Minor Annoyances

Some days nothing goes right.

You wake up and the tell-tale swoosh of cars on the road outside means that at the very least it has rained recently and you’re in for a wet ride, even if it’s no longer raining when you leave the house. Inevitably it will be and you’ll get wet from the top and bottom. When you do leave, late, as you were hoping the rain would stop, you’ll know from the second you start to ride that it won’t be a fun one. Each pedal stroke is hard and the bike doesn’t flow, as much as fight back, and that’s just on the downhills. Furthermore you start to pound into some sort of rhythm and instantly and inexplicably the chain jumps off at both ends and jams itself between the crank and chainring. With a sigh you coast to a stop and start to get to dirty up your hands putting the chain back on. Allen keys get found and gloves torn off to move the chain-tensioner and refit the chain before tightening it all up again, with a slight regret that you fitted a singlespeed conversion to a bike with vertical dropouts anyway.

On your way again and the ride passes more slowly than you can possibly imagine. Every road seems longer than you remember from yesterday and you can’t imagine how you do this every day. For some reason there’s an odd wobble form the back wheel, even though you know you’ve checked the spokes, the hub and the straightness of the wheel and nothing’s wrong.

Finally you arrive at work and drag yourself to the shower only to find, as you get dressed, that you left your pants at home and have to spend the day unintentionally commando.

All of these are little things which add up to a feeling of mild depression and resignation for the rest of the day, especially as you hope that the ride home won’t be quite as annoying. Still, you could be having to fight Scottish football fans, or having as bad a day at work as riders on the Commute Around Spain (or “Veulta a Espana”) as seen here and here:

For the benefit of my colleagues I would like to point out that I’m posting this a few days after such a day happened to me, to save you looking at me with the knowledge that I am improperly dressed.

The only solution as far as I can tell is to relax into the zen world of Mint Sauce and feel the healing that a good mountain bike ride can bring. Calm yourself down here.

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