This week in Colorado, the wind gods have not been happy and they’ve been content to bash Front Range cyclists with plenty of howling gusts.  This morning I was out on a ride in 25 mph winds with gusts as high as 36 mph.  I looked for every way I could to tuck myself out of the wind, hide near roadside scrub, take a longer route to get a little more tailwind for a few precious minutes.  But then, somewhere around 40 miles into the ride my mind shifted back to my childhood growing up on Long Island.  We were always out on the water and the wind was everything.  We learned to look for the slightest indication of onshore or offshore breezes; ripples on the flats, whispy clouds, the blowing beach grasses.  They became a natural part of life for me.  The wind was in your soul and you never had to think about it, you just naturally knew where it was coming from and how you could exploit it.

Then my thoughts came back to cycling in Colorado.  I think that sailor deep down inside me is still there.  Now, instead of looking for those old familiar ocean signals, I look for how the prairie grasses are moving, how those little landscape and utility marker flags are flapping, how the clouds are blowing off the mountain tops.  And of course once I know where the wind is coming from, I have to work to shelter myself from it or find a way to exploit it.  So I guess there is a bit of the son of the sailor in all of us who ride out on the roads with no ocean in sight.  It makes me think of the movie Wind with Matthew Modine and of course the old Jimmy Buffett song Son of a Sailor…which was stuck in my head for most of my ride today, but that’s a topic for another post.

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