This past week, my pilgrimage to the Strip Mall of Mightiness has been waylaid by a cold. I’m not sure how normal people react to colds, but we pretend bike racers react to sickness with the same energy as a Belieber does when Justin gets passed over for song of the year at the Kid’s Choice Awards, there’s hysterics, arm flapping and tears, oceans of tears.

Because it’s unfair. We pretend bike racers are fastidious about our heath and physical fitness and to have that interrupted, nay, assaulted by a viral interloper is a tragedy, plain and simple. You would think that viruses would be repelled by the force field our smugness and sense of superiority create, but it takes a lot of effort to keep the smugness shields deployed at full power, and sometimes you slip and let a virus in. Your defenses have been compromised. And that means you start to fall behind in the imaginary arms race with the other pretend bike racers.

Now that being a pretend bike racers is a year round preoccupation, days missed on the bike are like dog years, they get multiplied by a factor of 7, and they hump most everything in the living room. Each day spent allowing your body to recuperate is a day you are not pounding yourself into a race-dominating paste. You opponents are surely doing uphill one-legged drills while you drink soothing teas and blast all manners of awfulness out of your head with a Neti Pot. Why must life be so unfair!

I chose to allow myself three days for healing (which in dog racing terms, adds up to 21 days—nearly a month behind already!), before heading out for a gentle amble this week. My head was still slightly congested, so it felt as if the chimney to my mightiness factory was clogged, forcing the mightiness within to pile up in pallets of idleness, to be delivered at a later date. But there was no mightiness today, my locomotive’s fire lacked its normal stoke.

I shall continue to ride with my intake set to "mucous" for the foreseeable future, but I will not allow it to deter me in my quest for mightiness, and with each expectoration, I will inch closer to redeploying my shield of smugness.

Roman’s Beer Corner

This week’s selection is Lawson’s Double Dose IPA by Otter Creek Brewing. Roman has been concerned about the availability of the beers that he selects for the beer of the week, as many of them are not readily accessible to say, people. So he’s proposed a solution, Roman will deliver a sample of a beer (not necessarily the one in each week’s beer corner—I say that in case the sample somehow get "misplaced" in my or anyone else’s tummy) to the week’s contest winner. There are caveats to the contest, of course. Roman ranges far on his bicycle, but he does not deliver outside of the NYC area, so if you are in Wyoming, you are out of luck. Also, Roman will get to you when he gets to you—he’s a busy guy. And, of course, you have to be over 21, because I’m not really sure how legal any of this is in the first place, but there’s no way we’re tempting fate by delivering beer to minors, we only buy beer for kids in 7-11 parking lots, the way God intended.

That being said, if you would like to have a cuddly Russian bring you a rare beer on his trusty Centurion, you must write a limerick (follow the proper pattern please) lamenting what it’s like to be a cyclist with a cold in the comments below. I will choose a winner on Monday, and you will get a beer sometime in the future.