False Positive

Well would you look at little Virginia having himself a proper winter like a big boy!

Most years, when it comes to snow, the Commonwealth underperforms.  Not this year.  At least, not so far.  One thing that we as Virginians are really good at in the snow?  Driving around in it.  Not actually the skills and experience needed to drive in the snow, but just making the decision to drive in the snow.  We are awesome at making the decision to go out anyway.  And crashing our cars, it turns out.  But snow itself?  Not so much.

Americans as a whole, we are highly prone to the false positive, the things we think are true about ourselves but really are not.  Take, for example, our (in)ability to drive in the snow.  To (not actually) hold our own democratic elections.  Triathlon (in general.)  We think we can do all of these things, but in reality...

Add this to the long list of things that we think we can do but we can't.  

I'm not trying to drag you down here.  No, indeed, the false positive is a wonderful thing, essential even.  So many of life's greatest adventures happen only because we overreach...and then we just have to figure it out.  Looking at a good map will do this to you.  In fact, some of the best worst days, especially on a bike, were driven by the false positive, and they happened when some guy just like you looked at a map very much like this one and said to himself, yeah, I can do that in a day.

Without the False Positive,  for example, Pantani 2010 never would have happened.  I woke up that morning with more than a foot of snow on the ground, and rumors were flying around that there were two county snowplows plus a front-end loader stuck up on Simmons gap somewhere.  You'd have been better off with a dogsled than a bicycle that day, and I pretty much assumed no one would show.  Then, right around 10 AM, The Rooster, Jimmy McMillan, and an assortment of really hard Richmonders pulled into my yard in a monster truck with studded tires.  And away we went.  

And wouldn't you know it - it was awesome.

If it turns out that the best days are actually the worst days, or the worst days are actually the best days, or some kind of combination of the two...then without our own poor judgement and lack of genuine self-awareness, who would ever ride up brokenback on a road bike in the first place?

Don't answer that.

These, and other great riddles of life itself, to be addressed in the coming weeks as the clock ticks down to Pantani2019.  So go ahead and delete your weather app.  The forecast only calls for one thing, and it's up, up, up.