Whenever I ride a long road or path along an ocean--or just about any other body of water, for that matter--I can't help but to think about some of the earliest long rides I took, as a teenager in New Jersey.
Some said I was a lonely kid. Truth was, I simply wasn't thinking about the things most other kids my age were. Truth was, I couldn't. Oh, I worried about which college, if any, would accept me and ran different career paths through my mind. Truth was, I was doing those things because other people said I should.
Truth is, I was on a journey on which no one could accompany, let alone guide, me. I wanted to ride my bike across counties and countries when my peers wanted to get their licenses and pick up dates who would be impressed by such things--or being picked up by one of those new drivers.
And that was just one way in which I wasn't on the same road or path as my peers. If you've been reading my other blog--or even some posts on this one--you know another one of the ways in which my life--or, more precisely, the way in which I saw my identity, my self--differed from almost anybody else I knew. And I would not learn a language to express it for a long time.
But cycling was, and remains, a means of communication between my body, my spirit and all that is essential to them. That is the reason why, even when I have ridden by myself, I have never felt lonely while on two wheels. Some might have said I rode because of alienation. When I didn't know any better--in other words, when I didn't know how to express otherwise--I believed something like that in the same way people believe the most plausible-sounding explanation for just about anything because they don't know anything else.
Perhaps that is the reason why I am drawn to the ocean, or to any other large body of water, when I'm on my bike. It was while pedaling along the Atlantic Ocean between Sandy Hook and Island Beach--and along the bodies of water that led to the ocean--that I first realized that I would often ride alone, but I would not lack for companionship. I had my self, I had my bike and at times I would have a riding partners who understood, or who at least simply wanted to ride with me. Or, perhaps, I would simply want to ride with them.
P.S. On a somewhat related topic, please check out my latest on Huffington Post!
When you live in a big city, you can tell what part of the day it is by the light in which you're seeing whatever's in front of you. In other words, buildings or streets or other structures reflect morning, noon or night by dawn, daylight, dusk, shadows or artificial light.
Here in small-town and rural Florida, flora and fauna show varying sides of themselves through the different facets of the day. So, bush that might bud at one time of the day could bloom a couple of hours later and denude itself by nightfall.
And so it was this morning, when I rode from my parents' house. The street on which they live ends in a wider street that edges a wooded area. That street, in turn, leads to a four-line parkway that cuts through a swamp.
Alongside the parkway I saw these tiny flowers colored like pale lilacs waving in the breeze as I pedaled away. When I returned in the afternoon, they were gone. They were repeating the "hello" and "goodbye" they bade me yesterday and the day before as I began and ended those days' rides.
Tomorrow I will bid them farewell until another day, another season--and more important, another hour, another time of day.
Yesterday I did a shorter ride (about 50 km) than I did the other day (Daytona Beach) or Saturday (St. Augustine). But I planned it that way so I could linger along one of my favorite stretches of Route A1A, in the very aptly named Painters Hill:
Well, all right, the Painters part is apt. The hill, not so much. But it's a feast for the senses. And, oh yeah, I went swimming. You could tell I--and the other swimmers--aren't from around here. Natives wondered how we could "stand" water that's "so cold". I'd guess that the temperature was somewhere around 13 to 15 C (55 to 60F). At Rockaway Beach or Coney Island, it's probably not much higher than 5C (40F) right now.
Perhaps the best part of the ride is that I might have made a new friend and riding partner for future trips down here (or perhaps even for later this week!) I met her at a convenience store-gas station just west of the bridge from Palm Coast Parkway to Route A-1A. The bichon frise in the front basket of her Diamond Back cruiser gave that ever-so-friendly look bichon frises give and, of course, I stroked his head. If dogs are a reflection of their owners, that bichon frise perfectly mirrored her personality.
Before I crossed the bridge into A1A, we rode trails that crossed ponds, cut through swamps and rimmed the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. She apologized--though she had no reason to--for her riding: It was her first time out this year, she said. I didn't feel that she was slowing me down, as she feared. I must say, though, that I astounded her when I said that I rode the borrowed clunker to and from St. Augustine and Daytona Beach. "Just thinking about it gets me tired," she exclaimed.
After about two hours, she had to go back to her house to meet a client. I thanked her: Even if I hadn't continued down to Painters Hill and Flagler Beach, I would have felt I'd had a good ride. After all, encounters like that remind me of some of the reasons I ride.
Yesterday I was off to the races.
No, I wasn't in the peloton or even at the starting line. But I was in the vicinity of a track.
All right, it wasn't a velodrome. But it's probably the one truly important racing venue outside the world of cycling. I'm talking, of course about the Daytona Speedway.
To be more precise, I pedaled to Daytona Beach, which meant that I did two 100k rides in three days, which is two more than I'd done in the three previous months.
I rode up and down the streets, along the boardwalk and, yes, on the beach itself. I was going to do the latter because, I reasoned, if it was OK for cars and jeeps to drive there, why not bikes? Plus, I was riding a beach cruiser, and I thought perhaps it should actually be ridden on a beach at least once!
Believe it or not, the car lane on the beach is actually designated as the Daytona Beach Highway, subject to all of the same rules and regulations as other automobile routes. The difference is, of course, that it's sand instead of asphalt or concrete, and the speed limit is ten miles per hour (16KPH). Hey, you can go faster than that on your bike!
But the best part of going to and from Daytona by bike is the beautiful road--Route A1A--that skirts the coast line. When you're riding north from Daytona, all you have to do is look--real hard--to your right and, on a clear day, you can see Casablanca. After all, it's only 6866.9 kilometers (4246 miles) away.
Tomorrow or some time after, I'll tell you about the ride I did today. It's another 100K ride, though to a different destination from the one I did the other day.
So, in three days, I've probably done more riding-for-the-sake-of-riding than I'd done a couple of months. My legs have been holding up surprisingly well. Maybe I had more "money in the bank", as an old riding partner used to say, than I realized.
Whatever fatigue I've felt has come from all of the sun I've absorbed on my skin. Even though I've used lots of sunscreen, I now see--and feel--redness on skin that had been the color of Wonder bread for weeks.
All right, so that last description was a bit of an exaggeration. Still, I feel as if the past few days have been a new beginning, at least in terms of my cycling--and writing. Yes, I've been doing some of the latter, and it's not related (at least not obviously so) to this or my other blog.
The only complaint I have is the one I have about cycling here generally: It's flat. Now, it's probably the reason I've been able to do the rides I've done with relative ease. But to really get back into shape, I'll have to start going vertical. And about the only climbs around here are the bridge ramps. Even places with "hill" in their names don't require much more of a change in elevation than the floor of one place in which I lived during my youth.
Speaking of my youth: Yes, I did a fair amount of climbing on my bike. In fact, during my last two tours in France, I pedaled up a few of the fabled Tour de France climbs. One day I will write about them, after I sift through my photos and journals of those rides, the most recent of which I did in 2001.
But for now, I'll share this wry image about the difficulty of such climbs:
Of the peaks mentioned, I have done all except Port de Bales. Perhaps one day I will do them again, or find others.
