Distracted by snot

Being outside in the cold always leads to moments requiring distractions. While riding today, I made the mistake of wearing a stupid hat with both a brim and an ineffective ear band--if I tilted the hat back to keep the brim from obstructing my vision, the band would scrunch up and expose my ears. If I pulled the hat forward to smooth out the ear band and cover my lobes, the hat's brim sagged down in front of my eyes, making me hold back on descents and generally keep my speed in check. It was quite the distraction from the chilly air.

I needed a more powerful distraction at the end of the ride. Back at the shop, I searched my soul in a quiet agony while the nerve endings in the fingers of my left hand thawed out. I did my best to discretely blink back tears while trying to carry on a conversation with Bowman about Master's Cyclocross Worlds, in Louisville, Kentucky. My hands remained swollen for hours afterward.

On Sunday, I searched my soul on a chilly Derby. Only a handful of riders came out, riding in temperatures around 18-degrees when I left my house, and had only climbed into the mid-20s by the time I got home. After we'd completed the roll out, and stopped to ensure that our collective pipes weren't yet frozen, we joked about how today was the day that we weren't going to go hard on the way back to T-Town.

I was down, but someone got it in their head that this was the Derby, and we had to go hard. So we went fast. Here's the thing, though, it's much harder to go hard in the cold than in warm weather. Although the overall Derby took 12 minutes longer than it had the week before, it was much, much harder. On such a difficult ride, I often start looking for any distraction to keep my mind off the pain.

Yesterday, I got distracted by snot. For physiological reason that I don't understand, cold breads snot like heat and humidity bread sweat. Everyone on these cold-ass rides drips, spits, and blows prodigious snot--there's some streaked across my sunglasses, and one friend even posted a photo a truly epic snotsicle* on facebook -- that thing had to be a good six inches long at the end of his 70-mile ride. Our collective snot production, impressive as it may be, is also kind of gross.

In particular, I was thinking about how I really wasn't having any fun at all after we'd crested Topton hill and were headed toward the left turn onto Chestnut, when another rider turned his head to the right, reached across his face with his right hand to shut his left nostril, and then exhaled sharply, sending a perfectly clear, viscous glob hurtling down toward the pavement. Sheltered from the wind by his body, the glob hurtled toward the ground ... until his furiously spinning foot rose on the upward half of the stoke, catching the flying goo on the outside of his booty.

There it hung precariously, half stuck on his foot, half dangling in space, changing its shape and orientation at each stage of the pedal's rotation. I sat in behind, mesmerized by the tissue filler. Then we reached the turn, entering the series of rollers that mark the Derby's final kilometers. I lost track of the snot, but found plenty of other distractions from the cold as the pain and pace increased.

*Brad denies that it was snot