This year's version had a way different flavor and is already just as memorable. I got up at 5:00 am and looked at the thermometer, which said 2 degrees F. By 10:00 am it had soared to 7. By ride time at noon, I'm guessing it was in the 10-15 range.
8 brave bastards on fat tires and 3 brave bastards on skinnies showed up and threw down.
There was no snow, just bitchin' cold air. And low-angle sunshine. And an ungulate sighting, of course.
We rode for somewhere between 1 and 9 hours, as legend will heretofore have it, after which we retired to one or more establishments to replenish our deficient malt levels (Dan's characterization, not mine.)
Anyway, I really dig hanging out with fatbikers - they seem to be a fine bunch. And the ride today was flat out killer. You never know what you are going to get this time of year, but this one just came together and rocked it. Thanks to everyone who came out. Can't wait for next year's edition, already.
5 comments:
What a great day for a ride at Riverside. A fun time with an outstanding group. Looking forward to many more this winter!
The comparison to Christmas is apt. Global Fat Bike Day is actually the (perhaps unconscious) revival of a feast commemerating the flight of the Israelites from the armies of Pharoah while riding fat bikes, prior to the discovery of beer:
Isaiah 25:6 "And in this mountain shall the LORD of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees."
So, GFBD also celebrates an eternal present moment of salvation in which the observant looks both back in gratitude and forward to better drinks to come.
See also, Festivus.
Well, yes, Extravagantly Reverend Trubble.
But, fat bikes also appear in the Rg Veda, Aboriginal petroglyphs, and mesoAmerican pictograms.
And yet archeologists have unearthed not a single ancient fat bike. Fat bikes also disappear from the textual record for millenia, before reappearing (briefly) in Leonardo's sketchbooks. And then, further centuries of silence before CAD drawings appear, reputedly from the (as yet unexcavated) Surly design studios.
It may be that early fat bikes were made from degradable materials such as bamboo or jellyfish, and so are lost to the historical record.
Others, particularly evolutionary anthropologists, suggest that the idea of the fat bike preceded actual fat bikes by millions of years, and the idea alone may have provided a competitive advantage. Our brains may be hardwired to believe in fat bikes.
This belief may have enticed our ancestors to drop out of the trees and to adopt a knuckle-dragging mountain bicyclist stance, as a primitive urge to put the "pedal" in bipedalism.
Of course, the evolutionary theory of the fat bike dream recurring as a monolith throughout human history begs the question of why and how the idea originated in the first place. Nor does it explain the repeated disappearance of the dream.
No. It makes more sense that fat bikes preceded the idea of fat bikeness. And here we come full circle to eschatological explanations you will no doubt appreciate Extra.Rev. Trubble. Enjoy your fat bikes today, for tomorrow they may be raptured. And forgotten.
Suggesting a relationship between the steady rise of beer as the world's premium beverage and the occasional existence of fat bikes, however, is just silly.
Setting aside for a moment both undemonstrable metaphysical claims and explanations relying on the narcissistic delusion of human "reason," let's simply agree that the importance of fat bikes to the common psyche of mankind simply cannot be exaggerated, though many have tried.
In other words, shut up and ride.
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