It rains in Vancouver, it rains a lot. So much so in fact
that they even have a 65 foot tall sculpture of a raindrop downtown.
Yep, that sure is one big raindrop.
Just for some perspective, the yearly total rainfall in
Vancouver is twice that of London.
I’m not whinging though, I love this city and when the rain
clears and the sun hits, there’s no place I’d rather be. It’s like a deal you
do with the city, put up with rain for a few days, then…. Ta dah, what a lovely
view.
So with all this rain on our minds it was difficult to know
when to plan our next long training ride to minimize the chance of getting a soaking.
The weather man had called for rain all weekend so when we woke up on Saturday
morning and it was clear it seemed like a good time to get going.
Wrong! About ten miles in and the heavens opened, worse
still we were only wearing summer gloves and when you add wet hands and a four
degree temperature you get very cold very quickly, by the end of the ride I had
lost all feeling in my hands and they genuinely felt colder than they did when
I swam in Lake Ontario in January.
To add to this I also managed to fall of my bike and bruise
my ribs, a painful injury that could take up to 6 weeks to heal.
This caps off a year of stupid and easily avoidable injuries
for me. In the last twelve months, I have managed to bruise my coccyx whilst
mountain biking (ha! That one even sounds funny ‘I’m sorry, you’ve bruised your
what?') and I also dislocated my finger whilst trying to swing on a rope, this
one was extra specially fun as I had to get a friend to pop it back into place
for me whilst lots of small fish were trying to eat my feet. If you’ve never
heard the pop of a freshly dislocated finger going back into its socket, it’s a
pretty sweet sound I can tell you.
On the plus side, all the training is definitely paying off,
was feeling much stronger on the climbs and our pace was a lot faster.
On the last third of the ride I had a near miss when an old
geezer nearly plowed into the side of me at a roundabout; he missed my back wheel
by about a centimetre.
So one thirty mile ride and one accident, a few bruised
ribs, some scrapes and scratches, numb hands from the cold and a near miss with
a car. Kinda makes me wonder what a 2,000 mile ride will have to throw at me. I
look forward to finding out.
Dave
