Dressed in Fog

You know I'm feeling excited about cycling when I look at my busy schedule for the next day and decide to wake up early to ride. I'm definitely a dinner after sunset, late to bed, late to rise kinda gal but if I wanted to get in a ride today it had to be early. So, at 6:20 I was up, ate breakfast, walked Dexter and by 7:30 I was on my way to Tabor.

It was cold! Very, very cold. People were scraping the frost off their cars and my fingers, which were exposed because I just had my cycling gloves on, were freezing. The combination of the 32 degree air and the wind from cycling had me stuffing one hand at a time under my jacket to warm on my belly as I rode to Tabor.

As soon as I started climbing, my hands felt toasty warm. High heart rate, no wind...if I had gloves on I would have been stripping them off. The park is closed to cars on Wednesdays which meant that for the first time since before RAGBRAI, I listened to my MP3 player. I decided to just listen to my songs starting with A and pedaled up the mountain.

The whole top half of the mountain was like riding in a cloud. I couldn't see a view at all...it was all just dressed in fog. There is a special kind of quiet that comes when there is that much fog and it was a peaceful thing to ride in the cloud, listening to Bjork and thinking about my very close trip to Iceland.

There was hardly anyone else out this morning, just some walkers and one other cyclist that I saw. I pedaled happy through my three climbs, took out my earbuds, and then descended down for the cold (oh so cold!) ride home.

As soon as I got home I iced my back for 10 minutes which was hard to do because I was freezing then jumped into a HOT shower to defrost and get ready for my day.