Things have definitely changed.  Not surprisingly, it’s altered how much we ride, where we ride, and who we’re riding with.  In some of our cases, it’s been changing the “why we ride” too.  We’ve all seen planned events that we’ve been training for, canceled, postponed, or altered significantly.  For me, this has definitely effected my motivations to ride.  Usually late April and May are prime training times.  Getting my body and mind back into the right gear, so to speak, and starting to crank up the mileage in preparation for Tour De Bier, Peddler’s Jamboree, Dirty Kanza, Boulivardia, RAGBRAI, and numerous other events.   I’m finding that my past years motivation has been fairly “event” driven, and not simply health minded.  This has left me with a lack of reason to just get out there.  However, I’m also coming to terms with the fact that there are other motivating factors for riding, that also aren’t being met.

When I first got into cycling, I didn’t know a lot of people who also road.  I was  training for events (RAGBRAI), but the group of us that would participate was fairly small, and our ability to get out and ride together was limited.  The majority of my training was solo rides.  Hours were spent with just me, my thoughts, my music, an audio book or two, my bike, and miles and miles of road and trails to cover.  With this history, I’d think a time of social distancing would be perfectly acceptable.  I’ve always been a lone rider training, why not now?  But it hasn’t seem acceptable, and me always being a lone rider isn’t exactly true, is it?  I’ve not ALWAYS been a lone rider, specially over the last few year.

Team Bad Decisions has slowly been growing.   Several years ago, I started keeping an email list of people that I knew who enjoyed cycling, most of whom were friends from other groups.  Some of these people had ridden  RAGBRAI with me.  Others  just wanted to get out occasionally and enjoy a healthy fun Saturday morning from time to time.  I started sending regular emails about upcoming rides, to encourage greater participation.  I started organizing monthly rides to try to give them reasons to get out, enjoy some breakfast, some beer, and some time on the bike with friends.  Then, as the list of upcoming rides began to grow, and the list of people on the email chain grew, the email updates became more of a burden to manage.  I decided a website that listed all of our upcoming rides could be a good way to, not only get information about upcoming rides out, but also share the fun of our past rides.  Right around this time, was when I started going to the Velo Garage Thirsty Thursday rides more regularly.  I met more people, and over the past few years, my solo rides have become more of a rarity than the norm.

What’s the point of this recounting?  Maybe it’s more of me trying to understand my motivations for riding and why I haven’t been riding much since the beginning of the social distancing movement.   There’s a reason I started emailing people regularly, built a web site, launched a slack group, alert people to upcoming rides, and recount the fun that we had on our past rides.  It’s because the social aspect of riding and the cycling community is really what’s been motivating me this past couple years.   Yes I like the sport.  Yes I like the feeling of reaching the top of a hill that you couldn’t see the end to when you started up it.   Yes I enjoy building and maintaining my bike.   What I enjoy more than all of that, however, is talking with friends over beers about  these things afterwards.

When the social distancing rules were put in place, I bought in.  I wanted to maintain distance, I wanted to keep my friends, my family, and their friends and families all safe.  So I limited my exposure.  I didn’t go out for “social distancing” rides that others were setting up.  I didn’t want to organize anything, for fear it would spark a spread, and I didn’t (still don’t) want to be responsible for being any part of the chain of virus transmission that leads to the death of a loved one.  So..  The bikes sat.  I focused on other things, like my torn up yard, and I missed out on some rides, and on saying goodbye to the Timme’s as they left for California for a year.   My apologies Scott and Bryn.  I should have made a better effort to see you off.

So what now?  Well, I’m tired of not seeing my friends.  That’s got to change.  I’ve also noticed an ungodly number of people cycling right now.  This virus may have done more in 2 months to bring people back to or get new people into cycling than all the advocacy groups could do in 5 years.  Still, I think these people are missing out on the important part of cycling; the beers with friends at the end.   Time to start promoting getting out to cycle again.   I think, if done right, it can be done safely and without guilt.

We did it twice this past week!

After a month of working from home, a missed vacation, and tons of anxiety, I had had enough, and I took the day off work Wednesday.   Cait Purinton had been boasting about all the great gravel routes down around Peculiar Missouri, and arranged for several of us to meet up and go for a ride out in the country side.  The original plan was for us to finish our ride at the Peculiar Winery, where the Minsky’s food truck was supposed to be out and available.   Well, there was a mix-up on the dates, and it turned out that the food truck wasn’t going to be there on the 6th, but on the 9th.   There was talk of rescheduling, but I was planning to head out of town for the weekend for mother’s day, and several others were still keen on getting a ride in.   So it was decided to ride both days for any who could make it!

