The joys of eating scat

I was having flashbacks to Triple D '10.

Triple D is a bike race held near Dubuque, Iowa in January. Last year it was held on the Heritage Trail which is a rails-to-trails trail that goes something like 30 miles out the trail, turns around in the town of Dyersville and then heads back to Dubuque (hence the name Triple D: Dubuque-Dyersville-Dubuque). The race last year was routed almost entirely on the Heritage Trail as it had snowed soon before the event and the race director didn't want to repeat the year previous - where the snow melted so there was a layer of ice on top of which it snowed 8” and made the race into a push-your-bike-until-you-quit race - and there is more snowmobile traffic on the Heritage Trail than on other nearby trails so it would be nice and packed down. Anyway,things were going great for a while, trail was hard and packed well...until a trail groomer came by about an hour into the race and chewed up the trail and made it soft and – for me – all but unrideable. I then spent the next 9 hours riding/pushing through the slop.

Friday I did a ride mostly on ATV trails and forest roads (I live right near the Chequamegon National Forest) and then ended up a railroad grade which have just been graded by a bulldozer and was all soft and no fun to ride. Hence the Triple D flashbacks.

Today (Halloween Sunday) I rode some with Glinden (the boy of my girlfriend, Jenny) on the tag along then took off and rode by myself for another few hours, all on forest roads. It was a fun ride. At one point a big SUV passed me on the road and since the road was pretty rough I was able to ride fast enough (or maybe more precisely it was because they were going really slow) to keep it in sight for a ways then it was gone. I didn't think much of it...until a few minutes later I caught up with it because it was stuck in a mud puddle. I must admit that I felt a little smug as I rolled up, dismounted, walked across the muddy part and then kept riding. I did even offer to help and was sincerely trying to be nice but later I realized that it was probably a slap in the face for them to be offered help from a guy in tights. It's not like I could've even done anything...I usually carry a powerful winch with me one every ride but had forgotten it this time.

I rode for a little more and then stopped for a snack break. Before I had left I had grabbed a couple of granola bars and a bag of peanuts mixed with chocolate chips that had been in my bike bag since the summer. The chocolate chips had – of course – melted in the summer heat and the chocolate re-solidified and now it reminded me of a little junk toy that I saw for Christmas once that was a moose that when you pressed on its hinder it squatted and out came a chocolate covered raisin. Now imagine a whole pile of those that had melted together and that would be kinda how those peanuts looked.

Now I take a fair amount of pride in going against the grain, doing things that make sense even if they aren't commonly accepted by society. Examples: eating a bag of string cheese that had been at room temp for the better part of a day and had gone soft, showing up to a church service a little sweaty because I had biked there, riding my bike in the snow, thinking seriously about consuming a bag of peanuts that looks disturbingly like the slightly composted emissions of a sheep who has gotten into a batch of moldy string cheese (OK so maybe this is not an example of something that makes sense), etc. So my thinking was thus: 1) I'm hungry 2) I have food in front of me 3) I'm hungry. Conclusion: I don't care if it looks like shit and has been sitting in my bike bag for months, I'm going to eat it...but first I will pause to take a picture and document the totally unappealing look of this food and then be able to brag – and provide documentation - about my wholesomeness later when St. Peter asks me if I made a habit of wasting food. So I took a picture and then chomped into it. It tasted terrible and I immeditely spit it out and then threw uneaten part of it away in the grass. I spent the better part of a minute trying to spit the taste out and then, since that didn't get the taste out of my mouth, washed it out with water and then dove right into a nice pre-packaged granola bar.

Now, don't think that I'm now pro pre-packaging. It was just ironic that I had just been feeling smug and had my shit-eating grin wiped off my face by actually eating something that looked like shit. It happens.


When I look at this picture I am still amazed by just how stupid I am.




This gives you a pretty good idea of what the roads are like that I'm spending time riding on.



Glinden at our snack break