R.M. Dolin, December 4, 2023
Snow’s mostly melted, at least enough to get my bike back on the road. The steady sun’s welcoming in the way tired bones yearn to relive times when suffering seemed so essential. Belgium lies beyond the unseen edge of my mountainous horizon even as Roubaix’s “Hell of the North,” challenges me to train past my planned fifty kilometer ride, allowed to stop only because my feet are cold and hands went numb long before that last descent. I’m learning to smile again. . . Just as strange something like that is tied to a bike ride as it is weirdly impossible to explain how suffering up grueling climbs only to endure the casting cold of downhill coasts frees me from life’s constraints keeping me wrapped in the same perpetual loop as the well worn chain around my bicycle gears.
