Your Story; Keith Gray

It is high time I came clean, I gotta get this out in the open. For the past several years I have been living a double life. Some of you know me as Alex; migrating between Ontario and Texas, living out of a Sprinter van, riding the good life. To others, I am Keith; native Texan, physical therapist, married with kids. How, you might be asking, can I occupy these two lives simultaneously? How is it possible Lori and the kids don’t know something is up? Well, that’s easy; I have a twin. Okay, not a twin, but certainly Keith Gray is my doppleganger and this is his story.

After a couple of years attending the annual Chihuahuan Desert Bike Fest, I started to notice something odd. Folks I’d never met or knew very little would talk to me as though I was someone else. They would talk about people I didn’t know, places I’d not been, situations I knew nothing about. The exchanges were peculiar and I blew them off, not giving them a second thought. It seemed that Keith, too, was experiencing the same thing. “At least two people said “hi Alex” to me and one even chatted me up about the ride we did yesterday, but it wasn’t me!” Finally we figured it out; people kept mistaking us for the other. How could that be?

Well let’s see. We are both tall, thin/fit red-heads with freckles who oftentimes sport some sort of beard. We even ride the same bike; 29’er Moots MootoX YBB. He’s the faster of us, though, I’m the better looking one. More than anything, we both love to ride our bikes in the desert.

Keith got into mountain-biking while in school for physical therapy, eventually taking him from the trails of Lubbock, Texas to XC races all over west Texas. He even dabbled with triathlons, but we still like him. Moving to Austin, Keith was forced to up his game, both to excel on the very technical local terrain as well as to keep up with “the abundance of hotshots.” Now living in a little town about 70miles outside Fort Worth with his family, racing has been replaced with “as many multi day bike packing trips per year as I can get(which is never enough).”

As for the Big Bend, Keith’s had a soft spot for this little piece of paradise since his first trip here in 1997. He returned many years later to compete three times in the now defunct Chihuahuan Desert Challenge mtb race. Today that race lives on as the Chihuahuan Desert Bike Fest, an event that Keith and his racing pals much prefer. “Instead of worrying about being rested and ready to race, we get to ride 3 awesome days in a row and drink (too much) and stay up (too late).”

Many folks have siblings, some even have a twin. Few of us, however, have found our doppleganger, our “brother from a different mother.” And while we may look alike, it is a passion for the bike that truly makes Keith and I, kin. Not only is that Keith’s story, in a way, I guess it’s mine.