Everyone Knows It's Windy

(That’s the chorus of a 1967 song by The Association, if you are a youngster.)

  Spring in eastern Pennsylvania means temperatures are (usually) warming up and the winds will blow. Sure there are breezes much of the year, but it seems particularly gusty in March and April, which is especially noticeable when you are struggling through it in an effort to get the cycling legs back in condition!

    I was out riding on the Schuylkill Trail yesterday, doing about a thirty mile round trip from the Oaks area to the Philadelphia city line. The eastward leg of the trip was fantastic - at some moments I was cruising along, effortlessly holding at around 25 mph!  In the back of my mind, I knew I was going to have to turn around and dreaded what was waiting for me.

   When the moment came to head back, I was deceived a bit at first by a lack of wind. There are those VERY rare instances when wind changes direction to my advantage, but since the location of my U-turn was within a rock cut, I realized it must be a case of temporary shelter. About a half mile later, as the trail followed a bend in the river and the trail headed nearly due west, I was hit with a wall of wind that lasted nearly the whole trip back.

   Except for a couple sections where the trail direction changed slightly or I was partially screened by a tree line or building, it felt like I was doing a 15-mile hill climb. When I finished back at the trailhead and looked at my computer for an average speed, I knew that the relatively decent stats were more of a reflection of the incredible outbound speed, because as well as I held it together into the wind, there were some gusts that brought me to an absolute crawl!

   I had a whole new level of admiration for professional cyclists after watching them fight through even worse conditions during Sunday’s Ghent-Wevelgem race.  Facing a rainy day on the slippery, steep cobbled climbs throughout the 148-mile course is challenging enough, but riding into winds that gusted up to 50 mph off of the North Sea proved nearly impossible.

   Commentators refer to cyclists who excel in the Belgian Classics as “hard men”, and anyone finishing in this wretched weather had to be considered such. Indeed, only 39 of the original 199 starters crossed the finish line! Splits in the peloton kept occurring over and over again during the event, with little chance to get back together once groups fell behind.

   Racers who dropped far enough out of contention just decided to give up. Riders piled into team cars if there was space, while others asked locals for directions back to their hotel. Those attempting to battle through the conditions found absolutely no shelter out in the open farmlands of Belgium, and riders were actually being blown off of their bikes. Simple tasks like taking a feedbag (called a musette) or removing a rain jacket became dangerous - dozens of collisions occurred, accompanied with many broken bones from hitting the pavement.

   There were some “softer” landings, such as the two riders who were forced off of the road into an adjacent drainage ditch. Take a look at the photo below showing them climbing out, while their bikes sink, and the despair on the face of the red-helmeted Lotto-Soudal cyclist.

   Another incident involved the late breakaway, when Sky’s Gerraint Thomas was blown into a field. He attempted to unclip his foot for balance but lost control of his bike, somersaulted through the air and landed in the mushy grass. Thomas, winner of Friday’s E3 Harelbeke race, proved himself an ultimate “hard man” by getting on his bike, fighting back to the group and claiming the final spot on the podium!

   Perhaps the winner of the race, Luca Paolini, has the perfect stature for these extreme conditions – a diminutive, but powerful build. I’m thinking less body surface to catch the wind, yet the strength to fight through the air that is trying to push him around. The Italian at times looked to be cooked, but in these conditions, so did his other six breakaway mates. Paolini just managed to jump away at the right time, when the more favored riders were looking at each other, and once there was a little gap, there wasn’t enough left in anyone’s legs to catch him!

   As Paolini crossed the line, he pointed to his jersey to acknowledge his Katusha team, and also to his head, perhaps making the point that overcoming the day’s miserable weather was all about the mind.