Early Season Blues: The Downside of Nice Weather

Look, I’m not complaining.  It’s been as cold as all Hell in Connecticut for the past month-and-a-half or so, and it feels not just nice but actually, actively AMAZING to have a little sun out in the sky for once.  I can even see my grass in a few scattered spots.  That’s good.  Very good.  But the downside is that now it’s not just me out there on my bike in the City every day.  Now everybody’s out.  Which, again, is really all good.  Studies show that the best way to improve biker safety in a city is to add more bikes so that drivers get used to seeing and thinking about bikers on the streets day-to-day.  And it’s not like the other bikers get in the way. 

What they do is add an element of competition to the daily grind.

Which isn’t really a bad thing.  I mean, they don’t call it the “daily grind” for nothing.  Even riding can get boring when all you’re doing is riding the same tract twice a day, every day.  Every.  Damned.  Day.  Having a few other guys out there also riding hard… y’know, it helps.

But it’s also exhausting.  For instance, I came upon a guy this morning riding a nice little commuter when I got to Riverside Drive and 110^th Street.  I knew the guy was at least a somewhat serious rider because: a) he was riding an actual road bike and not a fixie, b) his commuter had toe clips, and c) he was wearing actual knickers.  And look, my first thought was not, Hey, I need to go smoke this guy.  First off, I’m still a little tired from all the swimming and running I did over the weekend, and anyway, I’m trying to be an adult about these things.  Trust me, if you race every single Type-A personality in Manhattan every chance you get, you’ll die of a heart attack inside of a month.  This city is stacked to the rafters with assholes, and they all want to prove they can smoke you if given half the chance.  I suppose that’s true of me, too. 

But not this morning.  No, this morning, I told myself that I was just gonna tuck in behind, and let the guy who was obviously a better rider than me tow me in.  It was a windy day, I’d already had to sprint to the train back in Stratford so that I came into the ride feeling wasted, and there are two little climbs between 110^th and my office, and I didn’t particularly feel like tackling either of them.  So, bottom line, getting towed sounded like a pretty damned good idea.  I was ready to admit defeat and let it happen.  Unfortunately, if you start at 110^th and head south on Riverside, you immediately hit a mile-long sloping downhill, and I out-weighed my would-be leader by, oh, maybe twenty pounds or so.  More if you count the differences in the bike weights.  So I had a choice right from the get-go.  Either ride the brakes or let myself fly by and do my own work. 

*sigh* 

I don’t have to tell you which way I went with it, do I?

Disaster struck at the next light.  I’d had to stop to wait for cars, but my man flew by me—from a surprisingly long way back—heading straight through the intersection despite the cars, using a move that’s so patently Manhattan Type-A that at that point I was literally honor-bound to give chase.  Ugh.  Just thinking about it hurt.  Of course, past that light, it’s straight into the first of the two short climbs, but by far the longer of the two.  I chased anyway, slowly closing the distance despite the weight disparity, and by the time we reached the second of the little climbs, I’d actually achieved my goal of getting towed up the hill.  And y’know, it was really twice as awesome as I thought it was gonna be.  But now I’m exhausted, I have been all day, and I still have to ride back and catch the train home.

Fortunately, the ride back to Harlem only has the one climb.  But it’s the one that’s the mile downhill on the way here, the one where I passed my man on the descent.

Ugh.  Just thinking about it makes me hurt.