Just An End of Summer Ride: September 2020

"Summers lease hath

all too short a date."

William Shakespeare 

 

It can't be September, but yet it is.....summer again has slipped past me in a blur.  Soon it will be time for nature to dress herself in russets and oranges and yellows. Her multicolored skirt will rustle and swirl, patchwork, in the swelling winds of fall.  Green grass will fade and yield to brown, lusterless dullness. Fields will be harvested, broken stalks whiskering the ground, a reminder of what was. A promise of what will be again.  Bicycling will mean arm warmers and jackets and morning air crackling with crispness as breath becomes visible as we speak and laugh. 

 

But not today.  Today is overcast and misty, unseasonably cool and unusually humid, but it is still summer and I cling to that. Twelve show for the ride,  more than I expected.   It makes me a tad nervous.  I hope they like the course. The ride is short, only 47 miles, but I think it is a nice course. It has two nice climbs on it:  Liberty Knob and the ironically named Flatwood.  Most of it is on little traveled roads.  Pavement is good in places and acceptable in others.  Few of the roads we will travel are in need of repair.  Smiles still dance across faces and the pace is relaxed with none of the intensity that seems to come with colder weather.  Even those who normally ride hard, and will do so later in the ride, stay together.  Perhaps the fog, perhaps the camaraderie.

 

The bike I normally ride needed a new middle chain ring.  One of the teeth had worn to where on a steep grade, it would jarringly drop to granny making my knees ache and causing me to lose my rhythm, and so it is being repaired.  Luckily for me, despite the age of the bike and the components, a  part was available.  So I am riding my old Trek, the aluminum bike that got me through my first PBP in 2007, a bike my husband bought for me.  The lights I used on that ride are still attached, and I do not have the heart to take them off as my husband was the one who put them on for me. No, they have not been on there since 2007, but they have been on there for a number of years.  It is an old hub generator, the kind with no battery, and on that PBP when I would climb my front lights would go out as I was not pedaling fast enough to power them.  If I remember, he reattached them for me to use for the occasional trek to work.  But they were his hands who placed them and so they remain.  I don't think I have ridden this bike outside since his loss.

 

I think how lucky I am to have them as we roll out into a dense fog: they will come in handy.  Switching bikes, I forgot to add a tail light.  Fortuitously, Larry Preeble has an extra that he loans me.  So I have lights both fore and rear.  It is foggy, the kind normally described as being thick enough to cut with a knife.  And it does not appear that it will lift early or be burned away.  The prediction is for cloud cover most of the day.

 

The fog does not overly trouble me once we get off the main road out of the ride start as I know from there on out, there will be little traffic, but I still remain cautious.  While we are on Bloomington Trail, Mike Crawford's chain slips between the cassette and his frame.  I can see John look and struggle with his decision to move on, but it does not take all of us to work on this and it is the right decision.  To my surprise, Mike does not have a quick release in the back and the screw to loosen the wheel appears to be stripped.  Three riders approach that were not with our group.  They are on an unofficial SIW ride to Leota and Little York.  They kindly stop and assist.  The wheel is loosened enough for the chain to be pulled back out and the ride is saved.  Thank yous are given and we are on our way, our paths soon diverging. I wish I could remember their names, but I don't.  I could blame the lack of memory on age, but I have always struggled with names. I would, however, know their faces if I saw them again, or so I believe.

 

As we climb up Liberty Knob, the first of the two main climbs, Paul tells me his legs have not recovered from Saturday.  Eventually, however, he finds that the problem is not his legs, the problem is that his rear wheel is rubbing against the rear brake.  Briefly I think of a 300K where that happened to me.  I was almost halfway into the ride before I figured out I was not just having a bad day.  It has always struck me as odd how you can prepare for a ride the same way, eat the same the evening before and the morning of, get the same amount of sleep, but one day you have a strong day and another a weak day.   Sometimes it is something like a brake rub, but sometimes you just aren't strong.  I try to make it a habit to check both my front and rear brakes before each ride, but sometimes a rub appears later regardless.  Anyway, it is a good feeling when you find out that was the problem and that  the problem was not with your own motor.  

 

Most of the others have waited at the store stop, but we intend to stop for just a bit and send them on. I think of how much more comfortable I am doing this now that the majority of riders ride with a GPS unit.  It also is so much easier to design a route, though I will always be fond of the days I grabbed my bike and headed out onto unknown roads armed with sidewalk chalk to help me find my way back home.  I will always be grateful to my husband for encouraging me even on those days when he was lonely or in pain, preparing me for the independence we both knew was coming however undesired.  

 

As we head down Bartle's  Knob, I am glad that I remembered to warn people to ride with caution.  A smile flirts across my face as I think of Roger Bradford and how he almost went down on that descent after his rear wheel skidded in a turn.  He was already so proud of completely the Mangler successfully, and then to pull out of a skid with no injury, let me just say he was beaming.  I am glad I got the chance to know him and to watch him complete the Challenge Series I used to put on.  

 

The ride ends and a few are waiting.  None of us eat inside restaurants anymore, but we get Subway sandwiches and sit and dine curbside, sharing a few more of those last of summer moments, heading home reluctantly to do chores.  Shakespeare was right.  While it is not my favorite season, summer does not last long enough. It is not the fall I fear.  I love the fall.  It is what comes after, now made harder by the Pandemic.  I know my grass is waiting and want to get it cut before the predicted rain. And as strange as it sounds, I will miss that as well.  But the world turns and season change.  It was a nice if uneventful ride shared with friends.