LAYNE MURDOCH/COURTESY OF THE BUSH CENTER
BUSH
AT PEACE
with him. “Get moving, Stork!”
he shouted at Ed Lazear, using the
nickname he had given his former
chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
At rest stops, Bush was impatient to get going again. He’d
pause, drink some Gatorade, chat,
grin, bask in the endorphin rush,
make a few jokes, and then hop
back on his carbon frame Trek Superfly 100 Elite.
“Yah, baby!” he’d exclaim.
By the end, however, he was exhausted. “I was gassed,” Bush admitted to me the next day. “Thirty
miles is a long way on a mountain
bike. I was tired.”
Over the last hour of the second day’s ride, as we traveled along
a singletrack trail that wound
through mostly flat, open fields,
Bush downshifted to one of his easiest gears, and the pace slowed to a
glacial crawl. Riders began to bunch
HUFFINGTON
06.16.13
“What does it mean when
you’re seeing triple? Ultra zen.”
up on each other, wheel to wheel. I
heard a little grumbling about the
stops and starts. But as was the
case all three days, no one dared
ride ahead of the former president.
“Did we reach Zen out there?” I
asked him after the ride, referencing a conversation he had years
ago with an Associated Press reporter who rode with him. Since
taking up mountain biking in
2004, Bush has embraced riding
hard as a way to leave his cares
behind, if only for an hour or two.
“I’m beyond that,” he replied, a
little groggily. “What does it mean
when you’re seeing triple?”
He answered the question himself: “Ultra Zen.”
Over an hour later, Bush was
still standing around, mingling
with the other riders and vol-
Former
President
George W.
Bush leads
a pack of
75 riders
participating
in the Warrior
100K at his
ranch near
Crawford,
Texas.