There’s a point in the season, even for us Pacific Northwest cyclists, when we’re done with riding in the rain. That time is now.
For the commuters that commuter, even when it’s not Bike to Work Day, they just put their rain shoes on and heads down. For racers, it’s especially unpleasant. It’s not that we’re pussies, or hard, or not determined. It’s that we’ve been doing it now since last October!
If you’re watching the Giro, it looks like that, but far less dramatic or inspired. We’re in parking lots with about a hundred fans cheering us on, instead of a crawling up mountainside covered with Tifosi.
The risks we take and concerns we have are whether or not we can go back to work on Monday.
I’ve written at length about riding in the rain, almost as much as Tom Robbins:
And then the rains came. They came down from the hills and up from the sound. And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained dangers and pale eggs of the beast. Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the raven. Ancient Shaman’s rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran into the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating. And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.
– Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
And it fouled a drivetrain.
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