The Bad Princesses: We’re fast; we’re female; we’re (mostly) over 50. And yes, we are rather pleased with ourselves.
The princess thing grew out of a random comment I made after biking 10 miles in the pouring rain to show up for a Saturday ride. I said to my coach, “I didn’t know you could get this wet.” A guy sitting with him said, “Oh, you can get wetter than that.”
I thought for a moment, and out of nowhere spoke this thought:
Princesses don’t get wetter than this.
Understand, until that moment I had never, ever, claimed princess-ship. Au contraire, I’d eschewed all things that smack of cuteness, sweetness, and privilege. Yet, in that brief moment, a princess was born.
Some weeks later one of the other women, Sally, noticed that I was regularly riding 10 miles on my own just to get to a Saturday ride. (That’s not as studly as it sounds. I was the newbie, and riding in was one way for me to get the miles my coach wanted me to get since I would fall back from the more advanced group during the main ride.) Sally is my best cheerleader, and she made a big deal of this. Next thing I know, Julie is saying, “You’re a bad princess.”
It was too good an identity to keep for myself, so now we are all Bad Princesses. We continue to ride in the rain, (hello, we live in Western Washington) as you can see from this snapshot of a ride in May, 2004. We’d just taken our fenders off for the “dry season.”
Wet Princesses