Wednesday, Cait, Nancy, Tara, Treadwell, and I all took to the back roads of Peculiar.   We met up at in the Parking lot of the Country Mart grocery store.  Treadwell was kind enough to head in to the store and pick up a variety pack of boulevard beers and distributed some out to us for the ride.  We also had the fun of listening to a play-by-play as Nancy was listening in to a conference call where she was being told how awesome she and everyone was, how great they were doing, right before they announced furloughs.  We actually started the ride while Nancy was still listening in on her head phones.  Sadly, Nancy said she really needed the ride by the end :(.   So we looked for some gravel therapy.  It took us a couple miles, but we did find our therapist!

There are some absolutely gorgeous country roads to go riding through.  Lined with farms, pastures, tons of dogs (most friendly) long horned steers, bulls, and chickens.   Some of which were actually turkey vultures and not chickens at all.  Tread showed that he was in mid season form already, as he bombed his way down several gravel hills that the rest of us were still grabbing the breaks on, fearful to let the bike get out of control.   Yes..  I know.  Stay loose.  Let the bike roll.  Don’t lock your arms or elbows and you’ll be fine.  Still, it takes a bit to get your confidence up.  We road through a gorgeous valley pasture.  We went past a fun looking little private lake.  Up a couple decent little hills, and started winding or way back towards Peculiar proper after stopping for one of our road beers.

When we got back into town, we made our way over to the Peculiar Winery, which was doing call in, curb side service.  You couldn’t go in to the winery, but you could hang out outside and enjoy some of their fine beverages.   We all decided to try their Strawberry Mango mixed wine slushies.  Missouri wines have always been too sweet for me.  I’m not a huge fan.  But when you embrace the sweetness, add some fruit, and freeze it enough to make some nice little ice-crystals out of it..  Well then I’m a fan.   It was pretty tasty!  We sat around outside and enjoyed the slushies, the company, and the pleasant day in general.  We then road back into town.  Stopped off at Cait’s house and were able to meet her boyfriend Nate, before we made our way back to the grocery store.

That was supposed to be it for me for the week, but plans change.  My trip home for mother’s day got canceled!  Not the best thing actually, but it did free me up to be able to ride Saturday!   So once again we met up in Peculiar.   This time it was Cait, Nancy, Tara, Derek Nelson, Cori Nelson, and me.  I picked up some beers from the store, and we took off.   We followed pretty much the same route, but we made a few variations.   We stopped for beer at a different spot, next to a cow pasture, where Tara tried to prove that she was some sort of cow whisperer.  We also decided to try to add a bit more gravel riding into the route, so we went exploring to the east and past Lake Peculiar park.  There was a good bit of hills on this exploration, and 1 particular Mastiff that decided her spot in the middle of the road was hers, and that we had no business trying to move her from it.  Her owner was nice though and helped try to give us some suggestions on how to get back into town.  We ended up riding back the way we came, as the only other way was going to take us a bit further south than we would have liked.

We got back into Town and, once again, to the Peculiar Winery right around 4:45-5:00ish time frame.   The Minsky’s truck was there, as was pretty much everyone from Peculiar!  The place was packed.   It looked like a tail gate party.   There was a flat bed trailer setup as a stage, and a gentleman was doing a fairly good job singing some  favorites that most everyone knows while playing his guitar.  The Staff at the winery seemed to be feeling the pressure a bit more, because this time we were told our slushy options included strawberry or blueberry, and there would be no mixing.  We all got strawberry and went to stand in line for the Minsky’s pizza truck.  There, in line, we discussed possible new strava segments.  Derek named one of the hills, that had a port-a-potty rental business at the base of it, “Kybo-Kilimanjaro!”   I’ll be creating that strava sgement soon!

Sadly the Minsky’s truck ran out of food while we were in line.   At first they told us that they were waiting to get re-stocked from the store that was a couple miles away.   We decided to stay in line and wait it out.  The weather was nice, and Tara and Cait ran and got more slushies for everyone, but then after a while they came out and let us know that the store was slammed and they weren’t going to be able to get more pizza in.  They were going to pack up and call it a day.   Bummer!  Good for them though.  Nice to see they had some good business.   Guess no-one predicted that many people would be at the winery on Saturday.  So we finished up our slushies and headed back in to town to end the day.

Upcoming Rides

Ok, so I don’t have much for you all right now.  I’ve got to go through the list of events currently posted on the website and do some editing and curating.  I do intend to get a BBBR scheduled soon.  I’ll figure out a way to make sure people can get out, ride, but stay as safe as possible.  It felt great to get out, ride, and more importantly, interact with people again.  I hope you’re willing to join us.  No worries if you want to continue to stay as safe as possible and not join, but when you’re ready…  We’ll be here and ready to ride.  Hope to see you soon!