My brother geezers were already abandoning the Monday ride on Sunday. Cold, wet, no thank you, please, etc.

I bailed too, mostly because I’m taking antibiotics and steroids to beat down a sinus infection, but also because I had my fill of cold and wet in the Before-Time™, when I fancied myself a cyclocross racer.

My interest in the activity started to flag after a few years living on our wind-whipped rockpile outside of Weirdcliffe, in Crustytucky County, Colo. (“Gateway to Gardner”).

I actually had some of my best races while we lived there, because I was living at 8,800 feet and training even higher, running a ton, riding a ’cross bike almost exclusively on the indifferently maintained and largely unpaved roads, and doing laps on my own short homemade course.

But evil weather was both my strength and my undoing. I needed a course with lots of running to have a chance against the roadies, who are like cowboys, reluctant to dismount from their steeds and proceed on foot. So, yeah: rain, mud, snow, anything to suck a few mph out of those tree-legged, leather-lunged sonsabitches.

But getting to the races in the kind of conditions that favored my limited skillset — run around for 45 minutes while wearing a perfectly rideable bike — could be something of a project. The nearest one was 90 minutes down and north in good weather, and it was the race I and my club put on twice a year in Bibleburg. The others were in Franktown, Littleton, Lakewood, Longmont, Boulder, Mead, Fort Collins, and like that there.

It got to where I would book a motel room, drive north the night before a race, eat dinner out, breakfast on coffee and energy bars in the room, get my ass handed to me at the event, clean up in a car wash, find something to eat, and drive home. After a while it began to feel a lot more like work than recreation, even if I did well, which mostly I did not.

Unless I saw heaps of snow on the deck when I got up on race day. Yay. And even then I had to drive home in it.

The travel got a little easier when we moved back to Bibleburg, but the racing never did. I was working a lot while training less, and at a lower altitude, too. The flesh was unwilling and the spirit was weak.

I could tell I was over it in 2004, when I rode my main race bike to a ’cross in Bibleburg . No spare bike, not even a spare wheel. And when I flatted about halfway through my race, I wobbled off the course, resolved the puncture (who brings a pump and saddlebag with spare tubes and tire irons to a friggin’ race?), and rode home.

And it wasn’t even snowing.