sniff, roll, cough

These days, a cough, sneeze, or sniffle is enough is send me running. Preferably outdoors.
Like trains, buses, and crowded public areas, classrooms are cesspools of bacteria and germs. I made a vow this year not to get H1N1. Not so much because I heard that it sucks more than having your impacted wisdom teeth torn out of your mouth without anaesthetic, but because I simply can't afford it. November means my sights are set on the goal of finals. I don't have time to have sickness derail me.

Of course, even with all the time I spend indoors, away from people, apparently the internet can carry diseases too. Because when Competitive Cyclist reported on his "lung-clotting cold" and mentioned me in the same breath, I somehow started to sniffle. And sneeze.
Okay, that girl in my class who was hospitalized with H1N1 and double pneumonia might have had something to do with it. As well as the guy who sits next to me in tax class and probably doesn't shower on a regular basis. The end result is, however, the same: I am sniffling my way through intervals on the rollers. Total suck.

And because these things are quite contagious, the Bianchi hasn't been feeling much better. Crusty brake pads, rims coated in a layer of grime, and a chain that's as stretched thin as my sanity these days. Being a negligent bike mom, I hadn't addressed my ailing two-wheeled wonder until last night. Rims finally got wiped down, the underside of the downtube de-crusted, chain lubed, and the saddle even got some Proofide treatment.
It was like dirty therapy. Hands oily and black, I couldn't be happier. Or feel more productive.
Apparently a clean bike didn't do much for my cold, though. I'm back to clutching my cup of tea as if that's going to make this runny nose go away. But hey, I'll at least look good biking to the ER if I do end up with H1N1...

halloween realities

A tad chilly but sunny and bright, I made it my mission to properly slack off yesterday afternoon. The day was too perfect to spend inside; coffee and lazy reading at Cafe Fixe were in order.
Rolling home in the late afternoon, caffeinated and fully pleased with my slacking off, I passed a few carved pumpkins on doorsteps. Oh yeah, Saturday is Halloween. I totally forgot about that.

It's no surprise, really. I have ambivalent feelings about Halloween. Candy is great [even if I hardly eat it anymore], and little kids dressed up as superheros or princesses are downright adorable. It gives me an excuse to eat a few kernels of candy corn [come on, it's not that gross], munch on a few handfuls of pumpkin seeds, and contemplate trying to buy a pumpkin before deciding that there's no way I could get it home on my bike.
On the other hand, I can't bring myself to dress up. Or, more accurately, use Halloween as an excuse to take most of my clothes off and scamper around in public in less than what I sleep in. The obvious question of at what age Halloween becomes a fetishized sex fest aside, I don't particularly enjoy seeing classmates in overpriced porn star gear. It's not so much the less than perfect physiques of students who spend too much time poring over casebooks as much as the total lack of originality in sexy nurse outfits. Come on, guys. That shit is so played out.

And when your primary mode of transportation is a bicycle, that severely limits your dressing up/dressing off options, anyway. So while friends made plans to dress up and party downtown, the only thing I was looking forward to was how warm it's supposed to be on Saturday. And how that's perfect for bike rides.
Which is probably for the best as last year, someone dressed up as me in a totally non-ironic "look, I'm that crazy bike girl in knee highs" kind of way. But such social deterrents aside, I'd really just rather spend Halloween getting my legs wrecked on my track bike, or bonking on the Bianchi. That almost sounds like I think I have better things to do than be a normal, social person, doesn't it?

It's not that, really. Halloween's a great holiday; it lets you live a different reality for a night. It's just that, unlike the scantily clad one-night-stands that Halloween at my age should lead to, my different reality is one I'd like to live for longer than a single night.
So I'm not dressing up as a cyclist, as easy as that would be, for Halloween. I'm just going to be one.
[Happy Halloween! And here's a Rapha Scarf Friday for you, even.]

riding to be righteous

Yesterday was cold and wet. Not the sharp cold that makes your sinuses hurt and your eyes tear up within 3 pedalstrokes. This was more a lethargic humidity that makes you briefly consider ditching class, before you reprimand yourself for how incredibly lame that would be. There was a good showing of rain too - just enough to make you hope you can avoid it if you sprinted fast enough, but not enough to make you just give up and get drenched - which made sure I was properly miserable [not to mention sweaty].
And in the middle of the day, a fog so thick it looked like Halloween outside. I wondered if I'd be able to get home; if those Knog lights would even work, or if I'd get crushed under the BC shuttle bus instead [those drivers are not kidding around]. I decided I didn't really care, either way; my mind felt like a moldy piece of fruit, and anything more complicated than zoning out was proving to be a bit much.

