Happy Father's Day

Today is Father's day, a day that was partially spent on my mountain bike. Riding is great alone time, time to think and at times not to think. On some of the longer uphills the strangest things pop into my head. Commercial jingles, bits of songs that repeat because I don't know the rest of the song and when I do plug in my headphones, songs that today reminded me of our dads. The dads that are no longer with us.

Our most recent loss was Wayne Harrington, owner and operator of SellSmart The Easy Way. Wayne was a father to his entire office and his extended family.

Late last year we lost a great father and grandfather in Don Thompson.

The year before, my dad John Cook, lost his short battle with cancer. He was 82. He only knew he had cancer for the last 9 months of his life. For half his life he did not even know me, since I was not born until he was in his forties. He is the reason I still ride a bike today.

We spent years travelling to BMX races. We would load up the Jimmy on every weekday night and drive more than an hour to a race. On Saturday it was up and out by 6:00am to make that day's first race, another hour drive away. By the afternoon we were at another track and yet another track that evening. The same thing would happen on Sunday. The next week would bring the same schedule. That is 11 races a week. We did this for an entire year. The only break we got was when we headed out for the Texas Tour, we only had 6 races a week for those summer months.

Why did we do this? Well I wanted to be the number 1 rider in my district, I wanted to be a member of the 10,000 points club. He just wanted to see me accomplish my goals. We both got what we wanted.