Sorry, I'm just bad with names

Saturday, 5 August

Kele never spells them right. PruDog gives everyone a new one. Me, I just can't remember them.

So, I apologize. Don't take it personally. It doesn't (always) mean I have no clue who you are. (I love those WSBA frame numbers cuz I can go home and look you up.) But I've always been bad with names and just can't retrieve them with confidence from my grey matter.

A teammate has a theory about this. Men outnumber women in bike racing by about 10 to 1. So it's much easier for them to remember our relatively fewer names than for us to place all 800 of them. There's one corps of male riders I know pretty well: they all know me, I know all of them, and I know all of their names. I'm just not sure which name goes with which guy. Yet.

And I have another excuse. After my crash last fall, they didn't put my jaw back where it used to be and I still have speech problems. Not every word comes out being the one I intended. Most recently, to my horror, I was introducing someone near and dear--and another name rolled off my tongue. Same number of syllables, same vowel/consonant order, but definitely not the person I was standing next to.

So, if you ride up next to me and address me by name, and I don't quite reciprocate, I am very sorry and don't mean to be rude. I'm just a bit thick and hate the thought of being even ruder and getting your name wrong. I'm just thankful anybody talks to me at all.

And now I must draft my response to the personal ad in the Eugene Weekly from a SWM looking for a woman 40-49 "to ride tandem bicycle."