Four Years, One Degree, and a Giant Bump on the Head

I’ve been forgetting to link to my monthly Outdoors column in the Dayton City Paper. In this month’s column I return to Oxford, Ohio, home of Miami University where I attended school.

Here’s the intro:

“Should I be wearing a helmet?” I asked my friend Mike standing next to his fancy mountain bike with Rock Shox.

“You’ll be fine,” he said, as he tightened the chin strap on his own helmet, slipped into his gloves, popped in his mouth piece, and adjusted his nut cup.

Fifteen minutes went by as I watched him pad and protect his body. I was wearing shorts, tennis shoes, an unsure smile, and a shirt that was void of dirt, blood, and sap…for the moment. To the onlooker I was either some kind of mountain biking purist that didn’t believe in putting anything between myself and nature, or an idiot. And since this was my first time mountain biking, it wasn’t hard to differentiate.

That day I learned more about physics during a few hours of mountain biking in Hueston Woods, north of Oxford, than I ever learned at Oxford’s Miami University where I studied. Most notably: bodies in motion will stay in motion until they hit a tree.

There were bumps. There were bruises. There was blood.


The link will probably go dead in a week or so. If you missed it, sorry about your luck.

 
7 comments
Kent says:

All this time I thought Miami University was actually in Miami.

Kelsey says:

Kent, Miami University was established before Florida was even a state!

The college in Florida is University of Miami. Now you know, and as of course you already know, knowing is half the battle.

Hi, the whole thing is going nicely here and ofcourse
every one is sharing facts, that’s really fine, keep up writing.

Let your voice be heard!

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