Good Ride In The Winter

Every November Sean used to ask me what I wanted for Christmas.

Every year I would tell him that I wanted bike gloves.

Bicycle gloves.

Full fingered gloves - always.

Insulated or not.

But bike gloves.

He used to roll his eyes, shake his head, implore me to tell him something other than gloves, but gloves were what I always needed.

I was rough on them.

And so every Christmas I would open a package from my oldest boy and find a pair of gloves.

The ones above are the last pair he ever bought me.

Pearl Izumi, full fingered gloves, insulated for cold weather bike riding................

I snapped these pictures last weekend during a bike ride down by Buffalo Bill Reservoir...................

When we first moved out the South Fork the large metal building on the property was full.

Full of boxes and tools and other endless things that belonged in a garage, a yard, a house.

It was a mess.

Filled with all the things we hurriedly crammed into two storage units in Idaho in the fall of 2017.

Somehow my bike got buried deep in the back of the metal building and it took months before we finally were able to dig it out.

In the meantime I hiked and worked out on my spin bike, patiently waiting for my Gary Fisher to escape the crammed confines of our metal building.

Recently (and finally) it saw the light of day.

I didn't bike far. 

It was sunny but also very cold, and so I headed from the house down to the lake (about two miles), picked up a narrow and winding trail that took me from one public entrance to the lake to the second, and then biked another couple of miles home.

It was only a short ride.

 But it was a good ride......................

A good ride in the winter is something you quietly put adjacent to your heart; an unspoken victory filed away for times of weakness and need, to be pulled out when you require a reminder of what you are capable of................Tom Babin, Frostbike: The Joy, Pain and Numbness of Winter Cycling