Well, at least the sun is out

I slept great last night, thanks to a less-than-stellar night on Sunday. I groggily rolled over and opened by eyes a bit to see the hint of daylight coming in the window. Huh, it must be getting kind of late. Except I peeked over at the clock and saw that it wasn't even 6am yet. Wow, the days really are getting longer. Then I heard a bird chirping. Spring must be coming! The clocks change this weekend! Oh, but wait! Look a little closer there. Remember how we got that fresh foot of snow yesterday? Oh. Right. But see, the snow stopped falling and the sun is out. Let's go look at the thermometer and see what the temperature is. Oh, 10. Great. And it's windy. Even better.

Apparently someone thought it would be funny to turn back time to early January. I have always expressed how much I hate the month of March, it's just that I don't quite remember how much until it shows up again each year. "Spring" supposedly arrives in March. Astrologically speaking, that is. For those of us stupid enough to live in New Hampshire, it's really more like winter, junior. So you get more sunlight, typically a few taunting days that are unseasonably warm, and a few more sneaky snowstorms often of the heavy, wet variety just to destroy your hope of ever seeing grass or leaves again and leave us all threatening to move south, but never wising up enough to actually do so.

The painful truth is that spring does not exist around here. We don't really have late fall, either. We go right from gorgeous fall, which really is nice, to our winter preview, to endless winter, to winter junior, to mud, and straight to summer. April really isn't that nice, either. Every year when we finally make it through March I start to think that maybe, just maybe I can expect some warmer temperatures. Then I am reminded that the average temperatures in April are still only in the 40's. In case you weren't aware, that is not warm. Not at all. We often have a few more sneaky snow events in April as well. I even had some snow days as a kid. Heck, the first race of any kind I ever did was a 12K road race in my home town in the middle of May and it snowed. It's like we're never safe. Granted, there was that one, glorious March when I was in college in Boston where we had some freakishly warm days in the upper 80's, but something tells me I shouldn't hold my breath for that kind of anomaly.

So what does all of this mean? Another foot of snow. More snow to melt and mess up the roads, plus a couple of days to start the week with highs in the 20's and windchills near zero. That means that it is very likely that I will not be riding my bike outside anytime soon and I really need to find more movies to watch because I've watched almost everything at this point. I did think of one other good thing about the trainer as opposed to outside this morning: you don't have to worry about being fashionable. If you are in your basement alone, you can wear that old jersey that is faded and doesn't really fit right with the broken zipper, and those bike shorts that still work fine but might be a little too worn out to be seen in public, and nobody cares. This is on top of some of the other good things, including: always knowing what the "weather" is going to be like, never having to worry about idiot drivers on cell phones or red necks yelling things out their windows that 9 out of 10 times you can't understand, catching up on the movies and TV shows you miss because you go to bed at 8:30, having water, food and a bathroom readily available, never having to call for a ride, not needing CO2 should you get a flat, no need for that helmet (although I did once manage to fall off the stupid trainer, so maybe I should consider it) and if you are riding for time you don't have to try and figure out how long certain routes will take, you just stop when you reach the desired time.

None of that makes riding inside better than riding outside, but I have to make myself feel better somehow. And that didn't stop me from having to venture outside for a transition run on the icy, snowy roads and the zero-degree windchills. But like I said, the sun was out. We can't have everything. And yesterday they did finally open up the pool at 4:00. It was a weird day. You would think people around here had never seen snow before. The gym is never closed. I've been there on some pretty snowy mornings and they have never even considered it. And I am positive that when I worked there they never closed due to weather. But at least I got it in.

And the other good news is that any precipitation in the forecast for now is rain/snow, not just snow, so that is progress, right? Just have to get through the next couple of below-freezing days and know that it at least theoretially should get better from here. Just have to wonder how many more Saturday long rides will have to be endured in the basement.