And a month later...

Here I am again.

Forget updating ever couple of days, I can't even remember to check my bank balance that often. No, I'm kidding. Actually, the real difficulty in updating very often lies in the fact that life (which includes cycling, imagine that!?) has been interfering with...well, life.

Here in the northeast we've become mired in that awful beast known as "fall" in which the sun drops below the horizon early in the evening and leaves us stuck on stationary trainers or bundling up and donning lights to stick out a few miles in the chill of the evening air. It's an ever-present dilemma that anyone in a New England state will have to come to grips with early in their cycling experience. Gone are the long lazy evenings of tooling along trails and less traveled back roads. Those carefree summer days are replaced by worries of darkness, fallen leaves hiding slippery roots or potholes in the road, and the creeping chill of the coming winter.

Not to fret: the weekends are prime time to spend with the rubber side down. Knobby or skinny, mud or tarmac, spinning or mashing, climbing or descending, it is all good. It's just the exhilaration of the ride that makes the week's troubles melt away. It is worth all the time spent in the office, in meetings or on the phone. And it's one of the only escapes from reality that allows us to focus on the next obstacle in front of us without any thought of the consequences lying down the trail.

Wouldn't it be nice if life was just as easy?