Aqua-biking??

OK, time to break the mold a little, maybe a lot.  Today I would like to take a moment and HIGHLY recommend riding your bike in the heaviest most turbulent rainstorm you can get your weatherman to promise.  Seriously!  Will this help you get ready for a bike race?  Perhaps, marginally.  Is this part of a recommended training plan I found somewhere, nope.  Does the rain help do some magic breathing technique or something?  Not in the slightest.  So why do it?  Because it is incredible fun!!  I stumbled over this fact completely by accident yesterday.

It was a normal Sunday mostly.  Hot and humid.  My training program called for a 3 hour bike and a 30min run.  Which is fairly normal for a weekend workout at this point.  Although, 3 hours is still a long haul make no mistake!  So around 1pm I strapped on the old kickers, jumped on my trusty metallic steed, and kicked it into medium gear.  17+ mph all the way baby!  This is my target speed for the bike because it get's me off the bike with a little under 8 hours to run the marathon.  Anyway, I head off without checking the weather of course, since I am far too impulsive to do anything that looks too much like planning!  So anybody who is in the greater Rochester area knows, that about 2:15 on Sunday, we had a thunderstorm that broke wind speed and rainfall records!  Now any normal person would have called for a ride to be sure, I even found a little spot, homeless style, under an overpass that was fairly dry.  However, by that point I was already completely soaked anyway, and more importantly, I am not normal.

Photo from under bridge.  The blurry is from the insane wind.  The little spout of water
at the top of the pic is the drainage from the roadway above.

I keep riding, heading down the Erie canal bike path at breakneck speeds, with the wind at my back, having literally a blast!  The water under the tires got as much as 6 inches deep in some spots where the rain had fully overflowed the easements and was coursing over the top of the path, branches were falling, little fruit like things falling from trees, what looked like mini crab apples, hit me once or twice!  I had to keep dodging bits of debris that were covering the path, it was amazingly great fun.  At the height of the storm with the wind behind me, I looked down at my speed while riding up a small hill and saw the number 28mph.  The wind really does affect your speed haha.

Ahhhh ADVENTURE!!!  Like food for your soul!  I turned the bike around and started riding back, facing the wind now, and ofcours had a hard time riding over 10mph, and even then the rain felt like little icy needles.  Which is fine, because at this point I am so high on endorphin's and adrenaline nothing could have bummed me out!  Thunder and lightning are normal to my ears, but about half way back on the return trip I heard a different kind of crash, familiar to my ears from back on the farm.  And about 50 yards up the trail, POW tree.

Tree.  Yes.  Dumbfounded for nearly a minute when I saw this fall, all I could think of was the word ... Tree

After thanking God for this awesome ride, and the fact that I am not dead, or pinned under a tree, or any other thing involving the tree.  I take a picture to remember the size of the blunt objects nature uses, and kept riding.  The rest of the ride was rather uneventful, except for the face plant I did in the pavement.  I seem to remember some lesson or something about bike tires not working very well in the mud, no matter.  It's my first wipe out ever, so I feel pretty lucky.  After my short but memorable make out session with the ground, it's back on the bike and heading home.



After all this, I really did have a unbelievable blast riding in the rain.  My workout went by in a flash, I worked harder than usual and barely noticed.  The ride will be a great story for ages to come and a happy memory for ages more.  I only wish I had some chums to share the madness with!  A few select people come to mind almost instantly, and if your one of them, you know who you are and your a stud!

Seriously though, you want some good medicine?  You want to feel great and love life again?  Go have an adventure, go ride in the rain, go hike somewhere you've never been before and spend the night out there.  Go do something totally out of the ordinary and lean on God to pull you through.  Then call me and tell me the story because I LOVE stories like that!  You better believe this will be fresh in my mind and one of the stories I tell while icing my entire body at the finish line in Cozumel!

Don't hate the hardships in life, love them while you overcome them.  Your going to be telling stories about them for ages, you might as well enjoy them while they last.