Time for a bike ride, and since we went in the late afternoon and we headed generally north and east that means it’s time for a shadooooooow sellllllfie …
It was also the day for me to go the wrong way because I got the roads confused and The Yankee had to chase me down which was no easy feat today because I had good legs and yet she managed to eventually do it anyway because I looked over my shoulder and saw the look on her face and then sat up and, yes, run-on sentences do happen a lot in cycling. It has something to do with the breathing, I think.
So we turned around and went the right direction, determined to not speak of this again. It only added on one extra mile, so she didn’t have to chase me far, because she is a strong rider, but my legs held up throughout the day. This is what’s important, look at that water:
There were people fishing on the causeway as we went through. Everyone is ready to enjoy some nice weather, which we’ve only had it intermittently here. That’s a crime against humanity, I’m pretty sure.
Anyway, that’s just after the big downhill, which one app tracked me at 134.4 miles per hour. I was not going 134.4 miles per hour. That’d be very fast, indeed, and I think the app is wrong in a lot of ways, begging the question: Why?
So you go down the descent then you take a hard left and you find yourself on a road that you can somehow hit 25-27 miles per hour without even pedaling. Then there’s the water and that’s when she caught me:
And then the climb out. This is where our barn by bike feature of the day comes in, and, yes, that is an uphill and not a camera tilt trick:
Is there a video? There is a video. On this particular route the video is from the last smooth, easy part before the hard part, and before the water.
It would be tempting to rush through here and attack the long series of rollers that turn into an uphill before the long downhill and the next eventual climb. It’d be fun to turn this into a bunch of big sweeping sines, as Bill Strickland called them:
I was riding in long, gradual curves that stretched nearly from the right shoulder of the road out to and sometimes past the yellow line on the left, then back and out and again the same.
[…]
The sine curve to me is more of an undulation, an expression of the natural beauty of movement, and the beauty of natural movement: a lover’s body in moments of passion beyond thought, for instance.
Or a bicycle rider in one of those rare interludes when the pure sheer pleasure of being a bicycle rider can be expressed only through an extended series of line-to-line swoops. The road sine is one of the most spontaneous and unsophisticated acts of cycling, and it begins and occurs and continues in some kind of complete state of unexamined and unself-conscious motion.
Bill Strickland is a brilliant writer and I love that description. I do it all the time on the bike. I always think of that passage when I do.
But never right here; never at the fence.
Somehow, I always find myself doing that other ultimate sign of freedom. I get to just the right spot on that road, just ahead of us here, and let it go and coast. I’ll float almost as far as momentum and enthusiasm will take me. And then start working my way uphill.
Talked with Tom Duszynski again, because the world needs to hear from epidemiologists and I’m part of the world and I want to give learned and thoughtful people a place to speak to people who want to hear real things and not bombast.
Wash your hands. And if you’re out on a bike or out on a trail or just in the backyard, have a great weekend.
