"My Eyes Were Watering."

I'm glad it's a rest day tomorrow. It feels like a framing nail was shot into each of my thighs and just left there. The lungs are okay, but the legs are sore and the back is tender. Core strength work tomorrow, maybe a short easy spin, and lots of rest.

Today's three hours of riding, broken into two chunks and truncated by a little bit, was accomplished partly in the rain. Sean doomed us when he said, "You know it's only going to spit just a little bit." Suffice to say, the roads were quite wet. Passing through Lanham, we suddenly hit bone dry pavement. "There it is... the exact spot where the weather changes." I wish he hadn't said that because a half mile later we were getting rained on again, as a direct result of his foolhardy comments about the weather. Like Fight Club and buying stuff from a rival to your own local bike shop, the first rule about the weather is you don't talk about the weather.

The problem with rain, of course, is not that it makes you wet and cold, though it did both those things to me today. Nor is it the Soggyass Syndrome, which turns even the finest of Italian chamoises into a cold piece of stretchy sandpaper. It's Teh Stink.

Following the ride, I attempted to burn myself in the showers at the office gym. I figured if I went straight from shivering to first degree burns, the cold wouldn't be as noticeable. Upon returning to my office, I had to hang up my jersey and shorts, and put my socks and gloves on the windowsill to dry. I knew I stunk.

Teh Stink is always latent in any bike clothes over a certain age, in most instances any time you've worn the piece at least twice. Teh Stink does not leave the clothes ever, sticking to them like Angelina Jolie sticks to Crazy. You can hide Teh Stink for a little while with clever soakings in OxyClean, but even Zombie Billy Mays can't kill Teh Stink, and its big brother, Teh Stench.

There's different types of Teh Stink. There's a mild Stink you get from winter riding - if you are sweating enough to make your stuff really nasty in the winter, you will get frostbite and quit biking before you wreck your clothes. Then there's mild Spring and Fall Teh Stink. It's the ordinary Stink, it's putrid enough alright, but it isn't enough to be painfully nasty. Then there's what you get from Summer riding - Teh Summer Stink. It's nasty, combining a lot of salt, that bad shrimp you ate last Thursday, some flop sweat from some stupid office park circuit race you hated doing, and the gusher of fluids that poured out of you on that 95 degree day when some idiot (you) had the idea to do hill repeats.

But by far the worst stench you can get, is the Summer Mountain Biking Stink. Dead air, 4 MPH up a steep hill, standing climb, max effort, high humidity, the mosquitoes biting your neck, rode-through-some-dung-a-while-back-crash-in-the-dust stench. Nothing compares to the sheer volume of sweat you get mountain biking, and nothing compares to what your jersey smells like within 30 minutes of you taking it off.

Goodness knows, I've tried different ways to kill the Summer MTB Stench. I've tried what everybody else does, which is to wad that shit up in the kit bag and leave it to fester for a week, hoping either that the bacteria will eat the smell, or that the jersey itself will sublimate and go directly from a solid form, into a vapor. I've tried leaving it in the wash basket, in the hopes that it will be encouraged to be less stinky by the pristine road kit around it. I've tried drying it, thinking that if I wrung it out and let it dry, that the stiff, upright jersey would discourage Teh Stink. I've even tried soaking it in various detergents and Oxy Clean. Nothing works.

And sadly, rain only turbocharges Teh Stink, and when it hits a jersey that has suffered from Teh Mountain Bike Stink, you get... TEH STENCH.

So today I'm sitting in my office at 3:00 PM, thinking about an arcane policy question and leaving work at the same time, when a very nice lady I work with, a good friend, stops by for just a minute. "No offense," she says. "But my frickin' eyes were watering this morning. I'm glad you're airing your stuff out, but it makes your whole office stink and I can't come in right now."

She'd noticed Teh Stench. In fact, it appears to have stepped out of the office for a minute, and bludgeoned her. Now I felt the sting of her reproach. But what to say?

I mean, there's not even any intelligible way to respond to that.

Well, except one.

"Guess I'll leave early then. It probably doesn't smell as bad when my kit is on my back, and I'm not here."

She didn't disagree, so maybe the real remedy to Teh Stench is to just never stop riding.

That, or ride naked. Six of one, half dozen the other.

The Case for Bro's Before Ho's