The Nick of Time

When "selling" cycling to the general public, most cycling advocates focus on the grand benefits: health, cleaner air, sunshine, saving money, etc. While all of those are certainly excellent reasons to choose riding a bike over driving, and I certainly don't want to diminish any of them, it's easy to overlook the far greater number of small joys that cycling offers. Sprinting to beat a red light. Finally crushing the local killer climb. Cruising down a slight decline with a tailwind. The Smile and Nod pass from another cyclist. Rolling up to a coffee shop and smelling the roasting beans. A pretty girl (or guy, if that's your thing) smiling when you ride pass. Stopping by the side of the road to enjoy the view, knowing that you got there solely on your own power:

Each ride can have a hundred such small moments, and when taken in the aggregate, riding always leaves a smile on my face. While driving can certainly have enjoyable moments, to my experience those tend to be outnumbered by the thousand constant annoyances of other drivers. Getting cut off. Merging. Slow drivers in the left lane. I have a 2-mile rule; every day I drive to work within 2 miles I'll wish I would have ridden, regardless of the weather. It never seems to fail. Sure, cycling has its frustrations; the close pass. The Heckler. On the whole, though, I find that the thousand small positives of cycling vastly outweigh the few small negatives.

Last night, Friday, while sitting at work and deciding if I should leave now or finish one more small task, I looked at the weather radar. Not good. A huge swatch of green was bearing down on the City of Lakes. Fortunately, my decision got a lot easier. I bailed on the office post haste and headed out. Rain was definitely coming. Having the rare tailwind (I ride east-west on the way home) I made great time. About 2/3 of the way home, thinking I was in the clear, I noticed a car on my right waiting to turn right onto the gridlocked freeway entrance with his window down. "Great," I thought. "Heckler". "Hey man!" came the call from the car. "Hey! You better get home fast, that storm is coming!" I'm sorry, what? Concerned for my safety? Since the traffic was all gridlocked, and we had a red light, I was able to chat with this guy for a couple of minutes. Nothing earth-shattering, just him hoping that I got home before the storm came. It felt great. For the next couple of miles I had a smile on my face, thinking about the human interactions that you get while biking that never, never happen when you're driving. Being out in the open, with all of the risks inherent in that, also has a tremendous benefit that no one really talks about all that much; interactions with people as people. It doesn't happen all that often that you find a driver who is willing to chat with you a bit at a red light, but it happens enough and is nice enough that I would say it's probably my second-favorite small-moment-of-greatness while cycling.

I did beat the storm. Beating a storm is, without a doubt, the number one underrated small-moment-of-greatness.

And then I voluntarily went out in the rain this morning to ride over to the Angry Catfish. It's only about 1.5 miles from my house, but I'm sure that I would have regretted driving.

An Ode to Todd Sample

A couple of weekends ago I ran into an old friend. A bunch of us from the Birchwood bike team headed down to Red Wing for a weekend of hard riding. It was a great time. I got dropped, but it didn’t matter. I caught up to the group in Lake City, MN at a gas station. This was 50 miles into a 72 mile ride. All was good. Then I went inside to use the restroom and came out to find I was all alone. Yikes. Well, not completely alone. Team mates Schultz and Smith were there, although Smith headed off to do the long route back to Red Wing. Schultz and I rolled out, northbound on Hwy 61. While rolling we spotted a lone figure, clad in black, in the distance. Being the tailwind-assisted hardasses we are, we caught him in no time. Upon passing said solitary rider, we realized it was none other than Todd Sample, a former teammate of ours. Todd was doing some crazy ass 110 mile race on gravel and had decided to bow out at around 70-75 miles. None of that sounds like fun to me. Todd was hurting and had been riding for a long time alone. Needless to say, he appreciated taking a bit of a draft and having someone with whom to chat. While some would say that quitting is a terrible thing, I don’t see it that way. To me it takes a lot of courage to admit when one is at one’s end, that the pursuit of a fun activity has stopped being fun and that there are more important things than the fleeting vainglory of finishing a meaningless bike race. You gotta know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. I respect Todd a lot for that. But that’s not why this is an Ode to Todd Sample.

I started this blog as a way to memorialize some of my thoughts and connect with the kids. OK, not really. I just wanted to write what I was thinking. I was going to write up thoughts on races, bike culture in the Twin Cities, my pending wedding (she said yes!) etc. It was going to be awesome. Then I got lazy and stopped. I still had and have a lot of thoughts I want to capture, and frankly everything I say is so awesome that the world does deserve to read it, so the idea of blogging again stayed in the back of my mind. The impetus for making this a reality again, however, came from the good people at Groucho Sports. They have a team of bloggers (one of whom I happen to know personally) and were looking for a couple of new recruits. I whipped up a couple of posts and ideas and sent in an entry. I don’t know if I have been or will be selected, but either way I was feeling like now was the time to start blogging again. I started to get sad about the prospect of not being selected when I realized “Hey – I can still blog on my own, if that’s what’s important to me!” Technically that’s important, but I was/am hoping for some Groucho swag. More on that later.

In any case, Todd was my inspiration to start blogging again. Not because of his riding courage. No, Todd is my inspiration because of a race – the 2009 Nature Valley Grand Prix Uptown Crit. No, we didn’t race. Actually, I haven’t raced since August, 2009 (more on that later, too). I ran into Todd and we were chatting and he mentioned that he had found the race report I did on the 2007 Square Lake Road Race. He had found it by Googling his own name. This was awesome to me for several reasons: 1) I love Googling myself. It’s totally narcissistic, but it’s still fascinating. 2) He admitted the Googling himself. 3) It meant I had a reader. So, out of respect for Todd and with the desire burning again thanks to the good people at Groucho Sports (whose black and white West River Racer jersey is hot) I’ve decided to blog again. This time, I have a few posts in the hopper and will actually make something of it. It’s the least I can do for my readers. And Todd, you can say you were there first.