For the last few months I’ve been living under the illusion that that little misanthrope known as Ms. Litka had turned over a new leaf. That she’d actually become a caring individual.
Yes, for some completely unfathomable reason I thought that she’d actually become kind, nice, sweet and all of that touchy-feely crap. Yesterday she violently disabused me of that notion.
Before I get into yesterday’s little adventure, though, let’s review a couple of things. Over the past 12 months she has variously:
- Convinced me to ride a bicycle outside. In 20 degree weather. For those of you Fahrenheit-phobes, that translates to about -7 degrees Celsius.
- Duped me into running. Multiple times. In the rain.
- Been directly or indirectly responsible for me crashing my bicycle - that would be the whole learning how to use clipless pedals thing.
- Encouraged me to engage in several sessions of near-death-by-drowning experiences.
- And, the crowning denouement, wheedled me into taking my road-bike onto a treacherous gravel road so that I could panic, lose the back wheel, steer straight into the nearest 4-inch-wide post and thereby dislocate my finger.
Now normally people who have all these injustices perpetrated upon them wise up and realize that something is amiss. But not me. Noooo, not me. Apparently I’m of the irrationally trusting sort.
So when she suggested that we use the trainers instead of riding outside in the nasty, blustery extant conditions I was quite convinced that the torturer of old had finally been vanquished. But I was wrong. Very, very wrong.
You see, Kerry has rollers. And she knows how to use them. I, on the other hand, didn’t. So just as I was about to put my bike on the trainer she said “Honey, would you go downstairs and get the rollers for me. They’re in the basement.” So, being the dutiful serf that I am, painfully dislocated finger and all I went downstairs to the basement, retrieved the heretofore-unknown rollers and brought them upstairs.
That’s when things went downhill. The next utterance went something like this: “You should ride the rollers. They’re fun. Besides, they’re set up for your size bike”.
And so began my latest 60 minutes of hell.
Picture this: you”ve never ridden rollers before, and while intellectually you know that gyroscopic forces conspire to keep the bike upright and that groundspeed has abso-fuckin-lutely nothing to do with it, your muscles, brain and body all tell you that you’re just about to die. Because if you don’t fall off the side of the rollers you’re going to do something stupid and the bike is going to launch off the front end of the rollers and about 10 milliseconds after that you’re going to be faceplanting at 20mph into the wall directly in front of you.
Oh yeah, I’m no longer a rollers virgin. I’ve ridden ‘em and survived. The first 5 minutes were, quite honestly, terrifying, but after about 10 minutes I started relaxing and then got more confident on them. So now I’ve added another new toy to my training gadgetry.
And now, a random thought for the day: “My 8th grade science teacher used to get high off of scented markers all the time” (Kerry, 9:38pm, 11/21/08)
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