I guess I am an avid cyclist. I want to resist framing myself that way so that I don’t have to try and live up to my own expectations of what that should mean, but I think that ship has sailed. I bike a lot, and I enjoy it.

 

As I biked home from a family dinner tonight, it was raining. Nothing major, mind you, it was positively pleasant, but it reminded me of a time at the end of the season last year when I biked through one of the largest thunderstorms I have ever seen. Granted, it may have felt like the largest only because I was biking through it and not watching it through a window, but that distinction is nearly meaningless experientially, so we’ll call it the largest.

I was on my normal route through snail lake park when the thunder started.

It was unbelievable.

Almost immediately I could see nothing. The rain was so heavy that I had to take my glasses off and put them in my pack so that I could even make progress. The water hurt just enough to be exhilarating. Biking up to the top of a hill next to Snail Lake, I was confronted with a huge lightning strike followed immediately by thunder, which was my first time thinking that what I was doing might actually be a really bad idea.

I did it anyway.

Riding through that deluge and wind and lightning and thunder was one of the best things I have ever done. The adrenaline rush was like drinking a cold glass of water on a hot day. I felt like I was moving as fast as a train even though I was probably doing 14MPH max.

As you can maybe see from the image above, I got out of the storm completely just south of lake Owasso. OF COURSE, there was a ridiculously huge rainbow stretching all the way from Shoreview to downtown St Paul. It was as if the planet was giving me a big thumbs up.

Not sure I would do it again, it was a bit idiotic. I dunno, I’m sure it falls into the category of things that you do once and are never the same after that. Trying to catch that lightning in a bottle (halfway literally) would probably just lead me to getting really wet and disappointed in the lack of rainbows.

[adam]