How does one deal with a climb into a headwind, when the unfeasibly slow pace does not seem to justify the pain? Head down, lowest functional gear, stop looking around, keep pedalling. My thoughts turned in, away from the wind. Would a lighter bike help? I never indulged my cro-mo longing but it did provide some raw material for a blog posting. I'm still on the bike I owned then. Its frame is aluminium. Like almost all other chemical elements aluminium was synthesised in nuclear reactions during the life histories of stars. It exists on Earth now because of events that took place in the insides of long-dead stars - BIG stars, more than eight times the mass of the Sun. Our poor little Sun will never see such events but it will see a stage in its life, far in the future, long after it has swollen up until it engulfs the Earth, in which carbon is manufactured in its deep interior. Carbon might be even better for bike frames than the cro-mo alloys, very light, super-strong yet forgiving for the rider. There's lots more carbon lying around than molybdenum - got manufactured in many more stars - but the production of carbon fibre and the manufacturing process mean carbon bikes are even more expensive.
And what's the deal with this stupid wind anyway? Sunlight falls more obliquely on the ground in the polar regions than at the equator, so the air is hotter and the gas pressure greater at low latitudes so air starts moving. Mix in the rotation of the Earth, variable cloud cover, friction with the ground and the shapes of the land masses etc. and before you know it you have a messy, changeable weather system. Another aspect of everyday life that finds its ultimate explanation in Earth's place in the cosmos, exposed to light from the Sun.
In so many ways my bike ride, like all of our existence - pleasures and headwinds! - couldn't be what it is without our place in a huge, old universe.
