All dressed up

I’m still getting used to the air, not just its thinness, but the crisp, dry mountain smell that greets me each morning when I open kitchen door to pump up the tires and look over the bike before a ride.  The air is bracing, the sun is out and I’m looking forward to a good, hard ride with my new friends on the Saturday morning training ride.

I slide through the back streets and main street of Manitou.  The tourists are still snoozing and few locals are getting things ready for a day of business on Manitou Avenue.  Just past the cop shop, I turn left and take the little jog over to El Paso.  El Paso runs parallel to Manitou, past bed and breakfast establishments and older estates looking south over the canyon.  It’ an easy downhill spin.  A climb past 31st and then dodging the cars going to the market in Old Colorado City across from their Carnegie Library.

At Walnut, the road is going to end, a quick right and left and I’m on the main drag of Colorado Ave, pointed at Downtown Colorado Springs, warmed up and raring to go.  Perhaps this week I’ll play more on the front, take a pull or two and sprint for the at hill climb…

Road Closed Ahead.  Tejon is closed?  Then I remember, the big military parade today.  I turn a block earlier and then right on Bijou to the Starbucks.  Fifteen minutes early and not much to do but sit and watch the preparations with the patriotic folks on the street.  A young black guy, street person through and through, “You OK?”  Yep.  “No problem?”  I don’t think so.  An older woman, to no one in particular, “My husband is off to Afghanistan for his eighth tour.” Uh-huh.  “If we don’t keep ‘em out of here, then they’ll be hanging jews from the lamp posts.”  Ok, that’s enough.  I move away from my conversation partners and sidle up to another rider sitting at an outdoor table.  Ahh, my tribe.

Byron, a new student at UCCS and transplant from East Lansing, pulls up.  Greetings.  Soon we have a posse of about 25 riders wondering how we’ll get to our route, on the other side of the parade route.  The parade starts at precisely 10am; we lollygag for a few more minutes and then head back west a block to try to ride around the start. 

Bump, pause, bump.  I feel the roughness of Bijou under my bum.  Either the rear tire is really over inflated, or I have a flat.  I look down; a flat.  The group rides away and I prop the bike up on bench.  It’s game over.  I change the flat and ride back up Colorado Ave, Pikes Peak Ave, El Paso Ave and the back way to Manitou. 

Instead of high speed jockeying for position this week at the front of the pack, I trade ideas for cooking zucchini with an older woman coming back from the Old Colorado City market.  Funny how these things work.