Mad dogs, Englishmen, and old jocks

What goes out in the midday sun? I'll take Old Sayings for 100, Alex.

It's a hot Saturday morning in central swingstate, and you have a meeting at the Old North Church in the morning and another meeting in Worthmore at noon, so you stop at home and, feeling your oats, decide to bicycle to the second one. Heck, it's not that far (6-7 miles), and in the shade of my decision-making brain, it's not that hot.

Kids, do not do this at home. This is not the Tour de France or the Tour de Lance or even the Tour de Grandview. But if you do, please factor into your decision: distance, temperature, wind, time of day, road surface, hills, and the continuous need for water, water, water. Anyone using common sense knows this, or should, hence the Old Saying about rabid canines and arrogant imperialist.

It started to sink in about halfway down Schlock Road, the convenient diagonal traffic artery with a designated bike lane leading directly from Methodistville to Worthmore. Since cycling creates its own breeze, it wasn't the heat itself that got to me, but after a couple of small hills the energy just drained out of my legs, and my whole body kind of shrank into a lower gear.

It's a strange somatic sensation, and I have learned the hard way that putting more effort into the movement does not make up for the oxygen debt when heart and lungs stop supplying enough ATP to the muscles. I've tried it, and it doesn't work. What does work somewhat is to relax the upper body by not leaning heavily on the handlebars, to breathe slowly and deeply, and to keep pedaling, just not so fast.

It's not rocket science, and my friend wasn't crushed that I got to Scottie McBean's at 12:10 instead of 12:00. In fact, we had a very productive conversation about a couple of small snags in the process of publishing his book. We talked about illustrations, permissions, digital files, and the medium being the message; I sweated through my T-shirt, cooled off, and rehydrated.

To add a bit of drama to an otherwise ordinary day, I got a call from my mate at McBean's about a minor emergency at the mall. So after my meeting, I took the side of the right triangle straight north toward Polaris, instead of the hypotenuse home to Methodistville. Note to self/others: Skankus Road is perhaps the worst place in central swingstate for a bicycle, a crumbling pot-holed two-lane thoroughfare in a busy residential/commercial corridor.

Next time I'll go a different way, but it was a straight shot to Macy's, and we unlocked the keys from the car so we could both be on our way. By this time I had also realized that my choice of headgear was totally wrong. Kids, on a 90-something degree day, wear something other than a heat-absorbing, polyester, nonbreathing, black Buckeye baseball cap, even though the block-O deters drivers from running you off the road.