Century withdrawals

It has come to my attention that it is now 10 days since I last rode an imperial century. Ordinarily this shouldn't bother anyone, but right now as I type this I have an urge to get on the bike and just churn out a lot of miles. It's odd that I should be so keen to do this, given that I've ridden four imperial centuries (i.e. rides of 100 miles or more) already this month. I have still been commuting and so on, of course, but for some reason that just doesn't suffice. As I've related in previous posts, my ride to work is more like a business transaction than anything else.

So how did I get to this stage? It was just yesterday that I was reading a post from another blogger riding their first century. How does one reach the stage where they are addicted to long rides? To be honest I don't know whether it's testosterone (shouldn't I be growing out of that by now?), or just wanting to extend myself. Maybe it's just wanting to prove something after the 600k ride didn't go as planned. http://life-cycle.blogspot.com/2006/07/mess.html Maybe it's a deeper desire to escape suburban life for a while. Either way, I want to go somewhere right now.

On the subject of suburban life, or at least one aspect of it, I continually find it astonishing just how little idea anyone on the Gold Coast has about dealing with traffic. I don't rant about this subject terribly often, largely because if I ranted about every Gold Coast idiot I ever saw, I'd have little time to talk about anything else. Yet I see it everyday, people overtaking too close, people ignoring obvious gaps in the traffic at give way situations, before trying to blast through long after the gap is gone. People abusing others for stopping at red lights, people who just generally have no friggen idea. This isn't necessarily an anti-motorist rant -- I've seen plenty of cyclists and pedestrians who are just as bad.

I've spent time riding in much bigger cities like Brisbane or Melbourne, one would think a smaller city like the Gold Coast (pop. around 500,000) would present no problems at all. Yet from my observations, the incompetent moron quotient here is much higher than in these other cities. I suspect it all comes back to experience. People living in larger cities probably cope with traffic better because they deal with it more often. People in medium-sized cities therefore lack the skill and anticipation that comes with such experience. That said, if I can learn my trade on the Gold Coast and apply it in Melbourne or Brisbane, I don't see any reason that others shouldn't be able to.

Hmmm, maybe escaping the idiots is the reason I want to leave.