Seventy Elephants

One of the perils of racing bikes is that there are a few hazards involved. One of the more unusual risks is the opportunity to wear bodily fluids from another Homo sapiens. Thankfully this has been a rarity in my case, but there is one occasion where this occurred and has left the memory indelibly etched.

The race involved was in Dunedin and ran from the city to Tairoa Head and then back via the high road over the peninsula to Shiel Hill. On this particular day there was a howling southerlie tail wind for the first leg and a block headwind for the return. The tailwind section was the harbour road and almost pancake flat, the return from Portobello on was a decent sized climb, with some undulation on the top and a long gradual descent.

The race was a handicap race, and given my hill climbing prowess I was placed in one of the easy marks. The flat section was pretty uneventful, with my mark catching all the groups ahead of it, and staying clear of the chasers. When we hit the climb, that all changed. By halfway up the climb the field was in tatters and I was well out of the money, having been caught and passed in rapid fashion by a number of the back markers.

As I crested the top, up behind Larnach's Castle, I was passed by a rider, who shall remain nameless, and I latched on to his back wheel like a limpet. The section of road there is rolling, then with a swift descent and a short, stiff climb before the long, gradual final descent. The elements had really turned and we had encountered a couple of cold, wet squalls. The skin on my legs looking like the skin of an uncooked chicken.

As we rocketed down the penultimate descent into a gusty wind, the rider in front cleared his sinuses and expectorated. What launched from his mouth seemed to gain a life of it's own and pulsed and wobbled in slow motion in the wind and draft. I was transfixed by this green death star of mucus that was flying between him and I. All hope was that it would pass me harmlessly, and as it left his draft it veered downward and landed smack on my inner thigh, just below the bottom of my shorts.

There, on my cold, goose pimpled white flesh it clung. A liberal dose of water from my drink bottle did nothing, it stubbornly hang on for the passage. The sheer horror of it made it seem even larger, and to my eyes it was the size of a saucer and mountainous also.

I hit the final climb, and the other rider escaped, I was alone with my cling on. I thought for a moment of stopping and removing it with the aid of grass, but realised that there were still riders behind me, and that I may have still been in the lower limits of the prize-money, so I soldiered on.

When I finally crossed the finish line I was out of the money, but was eternally grateful for the long, wet grass on the side of the road.