A ride and a swim

I rode to the Walden Pond reservation this morning, passing through a dank humid fog dense enough to arrest the use of my glasses from shear moisture accumulation. I played a cat and mouse game with the cracks and the holes, valleys and mountains plaguing Greater Boston’s average street. It is not so much the road feature itself which provides the problem, dangerous as some of those 2 foot wide gaps may be for my 3lb, 2mm thick tire, as it is the actions I must take to avoid such road hazards. My bike handling skills easily allow for the zigs and zags I must make on split-second notice, but unfortunately, the plush lexus and bmw behind me don’t notice the road gaps and canyons at 35mph, they don’t move to avoid the 4 inch hole that can send me flying. Instead they listen to Bach or 2pac and if I’m lucky, they wonder why that crazy bicyclist can’t ride in a straight line and secretly tally all the points they could have garnered if only they could find the guts to wipe these pests off their tarmac territories. If I’m unlucky, they’re in the midst of a karaoke session with their favorite Britney Spears or KISS song and before I know it, they don’t have to find the guts because they got lucky by accident and fortunately for them, blood washes off and the dent can easily be hammered out by an unskilled rubber-hammer wielding laborer from the nearby Quickie Mart.

Fix the roads.

While swimming through the fog hugging the shore after choosing to dismiss my original plan to strike out through the middle as slightly unwise for an amateur swimmer with little to no experience in open water and visibility lingering at 20-30ft. Off I set, wetsuit floating me along as I heat up to unreasonable temperatures, undoubtedly doing myself some form of damage as I pray for some cooling god to magically transport ice down my back where it will last no longer than five minutes, but what a blessed five minutes. It didn’t happen, and I continued. 1.16 miles… circa 2000 meters in about 45 minutes, with stops, that’s not a very fast pace, but its better than nothing. The next step is to do it nonstop, then to do it twice, then up and down the center a couple times, with hopefully three times out and back before the Ironman. Other than those goals I’m going to live in the pool, which ought to be sooo much fun.