50 Stories for 50 Years — Post 32
“It’s a class ride, not a race. We won’t drop you or leave you behind.”
A classmate said that to me five years ago, before my first reunion bike ride.
I wasn’t a cyclist. My 40th reunion was approaching, and Tony had organized a class ride. I asked my personal trainer, a young woman I had once coached who had become an athletic trainer herself, whether biking might work for me. She said yes.
So I said yes to the ride, though with plenty of trepidation.
Could I keep up? Would I hold the men back?
I called a classmate with those worries. His answer, It’s a class ride, not a race, got me through that first ride. More than that, it began a rhythm of cycling that carried me through the next five years.
This year, for our 45th reunion, I was back on the bike.
II’d trained. Not as much as the year I rode 81 kilometers, but enough. I chose the shorter route and had ridden similar mileage the week before. My husband rode beside me, more confident than I was that this really would be a ride and not a race.
We kept pace near the front of the group until, a few miles in, one of my classmates began having trouble with her bike.
And suddenly the question changed.
Not: Can I keep up?
But: Who will I ride beside?
Questions set the direction of our thinking. So I traded the performance questions for relational ones.
Who will I ride beside? What will we see? What conversations might we have?
Who might I finally come to know after forty-five years of technically being classmates?
I rode with Sue.
I hadn’t seen her since we graduated in 1981. She has lived in Hawaii for decades and now works as a longevity coach. As we pedaled, we talked about having children in our 40s and raising them in our 60s. She marveled at my family’s size. I marveled at the life she had built an ocean away.
It was the only real time we spent together all reunion weekend.
Eventually, those of us delayed by the bike trouble caught up with the main group at a waypoint. I tried to push the others ahead so they wouldn’t lose any more time waiting for us.
The group leader stopped me.
“We are riding together, Mary.”
I have kept thinking about that sentence.
Because as women at the Naval Academy, we didn’t have much opportunity to be together. There were too few of us to be represented in every company. Gathering drew attention, and often we avoided it. We lived together, trained together, survived Plebe Summer together, but the pressure of being among the earliest years of women left little room for the kind of friendship that develops slowly, simply by riding alongside one another.
What built those bonds came later.
For more than twenty years, the women in our class have found a time and place to gather every year. Nothing formal. Just someone persistent enough to organize it and enough of us willing to show up.
And we have grown deeper as we have grown older.
At our larger reunions, we take a Saturday morning for a light breakfast and conversation. Over the decades, those conversations have changed. We listen as each tells how life has unfolded through loss and gain, celebration and grief. We know one another now in ways we could not then.
Over forty-five years, my classmates have traveled at radically different speeds and in different directions.
Some surged ahead.
Some stopped.
Some began again.
Some are no longer here.
Reunion has become a waypoint—a place where those of us who can still gather stop for a while, catch our breath, tell the truth about the road we’ve traveled, and notice who is riding beside us.
Maybe my classmate had it right all those years ago.
It’s a class ride, not a race.
Perhaps life is, too.
A no-drop life, best traveled when nobody rides alone.