Painless in Paoli

"The foliage has been losing its freshness

through the month of August, and here and there a 

yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair 

amidst the locks of a beauty  who has seen one 

season too many..."  

(Oliver Wendell Holmes)

It is beautiful this time of year, there is no doubt about it.  There is a feeling of anticipation, the knowledge that things are about to change and change significantly.  No more the long, steamy daylight hours of summer to dance through with my bicycle gloriously unfettered.  While the weather is exceedingly pleasant, the lessened daylight hours make it feel as if there is less time, less time to do those things that need doing so that one can rest easy in the winter patiently waiting for spring to oust the cold and snow.  And there is less time if you want to ride in daylight, to feel the sun beating down, warming you, making you sweat.  Rides become more hurried, less tolerant of unnecessary delays.  Gone the days of lolling in the grass mid-ride talking or dreaming.  Lights are attached to bikes in case of problems.  There is less room for error.

The squirrels have been particularly active this year, crossing the road with a suicidal, wild abandon that is uncharacteristic the rest of the year. It is as if their timidity is shuttled to the back of their minds in their determination to gather and store food for the winter.   The harvest takes precedence over all else.  The farmers also have started the reaping, corn cobs littering the roads, dust thick and heavy in the air as  you ride by if they are working near the road, covering you with grit. 

I am glad I did not talk myself out of riding with the group today, although it did cross my mind.  I remember the difficulty of this course, Painless in Paoli, and grin again at the thought of Kirk's post after the ride last year:  "Painless, my ass."  When you are not training, it is all too easy to avoid challenging rides, to forget the satisfaction that effort can bring, the blessed tiredness that aids sleep and blessed unconsciousness later when night falls.  It is all too easy to forget the spectacular scenery that you can earn only through the climbs and the hilly terrain, those scenes that flatland riders never get to experience. This particularly holds true when one is not training for something or when one is depressed and has to literally demand going out the door, when riding is a duty and an obligation and not a delight.  Is it enough not to just ride?  Must one also ride hills? 

I still need to force myself out the door at times, but  more and more often I manage to give myself a resounding yes and a kick in the rear.  While it is still dark outside when I leave for the ride start, I know daylight will have stretched out, yawning in pinks and grays and purples, across the horizon before we begin.  What I don't know is that later today I will come as close to taking a serious spill as I have come in quite some time now. 

Tony and I are riding along and there comes a delicious descent, the kind you reach after a good climb, the kind you can swoop down laughing and grinning ear to ear while the wind yells, "slow down, you idiot."  How I love descents.  At the bottom, however, a large, tan dog lays in wait.  I am almost on top of him before I see him rushing out, and I expect to go down knowing the collision is inevitable and hoping that he doesn't savage me once I fall.  Amazingly, while he hits the middle of my front wheel and breaks the light holder off of my fork, I am able to lean into him and somehow I bounce off of him and remain upright. 

I stop to check on him and he gives me such a look of reproach it is almost comical, particularly in light of how close I was to going down and going down hard.  "Don't you know when a fellow is just playing," he seems to ask. "You play too roughly."  He then runs off.  I knock on the door to let the owner know, but nobody answers.  Tony waits patiently while I write a note to the owners briefly explaining what happened and saying I hope their dog is okay.

The rest of the ride is uneventful, but it is filled with companionship and lovely vistas, the sights, smells, and sounds you know you will miss like the dickens when it is cold, windy, and wild outside, the kind that bring a tinge of melancholy because summer green is fading:  summer beauty always ages and fails despite  our best efforts.   But there is still beauty to come, the beauty born of endurance and of weathering the spring, summer, and fall:  life's seasons.  It may just be that we need to develop a special eye to see it.  To me, my mother, 98years old,  is still beautiful despite her wrinkles, her dementia, her blindness.....she is my mother.  And the earth will be beautiful as well.  It is all, as they say, in the eye of the one who beholds her.  "Let us give thanks for those blessings that we are about to receive." Amen.

Henryville to Salem Ride in the Fall

"How beautiful, buoyant, and glad is the morning.

The first sunshine on the leaves: the first wind

laden with the breath of flowers - that deep sigh
with which they seem to waken from sleep; the first
dew, untouched even by the light foot of the early
hare; the first chirping of the early birds, as if 
eager to begin song and flight;
all is redolent of the strength given by rest, 
and the joy of a conscious life."
Letitia Landon

Sometimes dawn slaps you in the face, demanding your attention, there before you even know it.  And sometimes dawn languidly stretches, slowly seeps into the world, clad in shades of purple, pink, and gray.  Today is just such a morning as I wait in my car, facing east, seeing if anyone will show for my ride.  Would it be heresy to say that I hope that nobody shows, that I feel like riding, but I don’t feel like company?  And with the paid ride on the schedule and the distance to my ride, I get my wish.  Just my bike and me.

 

Heading through the forestry, the signs of fall surround me.  Early fallen leaves, surely premature, scatter the ground and the smell of leaf mold hangs delicately in the air taking me back to childhood and long hikes in the wooded terrain surrounding our home.  Back then fall meant acorn fights and leaf forts and school starting.  Back then meant high school football games and enviously watching my brothers play knowing that as a girl I was not allowed to compete due to my gender.  I am awakened from this reverie by a solitary runner, the rhythm of his breathing and his footsteps surging through my consciousness.  And briefly I am running here again with Carol, my running partner, before her injury, and I mourn and rejoice:  mourn for the loss of Carol and of my running days, but rejoice that I had the experience.  And I rejoice that I am here, that I am on my bike, and that the weather is perfect.

