A spill in the rain

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