Rain, Rain, and Other Things, Gone Away

Perfect, perfect, perfect.


75 degrees, sunny, gentle breeze. (Not wind. I hate wind.) On the road by 4:30; no plans for the evening except to ride and ride. Days like today are why I do it. No matter what stresses the rest of my daily life provides, nothing erases them like a ride.


God, this is sounding stupid. "La, la, la. Isn't life great? Isn't biking great?"


There are a few things in my life I'm sure of, and one of them is that when I bike I feel better. My playlist for today included a couple of podcasts of "This American Life". One was about infidelity. When I made my ride across the country four years ago, it wasn't too long after I had been dumped hard. All right, it was ten months later, but I still felt so burned that I thought about that, um, woman, quite a bit during those 3,000 miles. I'm not going to lie and say that the trip completely washed the treachery from my mind, but it helped, a lot.

I don't know if I have a real point here. My life is good. I like getting older. I like being fitter than most people my age. I like that my students think I'm 30. I like that cycling provides me both short-term and long-term benefits.


(There's something I'm not fully divulging here. A recent development in my life has once again made cycling a necessary catharsis. It's not illness, or legal trouble, or financial trouble. It's female again. But more than that I cannot say. For now.)


So, 75 degrees, sunny, gentle breeze. And a bit of a mental scrub.


Perfect, perfect, perfect.