I’m pretty sure people have speculated about time travel for as long as there’s been the concept of time. The more we learn about physics, the less likely this becomes. But I found the secret on a recent ride.
We hit a flat stretch of road, on a warm and sunny afternoon, with only a bit of wind at our backs. This was a typical sprinting mile, and so I entered the drops, and started upping the revs and the gears. 22, 24, 26, 27… each mph I increased, I dropped lower and dug deeper, with Kevin and Doug right behind.
About 3/4 of a mile in, I felt myself starting to flag. My largest weakness at the moment is heat, but my second is sustained sprints.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him. Doug – who had already put in probably 20 more miles than I had on this ride – was pulling up along side me, and started to pass. So I pushed harder. He continued to gain speed, so I pushed again. And suddenly it happened… it wasn’t 2012. We weren’t doing 28 mph. I wasn’t 33 years old. And my Defy Advanced had devolved into a 10-speed Raleigh.
In an instant, I was a young teenager, riding from one house to another with three of my closest friends in Ontario, Cali. We were flying around turns at amazing speeds that couldn’t be measured (mostly because none of us had cycle computers). And every time one of us took off, another would push their bike just that much harder and start to pass them.
This sprint with Doug and Kevin had opened up a rift in time that joined together two points separated by almost 20 years. It didn’t take quantum mechanics, the Large Hadron Collider, a DeLorean doing 88 mph, or 1.21 Gigawatts.
Nope. It just took a bike, a couple of buddies, and a good memory.