Thursday, June 10, 2010

And then it left again

The Tuesday Night Crit, for the second week in a row, turned into a soaking wet ride. This week some 31 guys showed up in the 1/2/3 training race and we went 44kmph for 50min in pouring rain under black skies. It was windy enough that on the headwind stretch I was seeing 400W get me 39-40kmph and nothing stuck for all that long. McK and I had a nice go of it for maybe 1/4 of the race.

Wednesday was looking promising in the morning and the ride to and from campus was warm, humid, and generally promising for a dry ride. So, of course, I procrastinated - and while the TT bike and I rode 5 minute intervals up and down Fir Butte, the wind kicking around from all sides like a gang of pre-schoolers in a group tantrum, the western sky turned completely white. It was one of those walls of water that comes down in fine, dense drops, penetrating every seam and crack in the raingear. A literal wall of water. I watched it approach over the course of an hour or so, each time I completed an interval I debated running from the storm to go finish on the home trainer, and each time I decided "No, I'm still OK". And I was still OK all the way through - until of course suddenly I wasn't.

Starting the last interval, headed south, the big car-wash in the sky opened up and before I had finished the 5 min rain had snuck under the collar of my jacket and by the time I got back to the end of the Amazon bike path - not more than three miles away - every item of clothing was waterlogged.

So, for the second day in a row, I got home and stood in front of the washing machine in my garage, stripping naked to throw 20lbs of soaking wet apparel into the "delicates" cycle.

This Is Not OK.

It's June. I know the rain is "warm". But there shouldn't be any rain to begin with. This is our three months of glorious dry warmth, being eaten away by more penetrating precipitation than we see on any given day in January. It is almost summer. Sunshine is not liquid, and if this crap doesn't stop I am seriously tempted to hang up the wheels until it does, because I am done.

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