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A bad day is relative

I'm going to tell you all a terrible story.

Sometime in December 2003 I went for a ride in the rain with a friend. I was pretty new to winter cycling. I was training for my first Ironman, which was the following March, so I had no choice but to ride through the worst weather. Which in San Francisco, I admit, isn't really that bad.

On this particular ride I was wearing just a wind breaker over my bike jersey and arm warmers, and a cold rain started to fall. My clothes quickly soaked through. We had stopped at a restroom about 25 or 30 miles from home when I realized my teeth were chattering so hard I couldn't hold my mouth shut. Hello, hypothermia. We decided to cut our ride short, turned around, stopped at a coffee shop to warm up, then headed back into the cold toward home. We had no choice. Neither of us had a credit card and neither of our husbands would have been able to pick us up.

Utterly miserable, we made it back to the Golden Gate Bridge to find that the bridge bike path was closed. This was highly unusual for mid-day on a weekend, but whatever, we were so glad to be back in the city that we walked our bikes across to the other side and rode down the empty pedestrian sidewalk.

Then we realized why the bike side of the bridge was closed. There was a jumper hanging off the railing. Several highway patrol officers were trying to talk the person off the ledge.

(We never found out what happened -- the bridge authority does not make such information public. The Chronicle ran an extended feature on bridge suicides last year.)

Anyway, I was reminded of that horrible ride yesterday. Yesterday we rode in relentless rain and wind. It was just silly. We rode 40 miles instead of our planned 60, and it took us over 3 hours. Ridiculous. The rain felt like needles on the descents, and on the climbs our glasses fogged up so much as to be useless. We were covered head to toe in road grime.

But at the same time, we were warm and fairly comfortable -- I now have proper rain gear -- and the three of us agreed that there was something fun about being out in absurd weather. We were doing something that the vast majority of people would never choose to do, and we felt pretty smug about it.

Later on Dave and I went out to dinner and sat in a candlelit covered patio. We were about ten feet inside the edge of the roof, totally dry, but when the wind blew we'd feel a few little teensy drips of water blowing our way. We asked to move over one table to get away from the rain. Wimps.

January 29, 2006 4:15 PM