Road Kill

Riding a bicycle along the side of a road often brings you up close and personal with the animals who thought they could out run the vehicular traffic. Yesterday, it seemed that the animal kingdom had been watching too many WWII movies and decided that they all wanted to be kamikazes. There were carcasses scattered everywhere! Going uphills on a nice hot day meant we weren't blazing by and we got to get up close and personal with the casualties. Often, too up close and personal! The visual and olfactory assaults were not pleasant. I didn't stop to take pictures of any of the bloated bodies, thought I would save the image for my readers imagination. Plus, I was trying to get by as quickly as possible, pedalling as fast as I could while holding my breath!
The genocide reached greater heights  when we came upon the locust swarms. Now, rather than witnessing the aftermath of the killings we were part of it. One on one a grasshopper is a cute little insect that as a child I loved to watch and play with.

Pretty cute grasshopper

They lose their cuteness factor pretty quickly when the are flying at you from every direction. All we could do was put our heads down, pedal and keep our mouths closed. If we were going to kill any of them, we were not going to eat them! It went on for about a mile of being pelted and bombarded. There was no way we could avoid hitting or running over them. It was a giant cloud of insects. I tried to get some pictures, while riding. The blurs you see are the locusts and the brown line on the road, well I'm sure you can deduce what that is!

        ' You have failed noone grasshopper, only your own ambition  '

In retrospect a road kill scattered ride was great training for Leadville. It forced me to ride hard with my mouth closed and often holding my breath. Hypoxic intervals. Now to just be able to ride the whole 100 miles in that state! The saying goes that a sensei is just a grasshopper grown up. In 10 weeks I hope this grasshopper has learned patience and grown into the sensei she needs to be.