Today’s short ride was a long time coming. Yikes! I hadn’t been on the bike since last Saturday’s Rust Shaker XC race. A combination of windy, cold, rainy, vile weather, B-Man’s soccer, strength training in the gym and general malaise (e.g.. laying in bed praying for the end of my days) from dealing with my continued unemployment and lack of societal contribution got in the way. Hey, this is what separates the Pros, neo-Pros, fast peeps and slow, depressive fat fucktards like me.
The weather has been less than ideal and anything but spring-like. Today is May 1st and I rode with a cold weather jacket on and knee warmers, my furnace kicked on in the house and my man nipples were so fucking hard I could have cut glass with them.
Even though the conditions were not ideal, it was nice to be on the bike, out of the gym and out from under the covers of my fart smelling bed. I rode the El Mariachi today (my go-to bike for the dirt and gravel roads these days) and I was glad I did, given the amount of fresh dirt (seen above) that Isabella County has been laying down north of Mt. Peezy. The wider tires make it so much easier to roll, now if I could just find a rigid fork for it, I would have MY version of a Ti Fargo.
The roads alternated between pavement, damp, hard packed, sandy dirt, to deep mud, to gritty, fresh gravel that flew in my face like a hippo shit (seriously, click the link, it’s priceless). Still, I plodded on and did my best to put the fact that it’s May 1st and I SHOULD be in shorts and short sleeves, except for the fact that I live in what could be construed as a muddy, flat, discarded suburb of Hoth.
The ride was nothing special… in fact, it was LESS than special. It was merely one of my normal dirt/paved road rides and was cut short due to the amount of ominous, dark clouds that started creeping in.
It’s not that I give a shit about riding in the rain, but given some of the storms that have come through the area in the past week, I was less than thrilled at getting caught in 40 mph winds and lighting. So, I did my thing, got a ride in and headed home, trying to outride the rain with just and hour in a half in my trunks.
I did get to chase some birdly beasts that were gnawing on a raccoon carcass along the road, fear that they would gnaw on me, yell at them (as if they cared), clean hunks of crunchy dirt off my teeth and wipe what I hope was only mud (and not cow excrement) off my face. Good times.
I am pretty sure that mid-Michigan operates about a month or two behind the rest of the country when it comes to weather and this was not an opportune moment for me to realize this (again), as this week I have had my closest encounter with what could be construed as being homesick and/or wanting to be somewhere, anywhere else in the past three and a half years. The rain, the relentless wind, the lack of mountains and fucking hills, the joblessness, the lack of opportunity… it really kicked my ass this week.
Oh well, there’s not much I can do about all that shit right now, so I might as well ride on, get some miles in, snap some pics and keep looking for work that allows me to not interact with society.
Later.