Biking in the rain is a challenge.

Some of the challenges I was ready for; that brief moment when you hit your brakes, and it actually feels like you’re speeding up (it’s an illusion, of course; your body expects to slow down, and it doesn’t, at least not as quickly as you think you will) is old hat to me.

And while this summer is my first real experience at bike commuting, I was ready for the big challenge.

Let me explain.

When you bike on a wet surface, your tires throw off water in a plane directly out from the center of the tire.  This is especially true on thin little road-bike tires like mine, which come to a pretty fine peak (to cut down on rolling resistance); you can actually see water sheeting off and flying into the air in an almost-plumb-straight line.

Now, if you don’t have fenders (and I don’t), that water’s gotta go somewhere; that somewhere is a fat, wet, sloppy line from your butt to your neck, straight up your back.

But I rode to work, secure in knowing that a hot shower and a change or two of dry clothes (one in my backpack, another stowed in my cube just in case) awaited me.

But as I wheeled down the busy street, I came up behind a couple of the guys I’ve noticed before (see Item #4 in this post); guys riding in their dress shirts and khakis.

And, but for the windbreaker one of them wore, that’s exactly how they were dressed this morning.  No back fender.  Big sloppy muddy wet skid mark up the back of their khakis and dress shirt.

They pulled into the government office building, and – presumably – went to work.  Skid mark and all?

I don’t know.  I really just don’t know.

My friend Beeeej is going to be doing a mega bike-a-thon.  It’s for a very good cause:

Six years ago, less than a year after I moved to New York City to be closer to my parents, my mother was diagnosed with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. None of us really knew at the time what that meant; we knew that leukemia was a form of blood cancer, but we didn’t know her prognosis, or even really that there were different kinds of the disease. I’ll write more about CLL in later entries, but for now suffice to say we knew her life would change.

We have been very fortunate, far more fortunate than many families of leukemia patients, in that my mother’s life hasn’t changed all that much; she has remained relatively healthy. CLL can remain relatively inactive – or at least advance very, very slowly – for several years, and with Mom it has done just that. As I said, it’s been six years – and she’s not only still with us, she’s still in pretty good health, and hasn’t had to undergo any kind of medical treatment. Not everybody is so lucky, and so we count every day with her as a blessing.

What does that have to do with Tucson?

Tonight I spent a couple of hours at the registration and kick-off for the New York City chapter of Team in Training. “TNT” is an arm of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, through which ordinary people sign up to do extraordinary things to raise money for the Society’s programs – medical research, government lobbying, patient services, and all the other things that are desperately needed in the fight against blood cancers. TNT members spend months training to run a marathon, bike/swim/run a triathlon, or bike a “century,” and they use the event as a catalyst to raise money from their friends and family.

And tonight I committed myself to spend the next six months training, so that I can ride my bike in “El Tour de Tucson” – one hundred and nine miles in and around the city of Tucson, Arizona in one day, November 17, 2007.

I hope you’ll check in with me often over the next six [now more like three!] months. It should be an interesting ride.

I know Beeeej would appreciate any help people can spare toward his goal of raising almost $11K to help combat Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, I imagine he’d appreciate it.

As would, y’know, all the rest of the CLL patients.

I’m going to try to chip loose a few bucks, and I hope you can too.

I’m closing in on two months of biking to work nearly every morning.

It’s having some effect on me:

• A couple of people who never pay me compliments said it looks like I’ve lost some weight.
• Now that my morning kicks off with a death-defying dice with some of Minnesota’s worst drivers, I don’t need as much coffee as I used to.
• A couple of my favorite work shirts – which were on the brink of “tight” last May – aren’t.
• While my legs aren’t the tree-trunk-like instruments of tempered death that they were 20-25 years ago, when I was biking 20-30 miles a day every day, they’re coming right along.

But the best part of all…

There’s one big hill I have to surmount on the way home every night.

Day One:  I made it about a third of the way up, and then wound up walking my bike the rest of the way up, huffing and puffing.

Week Two:  I made it to the top – weaving back and forth (to lower the slope) in low gear – and sat at the stoplight at the top, huffing and puffing and drinking water, for a minute or two before I got started again.

Two Weeks Ago: Made it to the top in low gear, but in a fairly straight line – and sat at the stoplight at the top for a moment to catch my breath and water up before I got on the road again.

Yesterday:  Got to the top, rolled through the green light and continued on my way, not especially winded.

It’s going to stink when school starts again.

