Living Rule #5

 

  Village Park, Cranbury, 8:34 a.m.

3 February 2013

There are times when cycling feels effortless.  This weekend was not one of those times.

We're used to being out in the cold.  We're used to headwinds.  We're used to the first climbs of the season.  What we're not used to is putting all three together.  We're never used to that, no matter how many years we've had to do it.

Jim has a good post about Saturday's Sourland slog, from which it took the rest of the day and well into this morning to recover.

That didn't stop me from meeting Jim in Plainsboro at 8 a.m. today for some extra miles before Winter Larry's scheduled 9 a.m. departure.  We headed north first, straight into a biting headwind.  The air was still a few degrees below freezing.  Larry's cut-off for cancellation is 32 °F, but the forecasts we'd seen had the air above freezing before 9 a.m.  We hoped that Larry would lead us north, into the wind first, instead of south, where we'd have to push against it for 20-odd miles.

We got to the parking lot early.  Ed, Ron, Mark, and Bob were there.  Larry wasn't.  Ron, having forgotten his shoes, decided not to ride in his sneakers.  "I'll go home," he said, "and be mad all day."

By 8:55 there was no sign of Larry.  I always carry an extra sign-in sheet.  This made me the de facto leader.  With Mark's help, we went north, into South Brunswick, then to the D&R Canal.  The tailwind pushed us from Montgomery to Kingston, where the four of us sat inside at Main Street with sugar and caffeine, Mark having decided that he was too cold to stop at all.

We were cold even with the tailwind helping us back through South Brunswick and Plainsboro.  We found the bike path and took it, bumps, cracks, moguls and all, through the woods in the back of town and away from traffic.  After hanging out in Cranbury just long enough to get cold again, Jim and I headed back the way we came.  Although the official ride was short, our extra miles put us enough over 40 for me to consider it a real ride.

I called Winter Larry.  He'd seen the forecast for New York City, 29 °F at some early hour, and figured nobody would show up.  I assured him that, more likely than not, on a day like today, Ed, Jim, and I would be there.

It is, after all, all about Rule #5.

By the way, there are buds on the trees in Cranbury's Village Park.