In many cultures, I think, winter is a time for reflection. But if you are a procrastinator, this process can be delayed. As this Midwestern winter turns into an impetuous, pot-hole-strewn spring, it provides a nice opportunity to make some observations about your relationship to your favorite sport. Here are mine:
- You come out of the winter thinking that you look disgusting because your skin is so pale, but this is not true. You are disgusting because your legs are so damn hairy.
- If you take advantage of the off-season to enroll in a Park Tools course on drive-train maintenance, you had better offer to tune up all of your friends’ bikes for free. That is, if you don’t use this knowledge immediately, and use it for the forces of good, you will forget everything—no, actually more than everything—you learned in the class. Plus you will be out good money for the tools you bought and which now mock you in the basement next to your unused table-saw.
- Oddly, in this damp corner of the Midwest, March and April are the darkest recesses of the off-season for mountain biking. Trails that were frozen and ride-able just a few weeks ago are now bogs of sticky dark earth that will dry out in mid-June if we’re lucky. It does not seem fair.
- Getting new clothes because you lost weight from going off dairy is kind of exciting and flattering, but having to buy new bibs when they have started to sag on your diminished butt just sucks.
- Here, in spring, the wind is a constant, swirling, malevolent 20 mph.
- Here, in spring, literally the moment you open your mouth to joke to your wife about the insanity of riding in this wind, a biker will cruise right by you, crushing both your spirit and the joke in one tailwind-driven swoop.
- Spring heats up quickly. Where fall riding is a lingering dream-land of crisp air and gilded, slanting sunlight, spring is about unpredictable skies and sudden humidity. As a result, you are a little sad that you don’t get to spend more time in your pricey-but-fetching cold-weather gear.
- The best indoor-trainer playlist is carefully curated, varied in style, has 163 or so songs on it, and is played on shuffle. In second place is old Radiolab broadcasts.
- How is it that, every year when you resume paying attention to the European peloton, you don’t recognize 80% of the names bandied about as favorites for this or that spring classic? Maybe you weren’t paying as much attention as you thought you were last year. If someone would start a CyclingNews forum called “while you were busy watching college basketball” to catch us up, I would be happy to lurk there.