Kathryn Bertine - The Road Less Taken: Lessons from a Life Spent Cycling

To my sisterhood of pro cycling. You chose the right road.

I went on a search for something real, traded what I know for how I feel.

The Avett Brothers

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Hunter S. Thompson

Contents

Foreword by Lindsay Berra

I was a 19-year-old college sophomore, home from Christmas break in 1996. I got a package in the mail from Amazon.com. Inside, I found a copy of Stephen Ambroses book, Undaunted Courage , about the Lewis and Clark expedition to unlock the American West. The note inside from Dr. John J. McMullen said, I thought you would like this.

First, lets acknowledge that the Internet was still little more than a precocious toddler in 1996, and that Dr. Mac, who was nearly 80 at the time, had already figured it out. He was always a pioneer of sorts. He was a retired naval commander who ran a very successful shipping business, but he loved sports, too. He brought the National Hockey Leagues New Jersey Devils into a market already saturated with New York Rangers fans where no one believed a team could thrive, much less win and went on to collect three Stanley Cups. And as the owner of baseballs Houston Astros, he hired Bob Watson as the GM. Watson was just the second African American to hold that position in Major League Baseball.

Dr. Mac was also the reason I met Kate Bertine.

Yes, Ive known Kathryn long enough that I still call her Kate. Calling her by her childhood nickname is a habit Ive been unable to get my tongue to break. To me, Kate is still the same teenager I met at the Meadowlands in the 90s, all wide-eyes, long legs, and bangs. But she likes to use her Big-Girl Name, so henceforth, I will use it, too.

Both Kathryns parents and my grandparents were lucky enough to call Dr. Mac a friend, and we would all meet at Brendan Byrne Arena to watch the Devils play. Kathryn and I would eat chicken fingers and lean through the windows of Suite 121, transfixed by the action on the ice below. Dr. Mac always got a kick out of us two girls who knew the intricacies of line changes and the two-line pass better than any of the men in the room. And because he was such a smart fellow, I think Dr. Mac knew Kathryn and I would be holding our own with the men for the rest of our lives.

By that time, I was already playing high school hockey. Boys hockey, that is; my high school didnt have a girls team, and by my senior year, I was captain of the varsity team. My high school team practiced and played at the same rink in suburban New Jersey where the Devils practiced, and sometimes, Id hop the boards after a shift and see my grandfather and Dr. Mac, eyeing me up from the other side of the glass. They were tough to impress and would never clap or cheer or shout. The best I would get was a nod of approval after a sneaky back-door goal or a tough battle along the half-wall against a boy twice my size. I know they both thought I was a little nuts, but I also know they appreciated my kind of crazy. Kathryns kind of crazy.

Dr. Mac and I got along. He approved of my gumption, encouraged my wanderlust, and seemed to understand them both more than either of my parents. He always stayed on top of what I was up to. I went to college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I continued to play hockey on the mens club team. I also walked on to the varsity softball team, which was a considerable accomplishment for an unrecruited player from the Northeast. After college, I became a writer for ESPN The Magazine , where I traveled more than 200 days a year both nationally and internationally for better than a decade, covering hockey, tennis, and baseball (my bread-and-butter sports) and other sports, too everything from boxing and snowboarding to college hoops and roller derby. And always, I was one of the only women in the pressbox, in the lockerroom, on the field. Now, as a national correspondent at MLB.com, the same is true.

I work in much the same way I played head down, nose-to-the-grindstone, doing the best job I can possibly do. Its the same way Kathryn rides her bike. Its the way we both live our lives.

We both travel, a lot. Sure, a lot of it is work-related, but there are also a lot of trips we choose to take because theres a mountain we want to climb or a beautiful stretch of road we want to ride. I like to think of my sense of adventure as one of my best qualities, but it often leads to that same presumptuous question, one that I know Kathryn also hears, over and over: Dont you think its time to settle down? That query always makes me think of great white sharks and automatic watches; if they stop moving, theyll die.

That question also reminds me of the 592-page thumbs- up I once received from a man who didnt dole out thumbs-ups very liberally. Dr. Mac told me to follow my own path by giving me the story of two men who quite literally made their own.

Kathryn and I have always had that in common weve done what has made us happy with little regard for what everyone else says should make us happy. I wont apologize for that, and I dont think Kathryn ever will, either.

Its like she says; the wind feels too good on our faces.

Lindsay Berra, national correspondent for MLB.com

Introduction

At 18, I knew exactly where my life would be by the time I turned 28. Id be married, have two kids, maybe three. There would be a medium-sized dog of mixed-breed heritage, pound rescued. My job within the publishing industry would be steady no, lucrative! and my income within a comfortable upper-middle-class bracket. So thats what I wrote down in the spring of 1993 when my high school history teacher, Mr. Johnson, handed each student in his senior homeroom a blank sheet of paper and asked where we saw ourselves 10 years later, when the calendar brought forth 2003.

Bil Johnson was the man. The dude. The cool teacher. The one with the ponytail, the hip wardrobe, and a passion for teaching accented with a slight, unspoken disdain for the syllabi and structures that steered students toward test-score prowess instead of an education based on truly absorbing the lessons of the world. His full name was Wilbur. I applauded his savvy commitment to being a Bil with one l. As a Kathryn called Katie during my childhood, it made no sense that my parents chose -ie instead of Kat y . Bil Johnson was my hero, a much-needed sign there were people in this world who got it . Despite the fact I had no idea what it was. This naivet was clear, as my 10-year prediction of my life mirrored exactly the same sentiments as most of the other girls in my class. We simply used our moms as models for the question, calculating how old theyd been when we were born, where we lived in New York suburbia, and what some of our parents did for a living. I lived in the right town, went to the right school, kept myself in the right lane, and that was that. Id surely stay in the right lane and keep making right turns.

Bil Johnson collected our letters. He said hed mail them to us in 10 years. We snickered.

In 2003 my parents received a letter addressed to me. They had moved six years prior from the house I grew up in, but our town was small and my parents had not moved far. The postman remembered the new house and dropped the letter in their new mailbox. I, too, had moved many times since college. My parents forwarded the letter to Colorado, where I lived in a rented home with three housemates on the outskirts of Boulder. I was struggling to find work and had recently broken up with a serious boyfriend. I was 28 and batting zero for the very predictions I made about my own life. I had nothing my teenage self thought Id have no husband, no kids, no dog, no salary. And yet, there was this: I was happy. I liked my life, unpredictable and oblique as it was.