Bob Sanchez’ BS

Things are changing in Kochi.

People are putting away their gas heaters, and I’ve turned mine down several degrees. I’ve stopped wearing leg warmers to school and actually felt hot in my layers on Friday!

A brand-new Kochi Station opened up last week, and the town held a massive cleanup day for its 2008 tourism campaign. I’m seeing more and more people outside walking around.

We’re pulling out of this strange thing called Winter. It wasn’t a particularly tough or bitter winter by other people’s standards, but SHUT UP. I’m a pansy from Southern California, OK?

Upon departing from my house for the Sunday Ride, I was faced with a choice - ski mask, or no ski mask. It has never been cold enough to warrant wearing the mask to prevent frostbite and such, but being outside all day for the first time in January tore up my throat something awful, so I had been wearing it to keep my beautiful baritone beautiful.

These silly little incidents are significant to me because I’ve never had to think about them on a daily basis. It’s a pain and I’m learning more and more about why people would pay exorbitant amounts of money to live in Orange County.

I decided against the mask and went with a scarf and earmuffs instead. I applied sunscreen and got blasted by Level 3 Confusion. My fingertips were icicles on my face, but my nose was saying, “HEY, what’s that? It’s summertime! We’re going to the beach! All right!” It had been that long since I had gotten even a whiff of sunscreen and it threw me for a loop.

The scarf came off before we departed from the Bike Shop. Other bikers were taking off their windbreakers and masks. The sun was high and bright and I’m sure it got up to 60 degrees. It was a gorgeous day and we were out there spending it.

Our destination was a mountaintop cherry orchard, but we climbed some other mountains for fun along the way. The first one was Buddha Slope, a long, dark climb that has a much longer, brighter descent into a valley full of apple, pear, and peach orchards.

I made it to the top before a few other riders, and while it’s never a race, that felt pretty good. As Mrs. Bike Shop huffed and puffed through the pass, she said, “Ohhhh, I lost to Mac and his horsepower!”

Opportunities for me to brag about myself in this group are few and far between, so I told her about the time I generated 2.08 horsepower in physics class in high school.

I participated in an experiment in this physics class as a TA in my senior year of high school. The students were studying power and learned that horsepower was a unit of physical work done within a set amount of time.

We went out to the football bleachers to see how much horsepower each of us could generate. We had already calculated the height of the stairs and each person’s approximate mass, so we knew how much work was required to move each person’s mass up the stairs.

From there, it was a matter of how fast that work could be done. Some students jogged up the stairs and others walked, but nobody skipped steps. I asked the teacher if it mattered whether we took every step, and he said that it didn’t.

My turn came up, and I jumped up the stairs as fast as I could. We ran the numbers and I had churned up more than two horsepower. Nobody else had even reached one.

That didn’t sound right, so I did it again. And again. And again. Even tried running all the way to the top of the bleachers, and not once did the number dip below two.

The teacher busted 1.5 but I took home the grand prize with 2.08, the number from the last run.

Of course this doesn’t mean that I’m capable of sustaining that kind of power over any significant amount of time or of doing anything meaningful with it. But I think it’s cool to say that I can generate the power of two horses by somebody’s standard.

I take every chance I can get to relate stories from my past in Japanese because it’s a confidence-builder; when saying something for the first time in Japanese, I do better telling old stories than I do attempting to answer unexpected questions.

I was very satisfied with the way the story came out in Japanese. So satisfied that when we reached the other bikers and Mrs. Bike Shop asked me to tell the story to them, I didn’t disappoint. That was a big mistake.

Everybody laughed at the story and that was fine with me because it was meant to be a freakish and humorous account, but I’m never going to hear the end of it.

Following our break, I switched gears going uphill and heard a strange sound. I stopped after going up and over the hill and saw that my chain had somehow come off the cog in the very back of the derailleur and was passing over a metal clip instead of the cog. I hailed Mr. Bike Shop, and he took a look and had no idea how that could have happened.

I should’ve seen this coming:

“Gee, Mac, must’ve been that 2.8 horsepower of yours.”

The final climb up to the cherry orchard featured a crooked, Lombard Street-esque road whose switchbacks offered great views of the bikers behind and below. Playful horsepower barbs rained down from above as I struggled up the steep incline:

“Come on, Mac, use that horsepower!”

“What was it? 3.5?”

“Unhitch the horse cart!”

These jabs, and the fun in general, have been missing from the Sunday rides since I returned home from Christmas. I am quite sure that the season has a lot to do with it.

Mr. Bike Shop and I endured ribbings about our unkempt beards (pretty much any facial hair appears unkempt here). A Canadian girl who rides with us tried out a local slang phrase, but it sound like “BALLS!” when she said it, so we razzed her about that. We poked fun at Mrs. Bike Shop for communicating so well with the farmers, whom none of the rest of us could understand because of their thick accents.

Laughs abounded and they, coupled with the sunlight pouring down from the sky, made it very easy to keep the energy level high. I peeled back the finger coverings on my gloves and rolled down my leg warmers for the ride home. We traveled nearly 60 miles, and I’m usually broken around 50. Today, however, I finished just a few minutes behind everybody else and felt like I could have continued!

The best part of the day came while we were sitting around at the orchard, eating cherry-flavored rice and mochi balls that reminded me of Cream of Wheat with a hint of cherry. I turned to Mrs. Bike Shop and said, “Man, I can’t wait for spring!”

She delivered the gem of the day, music to my ears:

“Whaddya mean wait, Horsepower Mac? Spring is here!”