My enduring hopes for a 200 mile day on day one of the DANROPES ride are fading fast. Though the wind blows from some version of the west 80%+ of the time in eastern Colorado and western Kansas, the forecast for the next several days is for some version of an east wind.
I’d been having wonderful dreams of clipping along with a nice tailwind at 20+ mph for the first few hundred miles, and I’m watching those dreams blow away I think. Looks like our first couple of days out we’ll be battling a headwind, so making 100 miles a day is going to be work I think. Those training days in the wind will pay off after all.
But you never know – the wind’s like that isn’t it? There’s nothing personal in it – just the random chance and whim of weather patterns. It’s so easy to think of it personally – that the wind is doing something to me – when in fact I’m dropping myself onto a piece of ground that has weather happening around it, and the weather doesn’t care one little twit about me and which way I point my bike.
It’s fun to see this little thing build in my tiny little brain – this reshaping of the universe around me riding my bike over the next 8 or 9 days. I find my little brain having fun talking about the “wind godsâ€, and what the wind is going to do to me. As we have for thousands of years, I am this little human that suddenly wants to define the cosmos and the gods around myself, rather than letting myself move through the moments that the cosmos lays in front of me.
So mile by mile over the next 8 or 9 days, I’ll listen closely to the wind, and see what I hear.
I hope it whispers quietly from behind my ear, and doesn’t blast into the front of my ear.
But of course, I’ll continue to wonder what I did to piss the wind gods off…
