TALES: Mud brothers

Saturday was absolutely perfect for riding, and we’d finally had a stretch of good weather to dry things out a bit. Unfortunately, we rode Spider Loop Sunday instead, which was exactly the opposite! It’s funny, though, how shared misery often makes for a better ride at the end of the day. The closest thing I can compare the day’s ride to is a team mud race I ran 10 years ago called the “Volkslauf” in Southern Cal (a must-run if you haven’t). Even as you scoop the mud from your pockets and out of your bike shorts, there’s just something beautiful about being exhausted and covered in filth, having stuck it out together.

When it takes three hours to clean the mud off of your bike, you have a lot of time to marvel at the fact that your wheels were even able to rotate with that much mud packed between them and the frame and how the drive train somehow continued to operate with half a pound of wet clay clogging the chain rings. Then, you reach for more Q-tips to painfully clear the orange crap out of each individual hex bolt.

New-comer Lloyd was the most impressive, muscling through the caked on slop as the only guy running “V” brakes. Garry and I both got intimately familiar with how slick the small bridges on the High Road and the Mother are when they’re wet, and Chris is planning a nasty letter to WTB on their mud-shedding Mutano tires that don’t. Lance was the hero as the only guy to make it upright down the Mother today.

The good thing about the rain was that the not-so-itsy-bitsy spiders are washed down the water spout! Unfortunately, though, more than a few black salamanders were harmed in the making of this ride as they squirmed across the trail. The great thing about riding in Okinawa is that we’re always coming across creatures we’ve never seen before (and only sometimes running over them) – this time it was a four-inch-long fluorescent green caterpillar.

Sayonara.