Summer Salvation
The light streams in through the open crack in your bedroom window. You can hear the birdsong – the dawn chorus is in full swing. It’s only just past 5.00am and there’s over an hour until your alarm is set to buzz. A few months ago, the unscheduled early start would have made you grumpily turn over hoping for more sleep, to wait for the world to brighten and warm. Today, the world is already awake, and you feel alive from the moment you open your eyes.
With the changing of the clocks a few weeks, it’s like someone turned the heating on. All of a sudden, the world is lighter, the temperatures warmer, and the world is more vivid and vibrant. You feel a totally different person – both off the bike, and even moreso on the bike. In your last few rides, the legs have felt energised, as excited by the turn of the season as the birds chirping outside your window.
The light streams in through the open crack in your bedroom window. You can hear the birdsong – the dawn chorus is in full swing.
You put our legwarmers, merino socks and heavy jackets into the bottom drawer last week, knowing they won’t see the light again for four or five months. The heavy winter bike that saw you through the long base miles, those rides that you sometimes completed out of a sense of obligation rather than passion, is in the shed. The lightweight carbon beauty reserved for the dry, clean roads of summer is looking resplendent in your hallway, making you want to pause and look at it whenever you walk past.
You’re due to meet your ride buddies at 8.30 and don’t need to leave the house until 8.15. Even after only 10 minutes of wakefulness, the energy buzzes around your body and you don’t want to wait that long. The early wake up means you can be in the saddle by 7. The bright light and the warmth it brings to your bedroom seduces and entices you, makes you yearn for the open road.
Breakfast, coffee, quick final bike check, another coffee, kit-up, and you’re out. Shorts, jersey and gilet. The socks are your vibrant light mesh favourites, pulled up and looking lush. The warmth of the sun even now, at just gone 7am, reassures you that the gilet will be in your pocket before you know it.
You put our legwarmers, merino socks and heavy jackets into the bottom drawer last week, knowing they won’t see the light again for four or five months.
You could just ride to the café where you’re due to meet your wingmen and enjoy a coffee in the sun for an hour. Although you have a ride ahead of you that’s going to last you well into the afternoon - a solid five hours in the saddle - you hit the local loop first. At 7.30am on a Sunday morning, the roads are your playground. You hear no traffic, just the beautiful sound of silence, interlaced with the odd tweets of birds and the buzz of your chain.
Sometimes, you ride with half an eye on your bike computer, checking your watts, your heart rate, your speed. This morning you just drink in the new colours around you and relish the movement and sense of speed. The trees and hedgerows are greener than ever, the sky deep blue. The vivid flash of colour from your socks as you pedal, a blur of energy, makes you feel faster. Just like the world, your feet feel alive.
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