Rodentathon 1

Last Sunday was a very pleasant spring day which drew out hordes of RRs.

Some pics from my crappy cell phone camera...



RRs winching themselves up the southern face of the RR KOM. At one point I counted at least 9 at one time on this ~0.5 mi climb. The steeper bits at the beginning and end aren't visible in this picture.



RRs at the top.



RRs were swarming the roads like rodents at a KFC/Taco Bell.

At the start of a long popular climb, we stopped to see if other riders we were to meet were still waiting for us. Meanwhile, a steady stream of RRs made their way up the climb. Then an aggressive-looking RR zoomed past. He had this intense "eye-of-the-tiger" expression.



My guess was that he was hell bent on catching the lesser RRs up the road. I wanted to get going so we could catch this guy and watch his world crumble around him as he tried to latch onto us and failed. However, I didn't say anything because it's a long climb and I knew we'd probably catch him in short order.

We caught him quickly and our relative speed was such that we were several bike lengths ahead of him before he could even react. I saw him dig deep to try to match our speed but instead he kept going backwards.

It must have been traumatic to for the RR to have been mowing down one lesser RR after another only to other riders blast past him at a much higher speed. On the matter of perspective, don't faster riders zoom past me? After all, there's always someone faster. Well, in all the years riding on that climb, I haven't met them yet. It's sad, really, since I'm not that fast. Whenever I think about this, I recall a particular scene from Futurama:

Bender: "You guys realize you live in a sewer, right?"
Dwayne: "Perhaps. But perhaps your civilization is merely the sewer of an even greater society above you!"
Leela: "No. We're on the top."
Fry: "Daylight and everything."
Dwayne: "Oh."

This guy was wearing a Triple Bypass jersey. For some reason, RRs wearing that particular year's jersey are very aggressive. This behavior is so common that RRs wearing that jersey deserver their own classification ("TBP RRs"). Perhaps the TBP jerseys from that year leech testosterone into people's skin.

Something like this:



Whenever I see someone wearing that jersey, I expect him to want to thunderdome.

The Triple Bypass is considered the RR world championships.

Fool me twice...

About two weekends after my encounter with SNOD1...

It was another warm Saturday at 71°F so riders were out in droves. It was quite windy though, probably 3.5/5 on my wind scale. As usual, I felt weak after the previous day's L4 workout. So there were potentially a lot of RRs but not that much ammunition.

On warm weekends, I'm often under attack before I even ride a single mile. My route always involves crossing a 4-lane road and getting onto a peripheral bike path. Then I turn onto the main bike path that takes me to the park I often ride at and in turn into the mountains. However, on that Saturday I did not even cross the road before I encountered some RR that wanted to thunderdome.

As I was waiting for gaps in vehicular traffic so I could cross from the south to the north side of the road, an RR rode down the path from the west. I crossed the road the same time he crossed in front of me. He knew I'd likely be getting on the path behind him so he got out of the saddle and hammered. He was an odd-looking kid with an ungainly position on the bike. More interestingly, he was adorned from head to toe with "Dopers Suck" paraphernalia--cap, socks, maybe even a jersey. His bike was plastered with their decals in case there was any ambiguity regarding his position on doping. He flailed away on his bike for awhile then faded dramatically, perhaps thinking I was far behind him or perhaps because he was out of shape. I zoomed past him and that was that. Perhaps he needs to dope.


Yes, I was already under siege only 2.5 minutes into my ride.

Near the end of my ride, I was heading towards the west face of the RR KOM. A couple came down a side road riding slowly. I passed them riding leisurely in L2. The man was almost a clone of SNOD1 (beard, graying hair, and clydesdale build). It was basically the same scenario as before. Because SNOD2 was with a woman, riding slowly, did not react when I cruised past them, and allowed a sizable gap to open, I did not sense any malevolence. However, after my experience with SNOD1, I was not going to be lulled into a false sense of security so easily.

Sure enough, as I approached the top of the hill, SNOD2 had left his companion and was out-of-the-saddle charging up the hill after me. I got out of the saddle as well and with a maniacal expression on his face, he dug deeper. Unfortunately for him, victory could only be achieved with a surprise attack and I easily held off his charge.



When I hit the top, I did a victory salute to rub it in. I hope he wasn't too far back that he didn't see it and that his female companion also wasn't too far back to witness the destruction of his masculinity. A motorist coming up the hill in the opposite direction appeared to be amused by the victory salute.

The whole scenario was so similar to the SNOD1 episode that I wondered if they were actually the same person. The odds of that happening are quite slim though.