Cycling Tips & Stories

As triathletes, we’ve all grown used to getting mocked on a pretty regular basis. We get mocked by schoolchildren yelling “go faster!” out the window of their school buses as they pass us out on our bikes. We get mocked by the locals in the towns we race in on Sunday mornings, who look at us incredulously through the dirty windows of a Dunkin Donuts at 6 a.m. as if we’d just landed from another planet (nevermind that they’re the ones sitting in a Dunkin Donuts at 6 o’clock on a Sunday morning). We even get mocked by our own loved ones, who sometimes find our behavior a little eccentric (for example, I don’t think it’s all that crazy to run the 5 miles from a wedding to the reception in order to squeeze in a workout).

But I think it’s fair to say that nothing mocks us as regularly, or as effectively, as the Weather. The Weather takes it as a personal insult that we try to plan a regular workout schedule without taking it into account. As a result, it will do everything in its power to make us pay a price. This is why, if your schedule calls for a hard bike ride on Wednesday morning before work, the Weather will see to it that Wednesday dawns with a sky right out of a Van Gogh painting, with swirling winds and freezing temperatures and hailstones the size of freewheels. And then, of course, 10:00 rolls around, and you out your office window, past the bottle of Comtrex on your desk, and see nothing but blue sky and sunshine. You can almost hear the Weather chuckling in the distance.