Older Eel

Almost 18 years ago was Eel #1, a big moment in Brendan's life on a bike. 

I made a lot of friends. I realized you can just invent a bike event and people will probably come to it. I learned that there are people all over the place who also ride through the margins on strange bikes. 

Little about me as a person has changed since then, except my job, marital status, fatherhood status and location of my home. Anyway, chill will invited me on a ride that was basically the eel course with some people from a Massachusetts island today and it was great. I brought my son, who has been learning the craft of riding a cx bike where it doesn't belong, and met up with friends who were once non-bike friends and probably now more fully committed bike people than I am (that's not actually true). Also, only true beat bike blog believers still understand the romance of a rim brake. 

Trails have come and gone, and so has a bit of my fitness, but I don't get nostalgic. I'm doing all the same things I started doing back then with a bigger, multi generational group and it's just as much fun as it used to be. Indeed, a break of riding East Hartford and Hartford riverfront reminds you great riding a bike in that area can be. 

Maybe someday Riverfront Recapture will finally open up the field north of Cemetery Brook, so you don't have to ride on a train tracks. That's a little too much to ask.