 

The trees are beginning to apologetically blush in shades of orange and yellow and red.  A falling leaf gently brushes my arm, softly caressing me, as if to apologize for this betrayal.  A squirrel scampers heedlessly across the road, his gait more of a series of arching bounds than a run, acorn in mouth, more concerned about the winter that looms ahead than me.  I suppose that my bicycle and I seem rather harmless in the face of all the danger in his world. 

 

As I leave the forested roads and slowly enter farmland, I see the changes here as well.  Soy bean fields have been neatly harvested, the fields given a flat top.  Ears of corn yield to gravity, resigned,  their  heads now facing the earth patiently awaiting their reaping rather than pointing toward the heavens, mostly brown now.  All the green in the world is relentlessly, slowly being leached away in preparation for the coming gray, colorless winter.  What green there is somehow is not as brilliant. Varying patterns of stains appear on the road, courtesy of  fallen persimmons and walnuts as the earth continues to bless us with her bounty despite our endless abuse. 

 

It is too early, this fall, this precursor to winter, the season that leaves me deeply aching, yearning inside, like a missed opportunity:  the feeling that something important has eluded me, slipped through my fingers ungrasped.  "How the hell did this happen without my noticing," I ask myself. It is too early to think about wool base layers and long pants and wool socks and balaclavas and how to keep my fingers and toes warm.  It is too early for most of my friends to hang their bicycles on garage walls leaving them forlornly abandoned until spring giggles and makes her presence known. 

 

Today I wanted to be alone, just me and my bike, but by spring I will be starved for the sight of their faces and the sound of their laughter and chatter.  I will be starved for greenness and the sound of life, the signs of rebirth. I know no amount of dragging my feet will slow this annual progression, and perhaps in the end I would not want it to.  Because this is what everything is all about, cycling, in more ways than one. How very odd….even in change there is continuity.

An Unfinished Ride in the Fall

Fall is always an unsettled time for me.  The exquisiteness of the fall landscape as the trees don their festive colors in preparation for a final pas de deux with the wind prior to resting takes my breath away.  It also leaves me melancholy with an undefinable and un-named yearning deep inside my heart.  I could not tell you what I ache for.  Spring?  Youth?  Warmth?  Sunshine? Old acquaintances?  I just know that I long to burrow deeply into a loved ones arms and find solace there. Memories resurface that have been buried, and I find I have an intense need to be alone despite the fact that I mourn the lost company of my friends that I have grown accustomed to seeing on week-ends.  My pace begins to decline and my body protests at any demand for speed, refusing to comply.

Sometimes it helps if I force myself to ride and I know I will not be riding next week-end due to family plans, and so I head to the group ride this morning.  I worry about losing fitness and not being able to keep up with friends if I do not ride.  Things do not go well from the start.  I forget my cue sheet holder.  I forget my GPS.  I forget my chewing gum, an addiction that takes the place of smoking.  My odometer stops working. On top of all that, like some virgin to riding in rain and cooler temperatures, I forget to put on a wool base layer trusting the weather forecast for the seventies.  When I arrive,  I find I am at the wrong parking lot.  I almost turn around and go home.  Something in me does not want to be here.  But yesterdays ride was so pleasant.  40 solo miles of mild temperatures with fluffy white cumulus clouds and little rain.  I am hoping that if I come to ride, I will be glad I did as sometimes happens.  But as I arrive in the correct parking lot today, the rain continues and the sky promises it will most likely be an all day affair.  The skies are gray with no promise of sun.  And I have ridden in so much rain this year.  I  feel enervated and I grow weary of rain.

A small group starts off into a wall of grayness, red lights blinking on the backs of bicycles.  I am surprised and dismayed at the quickness of the pace, and I wonder if it is me physically or mentally resisting the effort.  I am concerned because I don't know this area and have none of the tools to find my way if I drop back.  I debate turning around, but instead ask Randy if he intends to ride this quickly the entire way.  Randy is kind enough to say he will stay back with me.  He has a cue sheet and a working GPS.  It is good to see him.  It has been awhile. 

I am surprised that we can leave the city so quickly from here, and I must admit that the scenery is incredible, but I can't find my rhythm.  At the first big hill, I find I am riding adequately if not well.  I have no trouble scrambling up it at a reasonable pace leaving a few riders behind.  At the top there is a group waiting.  At this point I make another mistake, taking off my rain jacket because the rain has slightly slackened.  As if taunting me, it begins again in earnest when we all have regrouped and started back up.

We reach the store stop.  I am disappointed that they do not serve hot chocolate, but it is a road side ice cream store with no indoor service.  I make another mistake ordering ice cream.  With stopping, I begin to chill in earnest.  Despite the beauty of the route, despite knowing that movement will warm me back up and I will not continue to shiver and shake, I have no desire to continue.  I decide to cut the route short, something I rarely allow myself to do. Mark is going back as he has a wedding to attend and can't spend the entire day riding, and I decide to wimp out and return with him.  Deep inside I know it is mentally harmful to my riding to force myself onward at this point.  I think of a friend's advice about relaxing after PBP and doing some shorter rides, about being goalless for awhile. It is sound advice. I don't want to lose the love for cycling and I may be crossing the fine line that divides burning out with keeping an acceptable fitness level. Pulling out of the store, another rider joins us and we return to the parking lot fairly quickly.  I thank Mark for allowing me to accompany him and head homewards picking up a bottle of wine on the way.  When I arrive home, a hot bath and a glass of Merlot pick up my spirits.  I even take a nap, a luxury I rarely indulge in.  "Tomorrow's another day, and I'm thirsty anyway, so bring on the rain."  Jo Dee Messina