Hopeful

The sun IS still up there. Somewhere. Even as we got spit on by some evil dark clouds on our way home with our new bookshelf, this little patch served as my ray of hope.

But while the weather continues to be cold and miserable, people still have to get places and do things and some of them are still on two wheels. To those people, there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad gear. The hardest part is just getting out the door, and then I usually start to enjoy myself. This biker was clearly up for whatever the sky throws down.

There's a kind of relief in the unambiguity of weather that's just gross. You don't have to wonder what to put on, just load up for bear: booties or waterproof shoes, rain pants & jacket, facemask, warm gloves (there's no such thing as waterproof gloves) and in my case, I've been known to wear my ski goggles. Nothing makes me happier than to bike around for five hours in the rain, as I did a couple of weeks ago, and come home dry underneath it all. Sure, I'm wearing $500 to do it, and that's not to say there aren't much cheaper ways to be comfortable, but to me, it's worth it.

Cyclocross madness

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The last cyclocross race of the season was out at PIR the first weekend of December. That's about a 10 minute bike ride from our house so we ventured out into the muck to watch the insanity. The rain was epic, and the temperature was in the 30's and yet we saw guys in the elite men's race wearing what I would consider summer race-wear; shorts, short sleeve jersey, short fingered gloves, or in some cases no gloves at all. There we were bundled in many layers and waterproof shells and I just could not fathom how they did it. My capacity for suffering will never be that high. But it's sure fun to watch them slide around.

We mostly watched on a muddy hill that most riders started out riding up but as the laps went on you could see how much more effort it took and more of them got off and ran. There were also more wipe outs.

We didn't even last the whole hour to see the end of the men's race. We got too cold and baring our hands to unlock our bikes was the final straw. It was then that I discovered that they way to get Jess to ride faster is to freeze her. In an effort to get feeling back to her extremeties, she left me in the dust getting out of there. We stopped at Fred Meyer on the way home and I locked her bike up for her so she could go straight inside and warm up. All part of the service.