Are they impervious to the shock of the water robbing the heat straight from the bones that I feel as instantaneous pain stimulus that has me and the rest of the sane (?) mature population booking it back up to the dry sand after a momentary dip or is it just that they aren’t as conditioned to comfort and are better able to adapt to what really isn’t anything that shouldn’t be intolerable to the human animal like being a little cold. I see the same thing at my sometimes surreal day job bringing a truck mounted giant staircase and slide to events athletic and otherwise in promotion of Gentle Giant Moving Co.(It’s a long story). The adults that are their to compete see the stairs and know that going up them at a pace beyond a trudge could trigger a lactic response and probably even foresee the next days sore muscles (or worse, embarrassment in front of their peers), a kid just sees a slide and something that they can have fun with and will run up those stairs and slide down until someone with another agenda (their parents needing to get going or me wanting to get packed up and back on the road before dark) tells them they have to stop.
Its kind of sad to think that you eventually lose touch with the part of you that will have a good time in the face of what experience tells you is an invititation (originally a misspelling but a word I’d like to see added to the dictionary and credited to me, got to call Webster-get famous and have too many invititations to even attend to) to possible discomfort. I can’t claim any sort of tolerance to cold water but I like to think that I’ve managed to stave off the complete obliteration of my child joy by riding my bike as fast as I possibly can every once in a while. Its easy to forget that the exhilaration alone is reason enough to do it, especially when maybe you aren’t at your best and you might suspect that your best still wouldn’t be as good as someone else’s. Sometimes it takes bringing a giant staircase to a cyclo-cross race to remember. Thanks go out from me today to Adam Myerson and Cycle-Smart for the reminder with a fun race in Northampton going in the books.
