Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Today, I Did Not Get Rained On: A Post That Strives Not Only To Catalog the Meaningless Minutiae of My Day But To Do So in an Amusing Manner

Random questions of the day, apropos of nothing:

Why does a fish need a bicycle? To ride in the Tour De France, where the chain will malfunction (or the fish's shifting skill will malfunction) and the fish will be dropped by Alberto Contador; the fish will stop just short of accusing Contador of cheating.

Why are there no black cyclists in the TDF? Are there any black pro cyclists? None come to my admittedly very limited mind at the moment. And why so few, if any?

The last time I got rained on while out riding, the forecast was for a twenty percent chance of rain. Today, the chance was thirty percent, which spiked briefly to one hundred percent while I was having morning coffee. So I thought I'd do something else today. But when you want to ride, nothing else will do. And besides, the rain had stopped. I went to ride, and, back home after twenty-three miles down, still no more rain.

Tim Krabbe, in The Rider, has this to say of rain (and other challenges that beset riders): "After the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. . . . Velvet pillows, safari parks,
sunglasses: people have become woolly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. . . . Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas" (1978, p. 113).

So now I'm sort of thinking I should wish I had gotten rained on.

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