Colonial Triangle Ride - Day 1 - Wind

On every tour a little wind must blow. Considering how this trip started, it would be more appropriate to say "...a lot of wind must blow." On Friday morning, I finished packing my bike and was ready to head out around 8:30 AM.I faced a 20 mile ride to Yorktown, all of which was directly into a very stiff wind. When you couple the facts that my bike was completely loaded down, the panniers were sticking out a mile and I was sitting relatively straight up, the going was slow to say the least. If it wasn't for the traffic buzzing by, I probably would have adopted the sailing maneuver of tacking.

I was exerting an appreciable amount of energy but was barely able to maintain 10 mph. Tooling along at a snails pace gave me plenty of time to think and equate this ride to real life. Difficulties are a veritable part of life. We cannot escape them. They blow into our lives without warning. They inflict pain and retard our progress. What are we to do? If we tried to shelter ourselves from them, our world would become very small indeed. If we turned around every time we encountered them, we would never get to where we need to go. In real life, just like in bike riding, no matter how steep the road, no matter how hard the wind blows, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how tired you are, the only option is to put your head down and keep pedaling.