren’t so tight.
Think about it. You’ve seen these couples. You’ve seen him trying to pick her up from the mangled, twisted mess of skis and poles, her knees bent in a ready-to-
tear position while she screams, “I’m fine! Leave me alone!” You’ve seen them pinned underneath overturned mountain bikes, trapped like beetles on their backs, feet still clipped into the pedals. You’ve heard them yelling at each other on the trail about whether they should go for the summit despite the lightning storm.
I’ve been that girl more times than I’d like to count. When I was in college at Boulder, I had Mountain Bike Boyfriend. MBB bought me a pair of bike shoes and SPD pedals for my birthday and took me to Moab, of all places, to learn how to use them. The shoes were two sizes too small, so he insisted we stretch them out instead of return them. He had me wear them in the shower. When that didn’t work, he put beer bottles in them and left them on the heater overnight. Needless to say, without adequate blood flow, my toes went numb and I couldn’t pry my feet out of those damn pedals no matter what. On one particularly steep climb, I tipped over as if in slow motion and tumbled all the way down that rock and landed in a pile on the bottom. It took him more than two years to clean up that mess.
After college, I moved to San Diego where I met Surfer Boy. SB and I had very different ideas about what constitutes a “big” wave. Still, that did not stop me from following SB into surf that was way over my head, figuratively and literally. SB thought the fear-stricken look on my face was hilarious. Determined to succeed at this glamorous sport, I put up with him until one day he told me I looked like a drowned rat. That’s about the point when our relationship went under, too.
In Aspen, I found Skier Dude. SD has absolutely no empathy for the challenges I face as a snowboarder, particularly when it comes to long traverses. I tried to explain to him that traversing is as miserable as it is taxing, using precious muscle strength I’d rather save for the fun, going downhill part. “You’ll get used to it,” he would say, as if it was a skill I had yet to learn after snowboarding for 15 years. It’s one thing to chase a boy you love, but to do it by hopping like a frog with two feet strapped to a 4-foot plank is another story. Talk about a ball and chain.
We’ll chase you for only so long, boys. At some point you better hurry up and wait.
Freelance columnist Alison Berkley can be reached at alison@berkleymedia.com.
