This Offseason Brought to You by Polar Vortices and BTC Sweet Potato Fried Pies

I wrote this at the end of last winter, and filed it away.  As I return to writing about riding and racing, on the cusp of a new season, recovering a little after a hard training cycle, I'm reminded of the way that cycling just...cycles.  Imagine that.  Ups and downs, ebbs and flows, over and over again, unavoidably...no matter how much you want to keep on the gas, charging hard through infinite intervals, life intervenes, the seasons change, winter storms come and go, base miles accumulate and peaks approach and recede.

It's been a particularly long winter, in the sense of lots of hours on the bike over the winter break, and also because, despite some teasing hints that spring might be coming, winter insists and persists, refusing to actually give way to good riding weather. 

There are days in the Pennnsylvania winter, the season for setting out on interminable Sunday rides meandering through the region's exquisite exurban sprawl, the William Carlos Williams mongrelized landscape of revived mill towns, Quaker villages, and undead stripmall middle America (no one to drive the car!), days when I must adopt a compulsion that I do not genuinely feel to fill up legs with hours.  Time on the bike.

And sometimes those rides earn rewards, and you get to stop for coffee and baked goods, warming solidly frozen hands for just a few minutes before getting back to the purposeful business of wandering aimlessly, numbly cranking away, banking away kilojoules against some future moment of bile-flavored racing glory. 

That bakery stop is clutch, a moment of relief in the long process of storing up pale suffering in the cold against the longing for hot whirling dry hells to come.  An oven-warm loaf under the jersey, a sop for countless perineal insults.  I vaguely expect the halfhearted winter pedalstrokes to reincarnate in a standing, gasping, thrashing, crashing charge, the divine racerly revelation spreading across the washed out spring sky as the wheel in front of you pulls slowly away...

That bakery, two left turns after the long hilly section with black ice in the shade, that bakery at the end of winter, the down payment on summer carbohydrates and caffeine, disappears like a mirage by May.  I've never seen it in good weather.

In the south, however, winter is not such a masochistic dysfunctional love affair; January days in Oxford do not mentally weigh the grams of resentment they carry up every hill, dragging you down with calorie counting and early bedtimes and milligrams per milliliter of adrenal malfunction.

January in Oxford is easygoing; it has never frozen my water bottles inside my insulated vest, never hissed ugly names at me behind my back, never sat down at the top of the hill in a hot salty temper. 

But every once in a while, even so, you come upon winter's last bakery, and if you have put in the miles, if you have mindlessly watched the road long enough, you might have earned a sweet potato fried pie at the B.T.C. Old-Fashioned Grocery in Water Valley...the Unofficial Sponsor of North Mississippi Base Miles...

And honestly, I'm not sure yet where that fried pie sits in the eternal Boethean cycle of cycling.  I'll swallow the pie, never mind the banana turning brown and soft in my jersey pocket.  Time to refill bottles and zip up jerseys, back to the endless wandering, this time in the fifty-five degree sunshine of the Mississippi winter.

I'll take the bakery where I can find it, and winter will be gone soon enough.