Finally! / Why I will never be a bike messenger

My girlfriend finally started working again. For two months she's been sitting alone in the apartment staring at the wall and smoking cigarettes all day long. That would make anyone bored and lonely and put them in a foul mood most of the time. When I get home she's like a puppy, "look at me! Look at me! lookit me, lookit me, lookit me!" Any time I sit down to check my email or stand up to get in a workout she whines, "awwww, don't you want to be with ME?!" God forbid I say no. Everybody knows that telling that to a girl would be suicide. So finally, after two months of sacrificing sleep, internet, training time, DVD time, and most of all ME time, my girlfriend finally skipped off to work this morning! Now I'll finally have one beautiful, sweet hour a day, five days a week alone in the apartment to do whatever I want! Welcome back to regular blogging!

Later that morning...

Good thing I have all the effing time in the world because I just wasted so much of it! I'm sick of climbing the same frigging mountain all the time (especially after I paid 30 euros to NOT be allowed to climb it last week). There's this other hill that's across the city (see map here) called Montjuïc. It's a really beautiful place with parks, gardens, museums, fountains, athletic facilities (including the Olympic facilities), views of the city, the mountains and the sea, and a big, old castle at the top. Today I decided that I would climb up to the big, old castle at the top. I hadn't been there since the very first day I got my bike (when I had to stop half way up a climb to catch my breath, then couldn't get moving again) and I was curious.

One problem: It was a weekday at about 10:00 in the morning. Subsequent problem: There were many, many cars on the road. Making this problem worse: I had about 5 km through downtown Barcelona to go through to get there. And as if I didn't have enough problems already: there were something like 37 (or more) traffic lights between my house and the base of the hill. Clearly, like most of the things I do, this was not thought through.

Barcelona has been working really hard over the past few years to get more bike lanes in the city and get more people on bikes. They've really been doing a good job, but there's one problem, the motorists in this city are still Spanish and still don't give a shit. Whenever possible I stayed in the bike lane, but when every block there was a truck, or a cab, or a Mercedes with their flashers on in the bike lane I still had to risk life and limb in the regular traffic lanes. And, my lord, people will honk... and often for no apparent reason. For example, today I saw a guy in the delivery van who made a right turn, came right up to within about a foot some pedestrians in the crosswalk who had a walk sign and HONKED in their faces. Before this morning I used to think that being a bike messenger would be the most bad-ass job in the world. I used to fantasize about being a bike messenger in San Francisco and then becomig a butt model or something. Not anymore, biking in cities sucks! From this day forth I refuse to feel guilty for doing so much training on an indoor spin bike.


So finally I get to the bottom of the hill where there's a big old plaza, one of those 6-lane rotaries that European cities are so fond of, and a big convention center. There was a convention going on I guess, because they'd BLOCKED the road in front of it. They'd blocked the sidewalks. They'd blocked the little fenced-in grassy patches where it says "Please Do Not Walk On Grass". I found another way up, and I swear, everywhere I turned the roads were blocked. True, some of the roads up there don't look like they've been repaved since the Spanish Inquisition, but why did they have to be repaving today?

And you want to know what the most fucked up part of the whole thing was? Once I finally found rout to the top from what was pretty much the bottom, it only took me about 8 minutes to climb the damn thing anyway.

My final stats when I got home:
Time from start to finish: 1:20
Time moving: 1:10
Distance: 20.2 km
Average speed: 17 kmph
What my bike computer is thinking: "you suck!"