Perspectives in Biking

One of my biking friends called to invite me on a ride with a couple of new colleagues today.  So off we went.

As we're biking along, we see another biker coming the other way, wearing this over the top red, white, and blue stars and stripesy kit (and when I say over the top, I'm thinking way louder than most biking kits, which are plenty loud). 

So I jokingly said, "hey, there goes the US national road champ!" to the other folks in my group.  (The other biker couldn't hear.) 

And one of the new people looks back, for a sort of long time, and quietly says, "no, I don't think so."    But it was like he took my joke seriously.

And then we realized that while I was totally joking, because the idea of seeing the US national road champion on the road around here is pretty much out of the realm of possibility, he had momentarily taken it seriously because he comes from Colorado, where someone could see Tim Duggan riding around the roads.