Personal Essay Zero Draft

7/30/2019 Personal Essay Zero Draft

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Sumner Renegar

Ms. Barbara Presnell

English 1103

September 10, 2012

Personal Essay Zero Draft

My love for the sport of mountain biking started with my very first bicycle that I was

given as a child. I remember it was a silver and black Huffy Hammer if I do remember correctly.

This is the bike that I actually learned to ride a bike on. I remember riding around on the

driveway initially then once I grew more proficient at riding, I liked to take my bike off road. I

started racing down the driveway at high speeds then dragging the tire down the last 20 feet of

the driveway as I stomped the pedal brake. Then I moved up to riding down the steeper hill in

the front yard. I would ride down different lines down the front hill, ranging in steepness, the

most moderate being on the left, and the steepest on the far right. I liked trying to find

different ways and fun ways to get down the hill. I had a few different paths carved out of the

deep layer of leaves that covers the hill in the front yard. Every time I would sink into the

leaves on the way down leaves liked to follow me into the yard where I would end up raking

them right back in to the natural-area after my dad told me to clean up my mess. I also liked to

take it for laps around the back yard to see how fast I could go around. When I took off at the

starting line I would put all my weight on one of my pedals to make myself do a wheelie,

which all kids know makes you go so much faster. Once I had outgrown my Huffy, my love for

bikes would only be fed more with the switch to the full suspension Magna bike. This bike

made me feel invincible, with its two inches of travel, I felt I was able to ride over anything.

Once the Tour de France came on during the summer I would watch it then go outside to ride


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my bike around for as fast and as long as I could. Even if I wasnt riding a road bike in France I

loved the feeling of riding my bike around without a care in the world. My next venture into

the world of cycling came in the form of a diamondback BMX bike from Dicks Sporting Goods.

It was a light, almost Carolina, blue, and everything else was a matte black color. I had a lot of

good times on that bike. It was super fun for cruising to friends houses, into Mint Hill, or in the

woods in the neighborhood, or any other place I could find to ride it. One time I was just

messing around riding around on the driveway and as I went to bump up the curb, my foot

slipped of the pedal and spiked me in my shin twice. It bled like a steady stream of sap coming

from a wounded pine tree. In fact I still have the scars on my shin to this day. Another memory

I have from my Magna bike was the time i face planted on the road in my neighborhood. It was

towards the end of 5th

grade and my mom was participating in a student teacher kickball game.

She came up to bat and when she went to kick the ball, she missed and got an awful Charlie

horse. When we got back from school I was thinking about where I could go to get crutches

and I thought of my friend Graham Lawrence, who I had recalled had some crutches at his

house. I called up Graham and he said he had the crutches, so I got on my bike and rode right

over. Once I had the crutches, it was time to figure out how to actually carry then on a bike.

This was actually a common problem while riding a bike in the neighborhood between fishing,

building, and airsoft there were plenty of things to carry on a bike so I thought crutches

wouldnt be any different. I put the crutches across the handlebars and had both the crutches

and the bars in my grip. As I left the slightly downhill driveway and took a left down pine lake

lane I sped up quickly down the road. Not remembering the added length of the crutches on

the bars, I got too close to a mailbox I was passing and clipped the crutches on the stationary


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post. Immediately I knew I had messed up as I left the seat and flew over my barsand into the

asphalt. Right when I came to my senses and looked at my wrists were both scraped up from

the middle of wrists out to my knuckles. My face felt like it was on fire and I could feel my lip

bleeding onto my chin. Once I had realized the extent of my injury, I let out a blood curdling

scream that was heard by my friends and his brothers and his friends. One of my friends older

brothers came sprinting towards me and looked at me like a different person. He had seen the

scrapes all over my face and arms and asked me if I was alright. I said I was but I definitely was

not alright at all, I felt like I was almost in shock because the pain hadnt quite set in fully from

the road rash. Grahams brother offered to give me a ride home as he pulled up in his green

Dodge Stealth. I tried to gather myself to get into the car, but it hurt to bend my knees or

elbows because I scraped them all pretty badly during the crash. Once I was in the car I was

sitting there thinking about what my mom was going to think about what had happened. I was

also trying to ignore the stinging of the open wounds. I got home, Grahams brother, John,

helped me to the door, and as I walked through the door my mom saw my face and gasped in

horror at the sight of the aftermath of the crash. I tried to tell her what happened and I think

she was tearing up while I told her what had ensued. She felt like it was her fault because she

needed the crutches and I went to get them for her. Now that I was all scraped up and needing

a visit to the doctors office, she was almost unable to take me there due to her injured leg.

Thinking back to the situation, I recall it was my dad that took me to the local doctors office but

I could be wrong. I arrived at the doctors office, kind of limping in, and they asked me what I

needed, then saw the scrapes on my face. After they asked my parents and me what

happened, they proceeded to tell me they needed to clean the wounds with soap. I remember


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thinking that having soap in an open wound was going to hurt me more than it could ever help,

but they insisted it was the right thing to do. When they first touched the skin that they said

was my lower dermis, I think, I cringed in pain. It felt like they were putting a hot piece of metal

on my skin, all the while telling me it was helping me. You couldnt have convinced me it was

going to help me at the time, all I wanted was for them to stop putting that stuff on my skin.

Once the soap had been applied on every scrape, they bandaged me up with gauze and medical

tape, I looked like a zombie straight out of a movie. On our way out, I was prescribed a topical

medicine used for burn victims, since road rash is very similar to a burn. Over the next few

weeks, I had to replace the bandages daily and re-apply the medicine usually once a day. I

couldnt really bend my legs very well either because of the scrapes on both my knees, and I

was lucky enough to be living in a house with two sets of stairs, and a bedroom on the top floor.

I did recover eventually, of course, only to return to riding my bike. One weekend, my friends

and I found a spot in an apartment where there was a steep, short hill. It was right in front of a

side walk, a strip of grass, and a curb into the parking lot. We decided we could get some speed

on the hill behind the little ramp-like hill and jump the hill into the parking lot, about ten feet

away. We tried for a while and try after try we were getting closer to clearing the whole gap,

ramp to parking lot. Finally one of us cleared the landing and then the others followed suit.

Now that we were getting better, we thought we should try to see who could go the highest.

This was on my newer bike, the 2005 Specialized Hardrock Sport, which I found on craigslist for

$180. That bike was my first real mountain bike, it had good suspension and tight gears that

switched at the twitch of a finger. Without this bike, I would not have been interested in

mountain biking.

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Personal Essay Zero Draft