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ninevirtues10. You make a point of wearing your blaze-orange wind vest during deer season.
9. You hear country music, and especially "Sweet Home Alabama", played repeatedly in the weight room.
8. You routinely change flats with a fifty-cow audience.
7. The convenience store lady in Liberty, NC (50 miles from anywhere) has never seen cyclists come through her store before, but treats you like long-lost family anyway.
6. You don't spend your ride time dodging cellphone-wielding commuters, you spend it dodging guys in dirty pickup trucks with gun racks. (Carefully-- 90% of the time, the gun racks have guns in them which may or may not be loaded.)
5. When you break up the inevitable discussion between a dirty-pickup-truck guy and your male riding buddy about exactly who got cut off by whom, you do it by implying that it just wouldn't be gentlemanly to have a fistfight in front of a lady (namely, you).... and that tactic works*.
4. Five words: Vicious Farm Dog Sprint Prime. (Farm dogs run loose, and they can be alarmingly fast.)
3. When a farm dog sprint prime is coming up, the guys consider it gentlemanly to ride on the outside, between you and the pursuing farm dogs.
2. When you bonk, someone offers you a "pa'ar bar".
1. Your buddy behind you on a steep descent yells "Yeeehaw!" when he cleans it.
* I have had this happen on both coasts.... and on both coasts, my objective was to end the discussion before any actual violence happened and then to continue with our planned ride. On the west coast, though, I do it by fast talking and negotiation. In the Southeast, I play the Southern Womanhood card. (The particular buddy I'm thinking of--- nicest guy you ever met 99% of the time-- is hot tempered and has, on at least one occasion, broken his carbon-spoked wheel over another guy's head. I do not want to spend my ride time picking carbon fiber shards out of anyone, or explaining anything to any policeman anywhere. So, I tell them to stop, in the sweetest (and firmest) possible fashion, and because I am a woman in the south, that tactic works. (That blows me away, but hey, I'll take it.)
