first day of spring

the speed limit on my road is 35, which these days only amounts to madcap optimism. mud season is often a lot worse than this, and i can't say as other than the road there's much mud season at all. come to think of it, winter never really got here. usually on the first day of spring the skiing is still fine and there are still feet of snow outside my door. this time last year i was still sledding down into snohaus.

yesterday i peed outside, standing up, and although it wasn't as neat an affair as i'd hoped, it was a lot tidier than i'd feared and i managed not to get any on my shoes or clothing, which i count as pretty much a sucessful first run.

i had been noticing a degree of saddle soreness yesterday while at my desk. i always forget that those first few days of riding mean getting into condition where butt meets saddle and even though i ride what are known as "relief saddles",  it takes a little getting used to every season.

if i thought i noticed some saddle soreness at my desk yesterday, it was a whole other kettle of trees when i got on my bike today for a short climb up notch road until you can't go up any farther and a little bit past that and for sure i was NOTICING those contact points.

road condition was kind of a drag, too. mud suck away your energy and even on a flat or a slight downhill you still feel like you're climbing.

and then on the way back down (first day on the blue rocky) i thought i had some brake failure in my front brake, and downhill on a dirt road approaching a T going a little over 30 MPH is kind of a bad time to discover that.

tuns out it just needs a little adjusting and it's fine, but when you're going that fast downhill on dirt coming to the stop sign you need to be thinking about evasive moves and scrubbing that speed and getting your weight back in case there's a sudden need and you're thinking about what you're going to do if you have to go barrelling through the stop sign at the top of the half-blind curve.

in short, you don't have a lot of time to think: "is there really a problem with my front brake, or is it just pulling unusually high?"

by the time you realize there's no actual problem it's kind of anticlimactic.

here's a picture of a crocus i took today.