Dawn Patrol (rambling ride story) - Cycling Mob: Road Cycling, Mountain Biking and More

06-24-2004, 11:31 AM

[This also appears, with photographs, on my livejournal:
<www.livejournal.com/users/ouij>]

So I've been wrenching Franco's Follis for ages and ages, and I
haven't ridden much lately. I'm also getting fat (I'll come back to
that later).

So I get up this morning at five, saddle up, and off I go. It's a
beautiful day, mist hanging in the hollows. At six in the morning,
the heat of the day is still a long way away, and there's a slight
chill as I pedal. I take it easy, this being my first outing after a
long spell of inactivity, and make reasonable time (for me: 12 mph
rolling average) to Herndon, where I decide to turn around.

Then, on the way home, disaster: spoke failure. Two of them. I am
obviously way too fat now even for my longsuffering wheelset. I
backtrack to Vienna, where I know the nearest bikeshops are. A walk
of several miles. One fellow-cyclist zoomed by, but then asked if
everything was okay, and offered to lend me a phone. I thanked him,
said no, I'd walk it out. It was still a beautiful day, even if now I
was walking.

This was the downside of course of starting out that early in the
morning. I had no spare spokes or tools to fix a spoke failures, and
the shops didn't open up until eleven in the morning (!). Stopped at
a supermarket, bought a muffin and some iced tea, and a copy of the
Washington <i>Post</i>. Read the paper, eavesdropped on three women
gossiping about home improvements and two bakery workers chatting in
Spanish. Composed a verse letter to a friend (I'm pretty sure
Catullus never composed his lyrical letters after a mechanical.).

Eleven o'clock rolls around, and I wheel my bike into a busy bike shop
in Vienna. The mechanics fix my wheel, and tell me "you might think
about getting a new wheel if it breaks again--you break it three
times, and you might as well have bought a new wheel anyway."

"What's the damage?" I ask them, after it's all over.

"Twenty six dollars," says the man. Credit card over the counter and
off I go home. Long shot over a fairly busy road. Punkass kid in the
passenger seat of a blue coupe blows by me, yells "GET ON THE ****ING
SIDEWALK!"

I'm usually a very patient cyclist. I try not to let traffic get on
my nerves, but the spoke breakage and the repair bill have me in a
foul mood--that, and I'm already kind of tired. "**** YOU!" I bellow
back at them. Grumbling, I crank back homewards. I sprint across a
bridge over the interstate, and the effort is almost more than I can
do. I barely hang on.

Back into town; quiet residential streets. At a red light, I roll up
behind a big mulch truck. A little boy, maybe ten, is riding in the
bed of the truck, presumably following his dad on his daily rounds.
He looks at me, leans over, and over the noise of the diesel
clattering, asks me: "How many miles?"

"Thirty, today." I answer him, grinning. His eyes open wide, and his
mouth forms a perfect circle in a noiseless *wow*.

"Thirty miles?," he says with some disbelief--maybe admiration?-- "I
can barely manage five on my bike"

"Ain't too hard," I tell him. "You just have to stay on the bike."
(That's what Eddy Merckx would have said, right?).

My faith in the youth of the county restored, I crank up the hill
home, where I ride by a cop who seems to be keeping a wary eye on
traffic. I smile. "Good hunting," I wish him.

That was my ride today.