Dear Mother Nature

Who’s your daddy now?!  Huh?  In yo face beotch!  I ain’t skeert of you.  You’re a ho in thigh-highs…trying to lure me from a rest day with a 58 degree January forecast.  Yeah, I took the bait and delt with your lame attempt at turning a promising day miserable.  Now chalk up a few hard-guy hours for us.  Bam!  So what if you got me to trade the knee warmers for a layer of leg oil?  It made me ride harder when I saw the rain bead on my quads.  So what if your call for scattered showers made me reach for the jacket but leave it on the hanger?  So what if you got my buddy to wear short finger gloves in wind driven 40 degree rain?  So what if the one rider we saw was coming into town while we were headed out?  So what if I broke out my Lycra team shoe covers instead of the warm Pearl Izumi booties?  So what if we had to clean the wet road grit off our drive trains when we rolled back in?  I just read “A Dog in a Hat,” so you can make it feel like Belgium all you want and my smile will only grow wider.

I know you had my bib number the second I put the bikes on the roof rack.  Don’t think I didn’t notice.  Ooh a little mist, I’m soo scared.  Ooh, let’s make it cloudier on the drive over to my buddy Tony’s house.  Whatever Mother Nature.  You forget so soon that only weeks ago I raced cyclocross when it was blowing snow and 28.  I raced Mentor to Maysville in Northern Kentucky a few years ago in February and still finished even though my fingers were so wet and frozen I couldn’t shift for the final climb and had to have a teammate unzip my jersey.  Turning the mist into a full-on drizzle on the first climb?  Bring it on.  I just wiped the clinging drops from my arm warmers at the top.  So what if we couldn’t pace line without drinking wheel spray?  The side-by-side ride conversation just got better.  We became even better teammates.  Listen ya old bag, you ain’t going to make us cut a ride short. 

You couldn’t muster a little thunder or drop the temperature to make freezing rain?  All you had was that 20-minute blast of full-on driving rain and a ten degree drop?  That just made the vista of valley fog on the Point Pleasant climb even more spectacular.  The machismo just grew stronger when we splashed through the road river and muscled up the switchback.  Just for reference, in case you’re getting a little forgetful in your old age, I’ve ridden in sloshy shoes and have felt the wheel spray run down my crack countless times.  So listen up grandma, the next time you want to try to put down the Northern Kentucky beat down on us, you better get paw-paw’s belt.