The Bike Chronicles, Part 1

So, I ride a bike. Well, kind of. Ok, there's a lot of back story here, but basically, I didn't really learn how to ride a bike without training wheels until I was about 9 years old. Awful, I know! And so embarrassing... Anyway, I don't have very much inherent grace or balance as it is, and being a late bloomer, bike-wise, I don't feel super confident on a bike. So what in the world possessed me to get a road bike, I'll never know. But I have one, and to justify the expense to myself and my husband, I ride it. But I fall over. A lot. And to provide my sister with entertainment, I have been calling her after each ride to tell her the dumb things I did on my bike that day.

Well, I've been training for a century (that's a 100-mile bike ride, for you lucky souls who don't already know that), so there have been many phone calls to my sister Kim. So many, that I've started calling them The Bike Chronicles. With her permission, I will now be sharing all the Chronicles with you.

Many of my stories involve crashing into things or falling over, usually at a dead stand-still, simply because I didn't get my shoe unclipped from the pedal in time. I've also run into posts, gotten 3 flats on one ride, hit the pavement hard going too fast around a corner-- the fun never stops! But in the most recent Chronicle, I had a less painful, but no less embarrassing, experience.

I don't know about you, but when I exercise in the cold, my nose runs. However, barreling down the trail, clinging to my handle bars for dear life, isn't exactly conducive to blowing my nose, so I sniffle and snort until I get to a good stopping point and deal with it. On my ride last Friday, I did a 20-miler, so at my turn-around point, I hopped off my bike and pulled the tissue out of my back pocket (look at me, planning ahead!) to blow my nose. Now, I wear these tight gloves when I ride, and they are a bit of a pain to get on and off. I tried to take them off to blow my nose, but then decided that it was too much hassle, and I could just wear my gloves. I quickly learned what a mistake that was. I blew my nose, looked down to make sure I didn't get any on my gloves, and saw that I completely missed the tissue all together. Yes, I blew my nose right on my gloves. Fabulous. In a perfect world, I would then say that "snot makes an excellent tacky grip and totally helped me hold on to the handle bars better," or "But the snot just flicked off my gloves, no problem!" However, this is not a perfect world, and it was somewhat of a disaster to clean it all up. I ended up with a thin layer of tissue all over my gloves, stuck to all the snot. Ah, well. At least snot on my gloves didn't hurt as much as scraping past a post did. Just another day in the life of the Bike Chronicles.