So Spring Begins

"When the first fine spring days come, and the

earth awakes and assumes its garment of verdure,

when the perfumed warmth of the air blows on

our faces and fills our lungs, end even appears to 

penetrate our heart, we feel vague longings for

undefined happiness, a wish to run, to walk at 

random, to inhale the spring."

Guy de Maupassant

 

Finally it is growing warmer and there are bicycles in dire need of being ridden, roads that have missed me, friends who I have not seen over the winter to hug and catch up with.  Pale green is stealthily seeping into the background, leaves poking forth, asking themselves if it is time to emerge.  Daffodils shyly raise their yellow heads, daring the frost filled night to dim their glow.  Frogs drench the air with their courting calls as I ride past wet areas, puddled to excess from all the recent rain.   Squirrels grow restless, scampering across the road with wild abandon.  Oh, how I have longed for this, the warmer days, the burnished, bright blue skies, and the sun, brilliantly beaming, a proud partner  to mother earth. And I am happy.  Thankful to be here for another spring, to feel well, to be on a bicycle.  

During these rides I have been checking out my new navigation tool:  The Wahoo Element.  After much thought and conferring with Greg Smith, a friend I trust who appears to understand my technological challenges, when my Garmin broke I changed to the Wahoo Element.  (Thank you, Greg, for the time and for not making me feel stupid as others have done as I try to master electronics).  It is almost too simple to use.  I keep expecting it to be difficult, for something to pop up that I am doing incorrectly, but it  has not, at least at this point.  The battery life seems to be much better than that of my past Garmins, plus it is easier to use.  For me, the Element was a wise choice. 

That being said, there are a few things I miss from my Garmin, the most significant of which is that I miss seeing road names on my map.  If you have a route programmed in the Element (something very simple to do), when a turn nears it tells you the name of the road you will be turning on, but otherwise not.  I also miss the louder noise the Garmin made alerting me to turns. In wind or when busy talking, this could be an issue, particularly on a brevet.  The map also does not pan out as my Garmin did, but that was not a feature that I really used much.  Lastly, with the Garmin you could get estimated calories on the ride.  The Element has this feature, but it does not appear to work.  I suspect it requires that you buy the heart monitor, but I have not yet contacted support to find out.  It is not important enough to me to buy a heart monitor.  As I tell friends, as long as it is beating, I suppose I am okay.  And there is the feature I think will be valuable but that I have not used that allows me to share the ride with people that I want to share with.  I need to experiment with this feature, but I think it would allow me to have my daughter or a friend come rescue me if riding alone and having a mechanical that I cannot resolve.

On climbs, as always in the spring, I find my heart beating quite strongly and my lungs working overtime to try to fill themselves.  But how glorious it feels to put these demands upon them.   There is a certain satisfaction in sharing this with others because truly nobody is in the best of cycling shape this time of year.  It helps that it is spring, that friends are present, that we laugh and talk and sweat.  At the end of my last ride, as I bathed, I noticed a slender red streak encircling my arm where my arm warmers had not quite met the bottom of my sleeve and I smile, content and sated, but longing for another warm, sunny spring day with my bicycle.  Soon there will be tulips and other flowers as color once again embraces the earth, all waiting for us to appreciate them.  How fortunate we are to be given the gift of yet another spring.