Last Call for Smugness Prize, Or How You Went the Extra Mile for a Mile
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I’ll share my story!
I used to live in Maine, and one of my favorite pastimes is hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I travel up there a few times a year, always at least once in the winter. This year was no different, despite participating in Freezing Saddles for the first time. I didn’t even know that “coldest ride” was something to strive toward until the Team 19-Team 26 happy hour-turned trivia night at the Thirsty Crow, when Steve O revealed to me all of the fun data. Before that conversation I had pretty much accepted the fact that I wouldn’t get in any rides Fri., 2/14-Mon., 2/17. All of a sudden, the wheels in my head started turning. A new acquaintance at the happy hour, Rachel, offered one of her bikes that lives in her parents’ garage in Kittery, but unfortunately, that would have been too far out of the way. On Thursday night, while sipping a beer at DCA during my flight delay, I called the friend who I would be staying with to touch base about the weekend and decided to pose the bike question. Abby exclaimed, “Cassy! I JUST fixed up this bike that I got for free from the dump!” Turns out someone threw away this gorgeous yellow Raleigh bike, and all Abby had to do was put on new tires and it was good to go. The bike was with her in Orono, where she lives during the week as a grad student at the University of Maine, so one major hurdle was fitting it in her car (a Toyota Corolla) for the drive to her and her fiance’s house in Gray (about 2 hours). I wish I had taken a picture, but after some serious tetris-ing, we made it work. After a day of hiking and visiting a few breweries, we arrived at their house, which sits way back on a hilly unpaved road covered in a layer of slippery snow. The car thermometer said it was 1 degrees Fahrenheit outside. It was now or never. We carefully pulled the Raleigh out of the trunk, and I slowly road it back and forth on a small flat stretch of road, barely getting to 0.6 miles and hoping that rounding up would count. The Klimat app on Strava would later tell me it was … 0.16 degrees Fahrenheit! Definitely worth it to make that memory with one of my best pals.
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