Yeah, it was one of those days. You know, those "yeah, whatever" kind of days. Like "yeah, whatever, run my ass over, that's cool," or "yeah, whatever, pretend like you didn't see me, that's fine."
Which is a terrible mentality when you're on a bicycle. Halfway up Heartbreak Hill, it finally sort of registered and with bits of foliage blowing into my face, I managed to not fall into a pothole I knew was right there, or run into that pile of gravel that's been over there for the past month. Not that I was scared of the impact of falling per se; but it would just be embarrassing.

Because that's a total noob mistake. You know it, and I know it. Sure, shit happens, but biting it on a route I can navigate half-blind? Even that "well it was slippery and wet and my brakes weren't working and this is Boston so potholes appear out of nowhere" excuse doesn't cut it in that kind of situation. And with the NY Times article "Do More Bicyclists Lead to More Injuries?" fresh on my mind, I had no intention of making myself a neat little injury statistic to re-prove how Boston cannot give a flying fuck about cyclists.
By the time I got home, I sort of regretted reading that article; mostly because the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in the comments had driven me absolutely insane. But even slightly drenched, with bits of New England stuck to my face and leggings, and every bit cranky, I realized it's been a while since I've even flipped the bird at a driver. At some point, you get used to unpredictability. You pick and choose your battles, and sometime earlier this year, I guess I simply decided that unless I got hit or swerved at, I wasn't going to waste my time being a patronizing [m]asshole to drivers.

Bikes are for riding, not for being annoyingly righteous, right?
[Yeah, watch me get hit by a car tomorrow. That would sort of funny...if my health insurance coverage wasn't the equivalent of a box of bandaids. So let's hope this doesn't happen.]

dirty laundry

Sloane Crosley's book I Was Told There'd Be Cake, starts with:
"As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day."
I might live in Boston, but I know the feeling. Living in a studio apartment [owned by Boston College] that I knew I would be leaving in three years meant that I refused to put even a postcard up on my walls until my final year of school. I need another bookcase but, too lazy to get one, books are currently strewn around the floor, the sofa, and the extra chair that sits by my desk. The bed is constantly a pile of blankets, jackets, and laundry. I'm not even going to get into what the kitchen looks like.

Of course, yesterday had to be the day when the Office of Graduate Housing came around to make sure we weren't igniting fires with "prohibited" items like candles and octopus lamps. Of course, I had to have a fully booked schedule which meant no time to run home and clean. Of course, they had to come by when my bike was doing double duty as a drying rack.
When I started hitting the gym and sweating on rollers, I finally realized how much goddamn laundry athletes have to do.

Woolite now lives next to my bathtub and lack of a drying rack means Underarmour and bike shorts get to dry on my shower rod, the back of a chair, or on the track bike. My hands are all dried out and gross with all the hand washing. I've considered buying a whole new wardrobe and hiring a personal laundry assistant. I'm still considering it.
And between trying to find places to hang athletic gear, I was slightly thankful I wasn't racing 'cross this year. I'd probably end up buying about 10 kits to avoid washing the mud, grass, and grossness off of them post-race. Watching friends get splattered - and doing their own laundry - is quite enough for me this fall.

Standing on something that wasn't muddy dirt after the Elite Men's race in Gloucester, Andy had turned to me to [jokingly] ask:
"Hey, does your dorm have laundry?"
"I'm a grad student, Andy. I don't live in a dorm," I replied, feigning indignation.
"Is your RA cool?" Rich Bravo asked.
"Yeah," I said, laughing, "but I have curfew and no boys allowed after 10pm, sorry."
[BUT, I will be partying with the boys well past 10pm tomorrow night for Superb's Grand Opening Party. You should go, you really should.]

ugg[h] season

It's Ugg season, again.
Remember those boots that became popular in, oh, 2002? Yeah apparently, they're still around, despite their highly unflattering, leg shortening and fattening qualities [unless you're over 5'10" and under 100lbs, of course]. Which inevitably gives rise to snarky jokes with my best friend:
"Is she wearing Uggs?"
"Yeah. Welcome to 2002."

