Morning Risers

(Early summer morning by Susanne Nilsson. CC Attribution License. All-free-download.com)

While quarantining to escape COVID-19 was a necessary safety step, it brought its own downside as well - "The COVID 15".   This is  an abbreviation for the extra pounds people gained while being stressed out, afraid and living locked inside.  Most of us starting eating more, and a lot!  I was not exempt from this perfectly normal reaction to such unprecedented anxiety.  And now, a mere month after lock down was lifted, I am dealing with my larger look, and am NOT liking it.

So recently I have been waking at 6AM, and am out the door biking by 6:30, if not earlier.  It is the coolest time of day before the sun clears the horizon and starts heating up the Florida landscape to 90+degrees.  The best time is the 15 minutes between when there's enough light to see the road well enough to avoid branches or rocks that could land me in the ditch with a broken shoulder or worse, and the moment when the sun breaks the horizon and the sky starts to turn.  Riding down past the local farm and through a heavily treed, old subdivision to the dense, tree-canopied seclusion of the cross-county bike trail, I hear and see so many things I wouldn't notice because I'm close to the ground as the world wakes up.  I literally witness the birth of a new day.  There are so many different birds calling from safe tree nests, the musky smell of moist undergrowth is overpowering, and it's fun to race through series of sprinklers that overshoot their yards and hit the road.  

My senses surge as I bike into the day, and that's how I saw the coral snake.  It was young, near the edge of the road, and dead.  Hard to tell what happened, but the moment I saw that color pattern, I instantly recalled the native rhyme to confirm my sighting:  " Red on black, friend of Jack. Red on yellow, kill a fellow."  It was red on yellow.  I'd never seen one up close, but with a large farm beside our subdivision, and a huge border of undeveloped brush, it is I who was invading its territory. The fact this snake has the 2nd strongest venom (after the black Mamba) made me keep my distance...because it looked young, and I wondered where the mother was.

As I have continued to bike regularly in the early mornings, often 45-60 minutes, I wondered if there was a group on social media of such like-minded folks I could connect with, or follow.  I searched Instagram, and found #earlymorning with over 4.5M posts, and #earlyriser with almost 400K posts.  I began following them both.  On Facebook, I found various groups that were mostly geographically-specific for riders in those regions, but I also found an amazing niche group of "Early Morning Cycling Aviators"!!  On Twitter I found a great hashtag to follow called #morningcycling which has lots motivational and inspirational posts by early morning cyclists positively helping launch others into a new day.