Everything is relative

We get back to the Chamartín's clubhouse (which isn't a clubhouse, exactly, just a converted office that lacks heat) and Paco looks at Luis, Rob and I like he can't make up his mind if he should high-five us or smack us upside the head. Nobody, I mean nobody, knew that the morning was going to end up like that - huge, gobby snowflakes that came down horizontally more than once, visibility down to 200 metres, speeds slowed to damn near 10 km/h because you just had no idea what lay under the snow.

Canadian weather, vamos. Stuff that would not have flipped out any urban cyclist living in Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal - if you were a bike courier in any city along the eastern seaboard of North America, it would have been nothing at all. You would have dressed appropriately, dug into your mental maps of any potential problems like grates or crap pavement, and just kept going. But looking at the faces that greet us as we come in, get dried off and warmed up (just enough), you'd think that we'd just run an Alley Cat through Madrid traffic on a Saturday night. It's equal parts respect, confusion, and a burning desire to chew us out.

Me, I don't care. I'm Canadian; I've ridden in far, far worse conditions than what we encountered today. I am kind of pissed at myself for not having the foresight to bring a change of clothes -- but, then again, we didn't think that it was going to be quite as wild as it got. Had I known, I probably still would have gone out, but I would have brought home two of those plastic gloves that they make you wear in the supermarkets when you serve yourself in the produce section. I would have brought a change of clothes. And I would have made sure to have brought warm socks. But otherwise? I probably would have gone out anyway, even if it meant that I would have gotten soaked in the process.

None of the Spaniards went out. None of the Spaniards even went so far as to budge their arms up when the vote went down at 9.41 AM to find out if we were gonna go out or not. This mentality may be the reason why there are so few Madrileños in the pelotón and most of the ones who do compete get their asses kicked by the Basques during the Spring Classics, who grow up riding in this stuff and have to do it straight through from October to May every year.

I mean, it's just snow, right?? To me, riding in 40º weather, in the middle of the day, with the sun beating down, when there hasn't been rain or clouds for the previous six months...that strikes me as being a wee bit sick. If I can learn to ride in the oven, riding in the freezer shouldn't be such a big deal.