Thoughts on a stormy post-bike night

I dislike running, it hurts my knees these days. Swimming isn't really my thing and there aren't many pools accessible to me. Using the cardio machines at the gym gets really really boring even with an iPad and a subscription to Amazon Video. Bicycling, I actually kind of like. Yeah its painful and difficult and requires just as much motivation to get out the door as anything else but it is low impact and not that bad once you get into a rhythm.

In a perfect universe we wouldn't have to do any kind of exercise , our bodies would just look and perform perfectly all the time for whatever we wanted. In the real world though we have to counteract the effects of office jobs, work off stress, drop winter weight, and maintain muscle groups for whatever activities we enjoy. I find that bicycling does a pretty good job of keeping my body in shape for riding a sport bike.

Just like with motorcycling I ride a sport oriented bicycle. It works all the muscles in my legs, my lower back, and core from being hunched over the bars. It also keeps me in touch with the very real fact that everyone else on the road is out to kill me.

This week has been very tough for me. There are a lot of stressors at work and in life. I have great things to look forward to this year but my mind is the disquiet type that will agonize over the bad things constantly until I pull it out of the ditch manually. At work I can't physically check out when I start getting into a chase-my-tail mental downturn.

Tonight was Albany bike night. ABN is basically an excuse to get together with friends at a greasy spoon and be inappropriate, talk bikes, and anything else we can't do in our everyday lives. Getting there was hellish on a sport bike. The first five miles getting out of Corvallis was stop and go in the traffic pattern of people leaving Corvallis who work there but can't afford to live there, and the dearth of good routes to get from there to Albany. Then it was faster moving but congested traffic the rest of the way. I know its better than the Bay Area for instance, but it still sucks.

Realization of why I ride number nine hundred and sixty came on the way home when I did something as simple as accelerate hard from a stop and around a corner, riding first all the way to redline before shifting. In that handful of seconds where my 782cc of growling V4 symphony turns from a sedate street machine into a sixteen valve monster my entire neurotic being was quiet and all that remained was the next three seconds. The forgetting of self for a few seconds of hard acceleration, all of the worries about rent increases, angry coworkers, election year media stress, and even worrying about speeding tickets goes away.

Someone needs to bottle that feeling and sell it.