*Author’s Note - This post has been two years in the making. Ya know when you have good intentions...and then life gets in the way, and then you never get back to the thing you had good intentions about? Well....it's like that.
2020 was different.
Do we have a season?
March was when it became official. We were in a pandemic. Our mountain bike season didn’t happen until July, but both Matt and I knew this was still going to be “a thing” by then. We weren’t sure what to do, so we started asking other teams and the league what they were going to do. No one else was sure either, but we did get some feedback:
The Williamsport team and Joe Taverni were not taking any chances. They were throwing in the towel on the season. Joe decided it just wasn’t worth the risk. He was decided and steadfast.
The PICL was unsure. Because the science was showing that being separated and outside during the day had very low transmission risk: they figured they could go ahead with at least something. What that “something” was going to be, was not completely understood yet. And of course it wasn’t. With information changing daily, and the Governor shutting things down and making daily amendments to what was and was not “safe”…how could you decide anything? But what that meant was the possibility of PICL missing a complete year of revenue. Could they survive that kind of financial hit? No one seemed sure. And even if they could, how many of the people that make PICL work would have left, because they couldn’t get paid…at all? Was this potentially the end of PICL?
In the team, opinions were as varied as they were in the rest of the world. Some folks on the team felt like the entire affair was being overblown, and that we should just proceed as normal. Others felt that the season should be entirely scrapped, and anything less would be irresponsible and unsafe. Between those two opinions, were every shade of every other opinion.
…So, it came back to me and Matt. We agonized over this decision. We could see EVERYONE’S perspective. So how to decide…?
What we decided
So with all this in mind, Matt and I decided, like the league… we were going to do “something”, but we weren’t exactly sure what that looked like exactly. We decided that it was TOO IMPORTANT for the kids to have some kind of mental health time, so cancel the season. We decided that the kids (and especially the more outgoing kids) were going to need at least some time during the day to get outside and see SOMEBODY else. Being inside all day…every day…was going to be horrible for a bunch of our kids: and we knew it. So instead of that, we took the minor risk of having practice and “going places” together, but we decided NOT TO GO TO MEETS.
That being said, we also DIDN’T DROP OUT OF THE LEAGUE. We had our coaches keep up their Coach levels and get trainings, like it was a regular year. We had all the kids pay their dues: even though we weren’t really going to get the benefits of them. We decided to do this, because we wanted to help the league weather the storm. We wanted them to be viable when the year was over. We wanted PICL to survive Covid.
We rode
We rode all kinds of places. We all stayed together, but also went places as smaller groups. We rolled into Swatara in force and it looked like an invasion. We rode Natalie, and R.B. Winter, and all kinds of places we talked about before…now we had time to ride them.
Because it's been two years, I can't remember all the details. Frankly I can barely remember any of the details. Maybe anyone reading this will help me out in the comments if I forgot or omitted things that need to be remembered here.
So right off...I remember Jake's Rocks. I loved/love that place! What a work of art! Trail designing and building at an amazingly high level. Fun, beautiful trails that are unobtrusive on the landscape. I really can't say enough good things.
Claw/Teeth marks on my cooler after Jake’s rocks, and Amanda’s bear-infested campsite.
Our campsite got raided by a bear at Jake's Rocks. Amanda's littler Yeti cooler was taken pretty far away. My larger one wasn't too far away, but was still unopened and had teeth and claw marks on it. Pretty good advertisement for Yeti!
We had some fun at Raystown too. That place is always a great place to ride, and we had some great day and night riding there.
We didn’t win any awards.
We didn’t make any podiums.
We didn’t meet a lot of new riders at meets.
But, what we did do was really came together as a team. We did things at our own pace. We weren’t really “competitive” but you know the saying, “If you have two people on a bike…you have a race!” As a result, people found a way to satisfy their competitive urges.
Bottom line: it was fun. It was the right thing to do. I think our kids appreciated the ability to get out once in a while and socialize and get some exercise. I think in hindsight: keeping everyone locked up was the more dangerous move; but that’s easy to say now in retrospect. No judgement for anyone else’s decisions. It was a strange time.
Maybe we should take a year off from time to time. It’s a way we can call come together and absence makes the heart grow fonder.
