A Tribute to All Things Random (including a Friday Three-peat bike ride)...

Joy here...This morning at 7:30am I met up with The Trainer and Cili Padi and a new friend who has yet to earn a nickname when I refer to him on this blog like all my other friends who make their regular appearances as I chart my own progress.  The four of us were headed up to Pink Lake to do some hill repeats like we did last Friday.  Only this time, instead of doing two repeats, we planned on doing three repeats before turning our bikes around and heading for home.

Pink Lake:  Our hill repeat destination X 3!

At least that was the plan, but sometimes life just doesn't always unfold according to plan.  In fact, sometimes life seems more like a random collection of images and events that our brains are left to make sense of, rather than a planned out journey that we gladly trundle forward through.

Which makes me think of William Carlos Williams's most famous poem:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Literary critics (and the poet himself) talk about the immediacy of the imagery and the particularity of each individual item as gesturing to something profound, something universal.  English profs nod their heads sagely and rub their beards as the poem seems to speak to them in a secret language, telling them something deep that excludes the rest of us.  And while I used to be an English professor, I wasn't that kind of English professor, and to me the poem is much more about randomness:  the randomness of grammar, the randomness of colours, the randomness of items etc.  In this randomness there may be something profound, for that is what life is...random.

And that is what our ride today was...random.

What are all those balloons doing there???

Our Friday ride's random collection of odd tidbits and events began as The Trainer and her friend were on their way to my house to meet up with me and Cili Padi. What did they see?  A cyclist without a helmet, smoking while she rode:   RANDOM.

Then we rode towards the park and looked up to the September hazy sky to see hundreds of hot air balloons floating up above the horizon:  RANDOM.

Me fixing my chain.  (Photo courtesy of The Trainer.)

Then once we were in the park, pedalling away to get to the base of the climb where we would start our hill repeats, I heard a grinding sound and looked down to my crank and realized that I had just skipped a gear and my chain fell loose.  So I had to hop off my bike and for the first time ever, and put the chain back in gear:  RANDOM.

Then after we rode up the hill for the first time, the new friend said that he was going to continue on and do a full loop of the park, and Cili Padi said she was going to go home and rest her legs in preparation for our long Sunday bike ride.  So our foursome became a twosome:  RANDOM.

And all the while I was shouting out bits of information that my new CycleOps was telling me about the ride.  The gradient of the Pink Lake climb is anywhere from 8% to 12%:  RANDOM.

So with a nod to William Carlos Williams and my own, personal reading of his poem, I will take a moment to celebrate the randomness of life that we as humans do our very best to make sense of in a myriad of crazy and interesting (and, dare I say it, RANDOM) ways!

Over and out,
Joy