Down and Up in Early November

What's different about November is that it's really fall, as in: wind, rain, and low temperatures. I had a rough time commuting last week thanks to these conditions combining a lot of the time. I got rained on twice (fortunately both days on the way home), had to battle gusty winds, and really needed the winter shoes, the jacket, and my gloves--not to mention my lights at the end of the day. I remember writing back in April and May how the commutes were getting so easy that they hardly felt like the real thing any more. Well, this past week I met the real thing again and I'm still adjusting psychologically. I'm still seeing a few other backpack-racing bike-commuters, but sightings are getting to be few and far between. Riding to work is going to be a long, hard slog on most days. Not always, as became clear this morning, on the Sunday ride. The weather had begun to calm down late yesterday afternoon, and last night was calm, clear, and cool. There was some fog around this morning, but in a lot of places the skies were blue. My Whisper Power group has switched to mountain bikes, but I'm dissenting and sticking to the (winter) road bike. It's not that I hate dirt riding so much (although I'd be perfectly happy never to mess with it), it's more that the route follows paths where you run into a lot of (dog) walkers, runners, and such. Meanwhile, we're rumbling through at a speed that's considerably higher than what the other people are doing, and this makes for interactions that from the walkers' side are grudgingly polite at best, and which often cross over into plain resentment and sometimes willful obstruction. Fast cyclists, road or dirt, are not popular in this country, and one can see why. In many places there just isn't enough room. Some racing types nonetheless act as if they're in the middle of some kind of very important race. But even if you're well-behaved you can easily scare people. Yesterday I read about a conflict over a planned bike path outside of Haarlem, where the walker/hiking community objects for exactly these reasons: cyclists ruin it for the rest of us in these pretty areas. It's the same on the road on nice weekend afternoons: you really can't expect to go for a careless, fast training ride at those times--too many other people on the bike paths and roads. On those days, it's best to be done with your ride by 11am or so. It's not that by riding the road bike where my friends take to the trails that I think I can fix this, or even that I think cyclists do not belong on these trails. As one of the members of the group said during our coffee stop (where I did meet up with the rest): we're mostly on bike paths, so we should not feel guilty or anything. It's that I just don't need this tension when I'm supposed to be enjoying myself, supposed to be riding around relatively carelessly. So I rode the biggest part of today's ride by myself, roughly tracing the off-road route on the perimeter on paved roads. It certainly was a good day for a road ride, in spite of the 2 degrees Celsius I saw indicated somewhere. Let's hope these kinds of days come around from time to time during the week also, because I'm not in the true hard-man mindset yet.