Don Frank
WNR Report 8/8/19
I have not ridden on a Wednesday night nor submitted a report for at least a month, in part because of rain and in part because of lame excuses. I did not think anyone cared, but lately I have been riding on a Tuesday or a Thursday group ride along side of someone who asks, “Dan, no more ride reports?” or “Jon, are you going to keep writing those stupid ride reports?” Typically, before I get a chance to answer, we hit a hill, or maybe just a small rise in the road, and I get dropped so I never get to ask if I should write one. I will assume for the purposes of this report, that they are missed.
As tonight’s ride was rained out once again, I will comment mostly on rain. There is a lot of it this season, mostly on Wednesdays. Every Wednesday ride that gets called off due to rain is a Wednesday I don't ride home alone. But that has not always been true. We have ridden in rain, thunder, lightning, and microbursts that have knocked the Zinj out of us.
When I first got into riding, in 1997 or 1998, when many of you were still in the womb, I signed up for fundraising AIDS rides – Boston to New York. It was about 100 miles a day for three days. I trained by learning how to carbo-load.
The day before the AIDs ride, as my ride buddy and I drove up the pike to stay at a friend’s apartment, we listened to reports of a pending hurricane on the radio.[1] It was gonna be a big one. The storm was going mostly north to south, like us, so we figured it was going to be a good thing. We stayed up late in the night following the havoc the storm wreaked in its path. We worried only that it was going to make it even harder to wake at 4:30 a.m. for the 6:00 a.m. start. About thirty-five hundred people had raised enough money to qualify for the ride. We scoffed when our friend suggested that we would be the only ones there. We slept little and awoke to a howling wind. The worst part of the storm was going to surge into Boston at about 9 a.m. so we needed to get going. We hoisted our knapsacks onto our backs and pushed our bikes the mile or so in the dark to the massive parking lot where we were all to meet. So did about 2000 other riders, each of them stupid in the same way.[2]
In 2013 I was caught in my car in downtown Springfield as a tornado enveloped my office building and me. I pulled over as leaves, then trash, then sticks, then bricks, actual bricks from nearby buildings that had toppled, were banging against my car.The noise was deafening. It was pitch black at 2:00 p.m. Suddenly my station wagon back window exploded and the stuff from the street filled my car. Then it stopped. It was quiet. My car was dented and scraped but drivable. I drove home to Northampton, got into my NCC kit and went on the Wednesday Night Ride.[3]
So what’s a little rain?
[1] A radio is a wireless thing that we used to listen to before there were cell phones, for those of you who were still in the womb in 1998.
[2] This is the end of this anecdote because they would not let us ride. Too bad, as I am sure I would have a lot more “rain” material if they let us ride in a hurricane. They eventually loaded our gear, our bikes and us into busses and transported us to various school gymnasiums. It was still a lot of fun and we got to drink in the afternoon.
[3] As the ten of us rode up Elm Street an electrical after-shock nearly blew all of us off our bikes. We freaked out and went home. But that doesn’t mean we learned anything.