Remember in The Big Lebowski when The Dude is getting a drink at the bar in the bowling alley and the mysterious cowboy tells him "Sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you."? Of course you do! Todays ride was the latter, sort of.
I did a hard ride yesterday and wanted to do 30 miles today to start getting my body used to riding longer distances on consecutive days. I decided to ride out to Sauvie Island because I haven't done it in a while and I was thinking after yesterdays climbing something flat would be nice.
So I got up early and checked the weather, drank some coffee, got dressed, and hit the road just after sunrise. I'm going to get all my whining out of the way right now so it doesn't plague this post like body odor at a basement show:
I don't wear wool. But damnit if cotton socks don't fail me every week and my feet are numb with cold less than 10 miles into the ride. Am I going to have to rescue a sheep, buy a plot of land for it to live in peace on, and follow it around collecting the wool that falls off on it's own before I will have warm feet in the winter? Truth be told, I haven't really looked for good vegan socks. I'm sure I can find them, and I won't have to exploit a sheep by buying it a farm and collecting it's wool shedding to darn my own. I'm just tired of cold feet!
Which gets to the bigger issue. I am tired of being cold! It's February, it's fair game that it's cold, and thusly, that I am cold, but still. I am dreaming of warm rides. You will be mine, warm rides!
The Whinocerous would also like to say that todays ride was mostly unpleasant because it is hunting season and I did not know you could shoot animals on Sauvie Island. I was most of the way around the island when I heard guns and birds making bird noises as they took flight en masse. This made me so mad. I rode by a trailer on a pretty large plot of land that had a big pickup truck out front with some dudes getting suited up to go hunt. I looked at their property as I rode by it. No sign of a garden. No fruit trees.
Keep in mind, Sauvie Island is mostly farms and they grow everything there.
This made me remember that line hunters tell about needing to hunt for food. I imagine many do eat what they kill, but if that was a legitimate reason for hunting, why aren't hunters master gardeners? If they were all about needing a cheap source of food, why not grow it? You can surely grow more calories than you can kill. These knuckleheads I rode by clearly had enough land for a massive garden, but weren't growing shit. More fun to go out and ruin the silence on a Saturday morning by destroying beautiful birds?
Hearing gunshots made me grumpy.
So! That is the end of the whining.
All of that made it hard to really get into riding today, but I had a thought afterwards. I figure everyday of the big ride in May probably won't be some glorious visionquest where the secrets of the universe are reveled to me and the bike pedals itself. There are going to be some hard days and this was a hard day. So today was good training for days when I can't quite get my head in the game but have to keep pedaling.
I got some pretty pictures, too.
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