Adjustment troubles, Humble beginnings (A special, two-part post!)

So, last week I was riding in shorts and a short sleeve jersey, enjoying a nice sunburn on my arms and re-upping the tan lines on my thighs.

I harbored, at the time, what may have been an unreasonable expectation that when I returned to Pennsylvania this week the cold would have stopped and the weather would be suddenly spring like.

It was warmer on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday -- not spring-like per se, but in the 50s -- warmer enough to wear just knee warmers and spring-weight gloves. My ski gloves, which have now seen me through three winters of mostly warm-handed riding, happily stayed home, as did my winter jacket.

The warmer temperatures lulled me into a false sense of comfort, I suppose. Today, it was cold again. But, true to my normal, discombobulated state, I failed to look at the weather online before I left for work. It looked warm out the window, and had been warm all week, and my phone still thinks it's in Austin, so I had no idea that it was only in the 30s outside.

Walking into the cold was a rude awakening.

An even ruder awakening was heading out for a lunch ride and realizing that the spring-weight gloves I was wearing were woefully inadequate. My hands were numb instantly, the kind of numbness that made me want to turn back and cut the ride short. I didn't, but only because I don't know the roads that well and felt like I was likely to get lost if I attempted a short cut (I was alone after forgetting my shoes at home and taking too long to ride home to get them). In warmer weather I would have been happy to get lost. Today, I wasn't going to mess around.

My fingers were completely numb by the time I got back to the office and extracting my key card from my waterproof phone case was challenging. Once inside, my hands began the painful process of re-warming. Fortunately, I had gotten back to the locker room ahead of the rest of the lunch riders and the lunch runners, so no one heard me sobbing over my burning hands in the shower. Just kidding. Sort of.

I've got lots of experience with that sort of re-warming pain, but it's been a long time since I last felt it, as I've gotten better at dressing for cold weather as the years have gone on. If memory serves, it's always pretty excruciating when numb hands or toes come back to life, but I think it's ever more painful after a week in Austin.

Fortunately for me, it is supposed to get warmer for the weekend. Some rain is in the forecast, but I'll take rain to cold any day.

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On a completely unrelated note, I'll be racing this weekend, first at the Branch Brook Spring Series, and then at the local training crits here in the Lehigh Valley. At this point in my cycling life, racing is pretty much second nature. It's the first weekend in March, so of course I'm planning my first races of the season.

I won't bother packing in advance or laying out my clothes. Hell, it's going to rain so I may not even bother washing my bike ahead of time. I've done hundreds of races, so it's not much to get nervous about, I suppose. Even the start list failed to betray an surprises, as those lists sometimes do.

But, tonight, when I was enjoying a relaxing recovery spin on my rollers, while watching the karate kid, I started thinking about the first road race I ever did. It was sometime in the late 90s, 1999 if I had to guess. I'd previously done a few mountain bike races, and even though I'd been riding a road bike for a while, the racing thing was completely new to me.

So I showed up at Prospect Park at 5:30 in the morning on a Saturday or Sunday and registered for the four lap (was it five?) cat V race. I was wearing the Giordana Brooklyn long sleeve jersey my parent's had given me as a birthday present, and which I still wear as a layering piece from time to time.

It pains me to admit, but underneath that jersey I wore a Camelbak. Yup. It's true. Thinking it would offer easier drinking than a bottle, and thinking back to those mountain bike races, it seemed like a natural thing to do. Obviously it would be less of an aerodynamic drag under that jersey. Yikes.

The race started and I held on for a few laps before eventually getting dropped. Mercifully, I avoided getting lapped by a few hundred yards, finishing the entire race, and not even DFL, if memory serves.

I would go on to get dropped with some regularity -- such is the life of a beginning bike racer -- but I did eventually find my way. I don't know how much I learned from that first experience as most of my learning happened while racing in the ECCC (the season opener of which I'll be attending on Saturday), but I never again wore a Camelbak to a road race.