One of my all-time fave races. I love the sand chaos of Koksijde and I love the intense racing period over this time of year. And I also love deeply Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado slowly coming back to her best after a very long illness and injury. With all the young ones coming up, she does not get enough love. UCI World Champion, European U23 Champion, Netherlands Champion, 1st in DVV Trophy and Superprestige, and 2nd in UCI World Cup, all in the same year and all when she was twenty-one.
I’ve been waiting a long time for Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado to ride like she did in 2019 / 20. The pandemic and all the shit it intensified wasn’t good for her. And this season, she’s been riding like I remember, the one who won the World Championships. It’s more than a week since that first win, and she did it again at Superprestige Merksplas, leaving everyone in the mud behind her. Still and always my favourite rider.
The trees along the southern perimeter road which I know so well. I haven’t sat under all of them only because I have my favourites.
This storm line slipped to the south-west of Tempelhofer Feld. The next one to the north-east. Threading the sunny needle between downpours all afternoon.
The Flugfeld doing that pretty late-summer bloom of lilac-lavender chicory flowers. I sat under a tree reading Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come For Us.
Once again at Tempelhofer Feld. Walking in the fields, sleeping under a tree on the grass with fingers dug into their roots, Kestrel perched on an upper branch above me.
’Cos obviously I haven’t blorged for a month, but I have biked to Tempelhofer Feld a few times a week and gone for one or two-hour walks, sat under trees, read, talked to birds and the earth, and on a couple of occasions the sheep. And the Feld is a riot of grasshoppers, insects, birds, flowers, and apples. The fields come up to my boobs and when the wind blows, it’s achingly beautiful.
Tempelhofer Feld getting windy.
Jumped on my bike immediately after this photo to avoid the incoming drenching.
I haven’t been at Tempelhofer Feld so much the last couple of weeks, and when I have, it’s been doing ultra-lazy laps on my bike, totally not lycra’d up — except for bib shorts under my trackies, ’cos butt comfort. Today was 28° and felt like mid-30s, warm and dry wind, heavy sun, cloudy hazy sky. The Feld was full and the fields have grown from stubble to knee-high in a couple of weeks, doing that luscious, hallucinogenic, erotic green of spring all flushed and horny.