I’ve been pretty religious about biking to work every day this past four or five weeks; I only missed a couple days when my bike was in the shop.  Not bad, all in all.

And I got some positive reinforcement; a third party with no attachment to me whatsoever commented “Looks like you’ve lost some weight” over the weekend.  So – so far, so good.  I feel much better after the ride every morning; biking to work is a natural lift to the day.  Part of it is just the blast of exercise.  Part of it is the adrenaline from the existential threat from some of the drivers out there.  Either way, it focuses the mind.

But I have to wonder about something.

I’ve noticed that there seem to be four types of bikers on the road in the morning.

1. The serious bikers; the ones in the yellow jerseys and biker shorts and streamlined helmets, with legs like tree trunks – kinda like mine were, when I was a serious biker, between about 1980 and 1990.  Most of them are visibly serious about their biking (kinda like I was); focuses, concentrated, and very, very fast.  Some of them boggle the mind; one guy sailed past me a few weeks back on an oval bike – a single speed bike with no coaster gear on it, meaning you have to pedal all the freaking time when you’re on it, and you can’t change gears on hills.  I’m in awe.
2. Guys you can pretty much tell are there because they got their third DWI.  They’re usually dressed like they dress at work – work boots, jeans, coveralls, whatever.
3. Bikers like me; guys and gals in workout duds grinding out the commute to work, or grabbing a morning jaunt before heading into the office.  I wear pretty much what I wear to the gym; whatever T-shirt I was wearing the day before, my gym shorts, my sneakers.  I put my work clothes in a backpack (my christmas present to myself will probably be a rear rack of some kind), and take a shower in my office’s locker room before going to work because I figure even my little six mile commute is gonna make me sweaty.  And who needs that?
4. Bikers like the guy I drafted for a while this morning.  Let me explain.

The guy was fiftysomething, with a neatly-trimmed gray beard, he wore a helmet, a dress shirt, khaki Dockers, black socks and loafers – in other words, dressed for work at an office job.  He carried a shoulder bag that looked like it was full of notebooks, not clothes.

Now, it was pleasant this morning, but kinda muggy.  I was sweating; I’ll chalk a lot of that up to the fact that I’m still a ways away from being in shape, but I also have a pretty solid rhythm (one of the keys to distance biking is just getting your legs in a rhythm and keeping it, not stopping for anything, even coasting as little as possible; the cooling down of your muscles actually causes more fatigue than keeping your legs moving.  And yes, I realize the absurdity of calling my six-mile commute “distance biking”, but then you try it when you’re 44 and haven’t biked seriously since 1990.  But I digress), so I don’t waste a lot of energy, either.  This guy was working up a bit of a lather, too; decent rhythm, but he was standing on his pedals up hills and out of stoplights, which tends to exert one.

I have to wonder – how do these people get through the workday without smelling like a bear that’s just come out of hibernation?

I noticed that the guy this morning – like many of the guys I see who bike to work in their work duds – pulled into a government building at the end of his ride.  Government employees, please spill the beans – do your offices reek, or what?

End of week two of bike commuting and, when time and energy permits, riding a bit more just for fun.

And I’ve just recovered a memory from about 20 years ago.

One of my favorite things in the whooooooole world, I’ve re-realized, is passing the Saint Paul Cathedral, and continuing down the long hill onto John Ireland Boulevard – the broad, monument-dotted avenue that connects the Cathedral and the Capitol – and just unwinding, sailing as fast as I can past the Cathedral, the First Minnesota Memorial, St. Paul College and the Historical Society, and crossing Kellogg and over the freeway…

…and then hotfooting a hard right onto the frontage road below the Capitol and in front of the Veterans Building, blasting over the overpass past Saint Joseph’s Hospital onto Saint Peter Street, a one-way with almost too little traffic to worry about (although I worry about it, have no fear).

It can get better than this, but it’s not easy.

Good:  That feeling you get when you’re sailing down the street.

Better:  Passing a Prius driver, yelling “you should be ashamed, you gas-guzzling, carbon-belching, stinkpot-driving tool of Big Oil”

Best:  Passing the Prius on the left.

Rode in to work again today.

I’ll confess – I was incredibly sore on Friday.  I made it without throwing a knee or a ventricle, but since I haven’t done a lot of biking in the last five years or so, I was feeling it Friday night – especially since I went out for another ride in the evening.  Owwww.

Sunday, Monday and yesterday were better, of course – much better.  And the ride in takes almost exactly the same time as the bus.

I figure there’s going to be another week of searing pain.  But it’ll be worth it in the long run.  I hope.