Dirt Tan Bike Club

You’ve been good all year. And I hope your haul for Christmas 2023 included some really cool bike stuff. That thing you’ve been wanting forever—or maybe that thing you had no idea you’d love. (If not—there are always those gifts you give yourself…)

As we get older, our collections of bikes, gear and tools tend to get better and better. And I’ve learned a little something about how I react as a cyclist to the new toys that come my way. It’s a useful Christmas tip that’s helped me to at least partially ruin every bike-related gift I’ve ever received.

Here’s what I do: (It’s so simple and it works every time!) I take that gift and use it exactly the way God intended. I ride it or wear it or install it or crank it. I marvel at whatever nifty thing it does so well. And here’s the key to my ruinous little holiday secret: I immediately wish I could regift it.

I want to take this little engineering marvel, box it back up with a golden bow, and hand it straight away to my younger self.

Do you have any idea what I could have done with wireless shifting, 45mm tubeless gravel tires, GPS course navigation and a TrainerRoad subscription in the Year of our Lord 2003?

Then the Ghost of Races Past weaves me through a strip of twisted gravel flashbacks—swapping out old failures with reimagined gains. I dream a Garmin onto my early handlebars, so I never lost those cue sheets in the creek bed. My bad shifts disappear wirelessly, so I never shear off that derailleur racing outside Eureka (or Denton, or Weston). I snap my fingers and a hundred pinch flats vanish into tubeless oblivion. I nestle a smart trainer into my foolish winters, then register a fitter me into all those races across the twenty-teens where I couldn’t quite hang. And ping! Look at that young man go.

Every neat new toy that comes my way—every little upgrade in cycling tech—gets this same treatment. Sure, this doodad’s cool as hell. But wouldn’t it have been cooler still to have had it when you weren’t quite this … old?

And all those gifts wound up feeling like wastes. More kindling tossed onto the pale fire of my own disappointment.

Well, enough of that.

This winter, I scratched my younger self off my Christmas list. He’ll get no more gifts from me. (If I’m being honest, that kid wasn’t even always that nice.) I’m resolving instead this year to let my presents be about the present. To ride without carrying around how I used to ride.

Any regifting I do from here will be with my older self in mind. He’s the guy I most want on the nice list.

My wishes for him run like this: I wish him a rider’s bulky heart. And two lungs like Christmas stockings, stretching wide to accept each breath like the fat gift it is. I wish him a pair of fit and working legs—to climb stairs, walk dogs, follow his wife and chase kids farther into the deep end of whatever time we’re gifted.

I wish this old bag the kinds of perspective, wisdom and humor that only come when you’ve pushed hard enough for things to know the funny feeling of your wheels rattling off.

Oh, and I want to give him sturdy friendships. Sit him down beside grizzled pals with the same Christmas-sock lungs, scarred elbows and shabby race records. And when they’re too old to go on adventures, I want their minds to carry a city library’s worth of them. In the hefty snowball’s space behind the eyes and between the ears: Whole glaciers. Adventures big as canyons. Stories like cold rivers.

I don’t owe the younger me another thing. He’s been gifted plenty. But to our older cycling selves—and to the selves that will come about after our riding is done—well, I wish those old cusses the merriest of Christmases, and happy New Years by the dozen.