How to Ramno a Bass

This past Tuesday, I joined Rafal Doloto, Noah Marcus and Alexander Sanchez for some hill repeats in Council Bluffs. There are some monster hills over there. We did about 20 miles of them before calling it quits. It was a good one.

Post-ride, Rafal tweeted:

WTF? RT@rafal78: on the ride tonight some kid ramnoed a bass
with a bow . awesome !! Oh there were hills too #fb

I've got this one, Bryan.

Rafal, Noah, Alex and I had just crossed the Bob Kerry Pedestrian bridge and were riding along the north river front trail. Suddenly, Rafal became quite animated. Out of his mouth came a sort of pidgin mixture of English and his native Polish language (Rafal is from Poland). And because of the excitement, Rafal's speech was rushed. I could make out about every third word or so. I heard something like this, "DUDE" blah blah blah "RAMBO" blah blah blah "BOW FISHING." I followed his line of sight down the bike path and to the banks of the Missouri river below. Only then was I able to put the pieces together. There, down along the banks was a rambo looking dude, and he was bow-hunting fish. This wasn't the actual image, but this is what it looked like:

image: Bowfishers of Nebraska

This wasn't the first time I had witnessed bow fishing while riding a bicycle. A few years ago, I was doing a time trial workout at Lake Manawa when I came upon bow-hunter fishing. At the time, my blood was boiling lactic acid from the TT effort. To compensate, I was practicing a mental imaging technique that my friend and cycling sage Mike Munson taught me. When Munson's blood brimmed with lactic acid, he'd distract his mind by thinking of images that were the opposite of pain. For him, that equated to bunnies and lollipops. But as much as I tried, the lollipops and bunnies weren't working for me. That's when I came upon the two bow fishers. One was a stand-in for Ted Nugent. The other was an Athena warrior-princess, and she was bow fishing carp in a camouflage bikini. From then on, the bunnies & lollipops were out when I time trialed. In its place was Ted Nugent and his girl friend bow hunting carp.

After this past week's bow fishing episode, I wondered if there was a connection between cycling and bow fishing. Apparently, there is this on livestrong.com


Anyway, back to the present. Our group did the hill repeats in CB. Cooling down on the way back, we re-encountered the bow fishers. Their hunt? fish? was quite successful. Again, not the actual picture, but it looked something like this:


There you go Bryan. That's how a bass gets ramnoed [sic] with a bow.

Happy Monday, everyone.

Post Script:
Congrats to Rafal for winning the single speed division in twelve plus hours in this past weekend's running of the Almanzo 100 gravel road race.

All done 12 hours plus ss 1st place common sense Last place

Good job, buddy.