It didn’t seem that pretty at the time. It felt cold, I felt slow, and we were thinking about how our bikes were getting trashed in the muck. It had been a horribly-slow & tough ride up the hill for me; Karen and Kevin were doing a number on me just up through the park, and I was hoping, thinking, maybe I’d find my legs once onto Kings. That happens fairly often. But not today. A short time after being dropped JeffZ came flying by. I was thinking, how long are they going to have to wait for me at the top today?

I did feel a bit better once up on Skyline but I really wasn’t appreciating how pretty it was until I saw the photo I took, the one at the top of this post. It’s not the normal pretty cycling scene; but it captures something a bit different from the norm. Maybe something you don’t appreciate at the time; you’re focusing on it being 36 degrees, it’s wet, you’re on your nice bike, not your rain bike with disc brakes and everything’s getting kind of trashed. But maybe this is the reason why, at the end of the ride, you feel pretty good about having been out there. You weren’t able to process how pretty it was because you were focusing on the wrong things. But it was there, right in front of you, and on some level, it affected you.