Man versus Forces of Nature

My years at Georgia Tech taught me both sides of controlling Mother Nature. On one hand, there are the physical laws. When these laws are understood and respected, they allow us to build bridges, manufacture iPods, and make bicycles go faster. On the other hand, there are a lot of things that don't follow physical laws and it is folly to try to control them.

This morning, a few of the guys I usually ride with on Sunday decided to take a long ride stringing together parts of a couple of other routes. We wanted to ride 75 miles which is substantially longer than our usual ride. We started at 6:30 to beat the heat.

At about mile 35 on Peters Road, the law of gravity (in conjunction with a killer hill) produced a high-quality thigh burn. I usually would have dropped to my granny, but I thought it would be good to rip out some of the weak muscle fiber and later replace it with some stronger muscle fiber. (The ripping part appears to have gone just fine; we'll see about the regrowth.)

Along mile 60 or so, the law of hydration was kicking in. Even though we had been cooled down at least twice by rain, I was soaking my handlebar tape with sweat. This is when those ripped muscles started cramping. Fortunately, I understood this law and stopped to get a quart of liquid.

Thanks to an understanding of the physical laws, this mastery of nature was going well.

Around mile 52 or so, there is a bit of cyclo-cross on this route. To build a multi-lane highway, an older road was dead-ended. Our route cut through some trees to rejoin the dead-end from the multi-lane road. There is a brief stretch of about 15-20 meters that with road bikes is only passable on foot.

We'd come by before and found this dead-end was a dumping ground for ripped out cabinet's, broken toilet bowls, rusted refrigerators, tires -- just anything. On this trip however, the garbage had all been cleaned up and a barricade had been erected further up the road to prevent people from using this as a dump.

The road was clean. The barricade was effective. Almost. As we approached the barricade, we found a fresh new pile of garbage. The natural law of human behavior was not well understood.