Grinning and Bearing It

What a great last two days of cycling! Thursday we took two really spectacular rides on the road to Cameron Lake and on Red Rocks Parkway in Waterton National Park. There was a lot of elevation, but relatively gentle grades, and our legs all felt good. Here are some of the roads we traveled:

A few important lessons/reminders from this trip. First, road signs are there for a reason and it is wise to pay attention to them. This sign, for example:

Because this is what our tour leader Drew saw at a designated morning rest stop, about a half mile before we arrived:

Using his instincts honed as a tax attorney (okay, he also has done 18 Ironman races, which is no doubt a record for a tax attorney), Drew drove up the road in time to warn us. Drew then saw a bigger Grizzly while preparing our lunch at another spot. He quickly packed up the lunch and the van faster than his swim to bike transition time in any of his races. I also saw a black bear walking next to the side of the road while I was cycling, about 15 yards from me. I had a passing thought about stopping to take a picture, but decided to keep pedaling since taking a picture was not part of my daughter Sarah’s “black fight back…” rhyme about bears. Thinking that we might need something more potent than a rhyme to fend off bears, that afternoon I rode packing bear spray (note the bear spray holstered to my cycling shorts). Word of a new sheriff in town must have spread amongst the bear population since we did not see any in the afternoon:

The second lesson that I learned was “hyperphagia”, which means excessive eating and is often used to describe what bears do this time of the year to prepare for hibernation. We decided that hyperphagia is a good scientific-sounding word for the enormous amount of calories that cyclists consume. We certainly did our part this past week. It is a good thing we did since we needed a lot of energy on our last big climb on Friday in Glacier National Park — a four mile challenging ascent with a four mile screaming descent and then back the other way. The road was along the side of a mountain with steep drop-offs and few guardrails. Happily, there was not much traffic and I was able to get some good pictures along the way:

Finally, my biggest takeaway from this trip was to reaffirm the importance of friendships. When Mary and I first saw that no one had signed up for this tour aside from the Westport Gang, our first thought was “what if we all end up hating each other at the end of the week?” It was of course the opposite. We had a really great time on this “private tour” with good friends. This was a good reminder that all of you subscribers, including fellow cyclists Art, Kevin and Serge (and of course my best friend Mary), have enriched my life.

I do hope that subscribers read my posts with the understanding that I am trying to have a little fun with friends, as opposed to reading my posts as if fact-checking a legal brief. I recognize that I sometimes take some literary license and using imprecise language has been one my flaws. When I was a junior Kelley Drye partner, I let then associate and now blog reader Gary (whose secondary persona is being the General Counsel of a publicly traded entertainment company) take his first deposition. When I visited the conference room before lunch to see how he was doing, it was clear that the witness was lying through his teeth. I took Gary outside and told him something like “you’ll never get anything from this guy, so just make this experience miserable for him”. When Gary finished questioning at 7:30 pm (unclear if he allowed any lunch or bathroom breaks), the witness stood up, promptly fainted and knocked a hole in the conference room wall with his head as his toupee flew off.

Similarly, I may have caused some reader confusion by writing that Art received the silent treatment from the “entire” State of Rhode Island after he single-handedly caused Brown University to miss the NCAA tournament. It is true that his basketball career quickly ended, but there is no need to express concern about this experience impacting Art’s psyche. Most of his fellow engineering students apparently did not know that Brown had a basketball team.

Today’s musical coda is a tribute to someone who massively enriched my life — my college suitemate Jeff Harmet who passed away earlier this year after a 15 year on and off battle with cancer. I dedicated my first post of this year to another suitemate, Ned Brown, who passed away a few months before Jeff. It is very hard for me and blog reader Skip (err…The Honorable Justice Richards) to grasp that of four life-long friends who lived together sophomore through senior years, two are no longer with us. I met Jeff on my very first day of college and he was the last person I saw when leaving after graduation. Between were a lifetime full of memories. Jeff had a wonderful family and had a hugely successful business career. And then disaster struck far too early:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/obituaries/jeffrey-alan-harmet-rancho-santa-fe/

Jeff loved challenges, approached them with an intense focus and a quiet self-confidence that was never displayed as arrogance. He never let his emotions get in the way of figuring out how to succeed. I have spent my life trying to copy his secret sauce, with varying degrees of success. Because it is really hard to do.

I often heard the song “Flirting With Disaster” coming from the record player in Jeff’s dorm room (some younger readers may need to google “record player”). Now 43 years later, that song is a good metaphor for the vagaries of life and a reminder that we should all pile up memories while we can. We had good weather yesterday, rented a car and realized that, in a very different way, we were flirting with disaster on our cycling ascent of Going to the Sun Road. If we had not experienced dense fog, we probably would have been scared out of our minds to see the sheer drop-offs on this narrow road as cars were passing us:

Well, that’s all for our 2025 cycling trips. We have yet to plan any 2026 trips, but rest assured our intent is to be still pedaling. Until next time…..