I’ve bored the — smart, beautiful, talented — readers of this space aplenty with my hypothesis about how spring in Bloomington doesn’t actually begin until the bike races take place. The women raced Friday in the rain. The men raced Saturday in a drizzle and under overcast skies. This photo, I figured, would be the punchline: this was as blue as it got this weekend.
But later, late on Sunday afternoon, the skies actually improved.
That was as spring-like as it got this weekend, the first weekend of IU’s spring.
But enough about that, because we must quickly pivot to the site’s most popular weekly feature. And, dear friends? Dear — smart, beautiful, talented — friends, today I get to share with you the most absolutely adorable photo ever captured in any context.
Phoebe was sleeping on her paws. She doesn’t normally do this, but it was so cute I had to resist the urge to wake her up with a bunch of big pets.
Do you ever wonder what animals are thinking? I wonder that all of the time.
And then they do something that perfectly encapsulates our understanding of what it means to be insert animal here and I realize I might be over-anthropomorphizing. Anyway, Poseidon remains happily curious about everything, and in-trouble with everything. It’s a good thing, we tell him, that he’s charming. We only wonder why he doesn’t choose to behave that way more often.
The cats are doing just fine.
Three or four or five times a year I have to re-learn the same lesson about taking too many days off my bike. I have now learned it twice this year so far: the first ride back after a too-long break is a little stiff. And so it was, today, when I put my feet on the pedals for the first time in five days. But, I got in the London Pretzel on Zwift, and 35 miles before dinner.
I like how the Union Jack is rippling on that lamp post. This route spends a lot of time in the game’s version of London, but sends you into the Surrey Hills twice. They aren’t the biggest or the hardest climbs in the game, but sometimes they feel like it. The part in the city was pretty fast, but I gave all that speed back on the hills. But once I (finally) got to the top of one of those hills, I got a nice view of the moon. The moon is always full on Zwift, never mind the issues of physical oceanography that would present.
But! I finished sixth in one sprint. I am not a sprinter. And I clocked in a time that was 16th in one of the two climbs. I am also, most definitely, not a climber.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 100 routes down, 29 to go.
