Oh, how the mind wanders when you’re out roaming around on your bike!
These mindless questions linger for each thought that rises from the cosmos: Do these details really matter to you, or do these details make you wonder what’s really the matter with you?
For me, it’s typically the latter.
Take for instance a recent ride on a searing hot morning. The scorching sun drenched most of the dirty and dusty logging road, although a slim band of shade skirted the edge of the road where the smaller Lodgepole Pines hugged the incline.
I chugged blissfully up the climb feeling quite proud of my clever move to stay cooler by finding the shade even if I was on the left side of the road. That’s when my noggin started cookin’, as in heating up, not necessarily brainstorming, at least yet.
Hmmm.
As the sweat began to pour my brain searched for answers to this nagging question: Why is my head so frickin’ hot while riding in the shade?
Shaking the sweat off I glanced to my shadow and realized that all but my head was shaded. No wonder!
No, I actually paused to wonder how much thought actually went into my genius shade concept, and whether or not it was worth the energy since I certainly hadn’t put enough thought into it since my head was boiling not just from the sun but from thinking too much about that stuff that really doesn’t matter.
This week’s question: What bizarro thoughts have run through your head on a ride?
Mine typically run to odd and unsolvable math problems, like how many grains of sand have touched my tire since I left home, or how many pedal strokes I’ve made in my life. I’ll try to come up with a reasonable calculation for an estimate, then try to do that math in my head, which goes about as well as you’d guess. How many leaves does the average tree have?
Generally a long ride chases all the random thoughts out of my head. That clean slate feeling at the end of a ride is great.