No Ride-y...

This sucks. Bad weather here. No riding. Depressed.

Feel free to leave a comment bitching about how the weather in your neighborhood is screwing up your ride/training plan, whatever.

Kinda puts me in mind of the worst rides I've ever had. I always say "a bad day on the bike is better than (doing whatever.) But it's really not. You can say something like that on an epic ride, where it's very tough, painful, awful but still good. Occasionally though, there's a day when your ride is so filled with suffering and so lacking in redeeming value, that you'd do about anything to have it finished. Unfortunately, you're usually 15 miles out when you come to that realization. Yep, there's some days I'd rather empty the friggin' cat litter box than have a bad ride (and the cat poop gives me the dry heaves, so that tells you how bad the ride has to be, before I cry uncle).

Worst rides - rides nastier than emptying the cat box - include a 5 flat day, and a ride in bitter cold when I had such a bad asthma attack, I thought I was going to die. I had a seven flat day that was on a trajectory to be worse than either, which halfway ended with me in a bike shop buying new tires. That sucked, but I rounded out the day with some craft brews and chili, and in between I ambled into a pretty cool local bike shop, so it wasn't unpleasant on the balance, I got my epic ride in Howard County in, and the pleasantness at the end of the day sort of helped the ride rally out of the "hell" category, and into the merely "more interesting than I care for" category.

The other wicked flat day, the five flat day, ended with me hoofing it up the road toward home. A local racer - Jay Murphy - stopped and gave me a ride the last mile or two, but the two hours prior to that were sheer suckage. Jay is buddies with Jon, my LBS guy, and we know a lot of the same people, so it was five pleasant minutes after a couple very bad hours, but I wouldn't do the ride over again just to have five good minutes. No offense Jay - it was a really shitty ride. The company didn't make up for things like having to tie knots in my blasted apart tube, re=insert it in the tire, inflate it, and ride along going ca-lump, ca-lump, ca-lump, breaking off a too-short stem on my aero rim, all that jazz.

On the asthma near-death ride, I didn't even have that little bit of a bright spot. In fact, as I coughed up blood and made gurgling noises - still keeping up a good 90 RPM spin mind you - if you had offered me the opportunity to clean a hundred of the foulest cats' litter boxes all day long for weeks on end in exchange for getting that ride over with, I might have done taken you up on it. It was that bad. Then when I finished up my feet were damn near frostbite, and I was hypothermic for hours, and still had to drive home. That wasn't even really good for a story, because the upshot of the ride was "I was really cold and could have died." That's about as interesting as getting locked in the potato section freezer at the grocery - tragic maybe, but not interesting at all.

Those are my epic hell rides, the only two I can think of right now I'd trade in, in favor of just not riding that day.

You got any good hell ride stories like that? Share 'em in comments or shoot me a link and I'll link to your sad tale.

Meanwhile... pray for a bit of global warming to get this cold weather to lift. It's killing me.