Another first lap in solitary confinement was well on its way to becoming two laps when it very quickly almost became 1.5 laps and a trip to the hospital.
Riding alone about to start climbing Harlem Hill for the second time, I see a teammate bombing down going in the other direction, looking for me. Unfortunately, my teammate, who is blinder than a bat and wears glasses for most other occasions, doesn’t see me. He’s got to be joking I figure as he keeps heading straight for me at warp speed. It’s too late by the time I realize that our long running joke about the way he says hello to someone on a bike is by picking them off the ground after he’s run into them because he can’t see them is about to become reality. A very painful reality. Luckily, at the last second, and I do mean the last second, he sees me and swerves to avoid a collision. When he finally recognizes me, he’s parallel to me. “Hey” I hear as he zooms past. Lucky. I could just see trying to explain why there are two of us from the same team lying on the ground at the start of Harlem Hill.
My teammate is a little vain, well, a lot of vain, so much so that he’d rather not see than put on “non-cycling” glasses (don’t ask me about contact or prescription Oakleys – I stopped mentioning them a long time ago.) Such is the nature of amateur cyclists with our matching kits, helmets, team-issue socks, and bar tape to match our kit. I have a blue saddle on my race bike because I like the saddle and I got for free. I never thought I’d hear the end of it. We’re like a bunch of, excuse me ladies, girls when it comes to putting it all together. And even important at 5:00 am when you can’t see anything anyway.
Today also marked the return of Rider X whom I’ve managed to avoid for the better part of two months. Today he was riding a borrowed cross bike. One lap in, the front tire starts losing air. It’s a slow leak, but a steady one and soon it’s all but flat, but he keeps riding because, surprise, surprise, he doesn’t have a tube with him. He’s so squirrelly on the downhill to Harlem Hill that the guys next to him have to scatter in different directions. Once again, his problem is now everyone’s problem.
You probably shouldn’t be riding if:
- You don’t own a bike – seems to be a pre-requisite
- Every ride you have a mechanical issue. Every single ride - here’s some advice: check your bike the night before (let me rephrase, check whoever’s bike you’re borrowing the night before). You’ll probably notice things like the front tire having no air in it
- You can’t be bothered to bring a tube and a pump with you – those flats aren’t just going to go away by themselves, are they? And the solution is not to ride tubulars on training rides. That just exacerbates the problem
- You can’t be bothered to stop and fix the flat – Heck, we’ll probably even help you change it, but it makes the ride better for everyone if we take care of the issue and get back to riding instead of hearing about for 20 minutes
Rather than get into it, I just increased the pace up Harlem Hill. When the boys caught up to me on the next riser, he was nowhere to be seen. Problem solved.
That’s today’s view from the back.
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