FHR 2008

This guy wearing black polyester spandex tights and a brightly colored neon top rode past me and Mimi and said something like, “The good thing about those pirate flags is that you can easily grab onto them,” and I retorted, “Yeah, man, hang on and I’ll pull you up the next hill,” after which what I thought about was awkward moments between human beings who dress differently, but mostly what struck me about today was how different Bainbridge Island looked on a sunny day in February, one example of which, right off, at the beginning of our ride around the island, was how you could see downtown Seattle, and then, how rather than being a mysterious tour of some sort of windswept spit of land on the edge of the continent, it was more like a spring ramble through rolling hills, but mostly downhill when you tallied it all up, even at most points during the ride.

And I was all smug at the start of the race when Kalin’s tandem broke a shifter cable, thinking “Hah! I just tuned our baby up, spending an hour and a half the other day on a 5 minute job,” but the Universe had the last laugh as we snapped ours with 3 hills to go.

To tell the truth, though, I was glad to have an excuse to walk the last few rollers and even Mimi, who otherwise wouldn’t have let me, could see the sense of it, especially since not a single racer passed us while we pushed the bike, enabling us to finish respectably and more importantly, while there was still plenty of chili left and plus, right about when the winning group of riders, led, not surprisingly by Stanglor, had just returned from a beer run.

Hooray for Derek for organizing another reason to live through February and oh my god my heart when his mom called him “darling” as we carried trash to his truck.