I've surprised myself. I'm still riding my bike to work two or three times a week. This morning I lay in bed, exhausted, wondering whether I should brave the bleak weather or just drive in, but there really never was a question. I got up and pulled on my bike shorts and my jogging shorts over them and got ready my camelback and cassette player with my latest read in it and my backpack with my long pants for work. There doesn't seem to be much on the surface to enjoy about the ride. It has steep hills going both directions--the worst being on the way home--and there's not much to look at besides gravel and weedy fields, and the main road that I travel is a narrow two-laner that is always jammed with insane Utah drivers. What I love about it is what it's doing to me. I still pedal through pain. My nearly-atrophied leg muscles still protest wildly as I push them, put the point is that I can pedal through the pain now. As I learn to go at a constant and steady pace rather than pumping like mad for a while and then coasting until I catch my breath, I can keep going without taking a break from pedaling. My progress is exhilarating. I still get snubbed by the many professional bikers I encounter with their colorful, sponsor-laden spandex and their genuine, expensive street bikes, but I don't care. I'm not there to impress them. I'm there for me. Besides, they leave me in their dust long before I can worry about what they think. Tonight after work was a different story, though. The wind was gaining force and storm clouds were gathering, so, since I have to go to work tomorrow anyway, I left the bike there and brought the company vehicle home. The trip home convinced me that the traffic is much safer on the bike. At least I'm not directly in the path of those killing machines with the raving lunatics at their helms. I noticed this big blue suburban when it raced to merge in front of me but didn't make it. I forgot about it and drove until I came to a yellow light and stopped. There had been an accident and the two wrecked cars were on the side of the road and no one appeared to be hurt. There was a lot of distance between the suburban and me but a few seconds after the light went red I heard a horrendous screeching noise and saw him swerve wildly into the turn lane next to me. He put his hand up to his face to avoid looking at me, put his signal on and turned right. I saw him make a u-turn so he could get back on the road I was on. Apparently he had been looking at the accident and not at where he was going and just barely missed wrecking the company car. I'm not sure what I would have done.
I've had long days at work this week. The banquet for which I've been producing the video presentation (which, by the way runs about forty minutes total) is Monday and I still have at least a couple of hours of work to do on it. So, as I said, I'm going in tomorrow to finish it.
Yesterday my wife told me that our five-year-old had come running in shouting "Emergency! Emergency!" She went out to see what the problem was and found our eight-year-old serenely hanging upside down from the willowtree in our front yard by his ankle which had somehow gotten tangled up in his jump rope. She said he didn't seem distressed but was waiting patiently for her to get him down. Quite a madhouse I live in, isn't it.
No comments:
Post a Comment