I've never been one to jump on fashion trends that would make me look like the lovechild of a munchkin and a tree trunk. Still, that doesn't mean I'm capable of keeping up with what's hip and trendy [Rapha does that for me...juuuust kidding].
Because it sometimes takes snow to get me riding more.
Sunday afternoon's rain turned into snow as I realized that I couldn't avoid not going to the grocery store if I wanted more than cheese and ketchup for dinner. And battling the big, frosty flakes, I dragged the bike up and down hills that felt like mountains in jeans that were getting drenched with icy water.
I hate how winter makes me feel like Jabba the Hutt on a tricycle.
But despite my intense desire to be a better rider, I'm also a busy girl without a realistic concept of time. Which means that I'll tell myself that 6 hours of sleep is plenty to keep me going, only to end up face first on my yoga mat at 4pm, fast asleep, my head on top of an open casebook, highlighter still clutched in my right hand. Yesterday, though, I woke up 20 minutes later, completely disoriented [no drool, though], looked around at the piles of books in my room, and then got on my rollers.

I really should be reading cases and trying to figure out Section 316 of the Internal Revenue Code, but I'm trying to see how fast I can get my shoulders sweating instead.
It's weird, but when I'm pressed for time, some part of me insists that I spend more of it on my bike. And when it snows in mid-October, that's also enough to make me irrationally freak out and run to my rollers.
Irrational because I should be savoring the remaining warm-ish days. Yesterday was the perfect fall day - just cool enough with the sun shining brightly and innocently, as if the sky hadn't dumped snow all over me Sunday afternoon. Escaping school a bit on the early side, a small part of me whispered temptations to go to Dover, to putz around and find a park, to ride in lazy circles around this small New England city.

Instead, I read cases at a much faster clip than the I-totally-don't-want-to-be-doing-this-oh-who's-on-gchat?-wait-I-should-finish-this-reading pace, condensing the schoolwork into that narrow space between the power nap and dinner. And before stuffing my face, I spun on my track bike for a decent amount of time while distracting myself with "Kitchen Nightmares" [my new addiction].
Okay, I didn't finish all of my work, and went to bed too late to get up too early. Old habits die hard, sometimes, I guess. Still, do I at least get points for not wearing Uggs?

how i roll

Back when my mother was still deluding herself into thinking I had some musical promise, she would send me to weekly piano lessons. I don't actually remember being presented with the concept of "choice" in this decision. I was supposed to learn how to play piano. End of story.
I was maybe six or seven at the time. In the living room of my piano teacher, I would alternate between awkwardly trying to navigate the stretch of white and black keys and sitting in a chair, writing out the rhythm of whatever my teacher would play. And while regulated to invalid-child-with-epilepsy status, I absolutely could not sit still.

It was one of those days where I was supposed to write out rhythms when it happened. I was seated on a wooden chair but had tucked my legs underneath me so that I was perched on my shins. My toes stuck out of that narrow space between the seat of the chair and its back. I was fidgeting, and as I shifted in my seat, a heel got caught in the back of the chair. I panicked, pulled and struggled. The chair wobbled as I fought it, then fell back, me stuck to it, and the back of my head smashed against my piano teacher's glass coffee table.
She totally freaked out.
A few stitches later, I was fine. I actually remember wondering why we weren't just continuing the piano lesson.
Two decades later, I've come to terms with sitting for long stretches of time, but that doesn't mean I don't hate it. And a 12 hour school day means that while I'm not on my butt the whole time, by the time I get home, the only thing I want to do is eat something decent and be horizontal for an extended period of time [preferably for more than 6 hours].

But yesterday, I came home, peeled off restricting clothing, and hopped right back onto a bike. With the weather turning positively freezing and the heat turning my apartment into a sauna, unlike the true road warriors who are shunning the indoor trainer at all costs, I'm hiding inside, rolling happily. Ironically, the stacks of books smothering my desk and every flat surface in my apartment, along with the "to do" list that never ends, is pushing me into higher gears [literally]. The mental image of that adorable Phil Wood 12T cog helps, too.
So after a make-up class that ended at 7.15pm last night, nursing a headache from incomprehension of corporate taxation, starving, and exhausted, I rolled for a little bit. And despite the sweating, I realized that it doesn't burn so much on my increased gearing. I actually might be getting used to it.

I stretched properly for once afterwards, and because I like cylindrical things, even rolled out my IT bands with my new favorite toy - a giant foam roller. My legs felt happy, even if I couldn't wait to dive into bed a few hours later.
And in case you were wondering, I slept like a baby.