I was just reading a post from a normally indefatigable friend of mine who’s struggling with motivation to keep racing. My guess is that, rather than a surrender, this is a small crisis of conscience that will burn off whatever doubts she has about taking it to the next level, because she’s a bad-ass and everything she’s written about it thus far has been excitement and fire and joy.

But it did get me thinking about my relationship to cycling, and the things I’ve accomplished this year, and where I want it to go from here. I’ve logged about 4000 miles this year, most of them commuting miles, but at least a thousand of them were training for and riding my first century back in August.

As I began training for that ride, I’d thought I might be taking my first step towards getting into serious road riding. I put in pre-dawn miles and went after hills and thought about how heavy my bike was and how thick my tires were. I ate little blocks of gummi caffeine and sugar, occasionally found someone else going fast to trade drafting duties with, and wondered if I should get serious and trade the pedal clips for real cycling shoes and clipless pedals. I thought about joining a club and riding a featherweight bike in a paceline on Saturday mornings, and derided myself for having a triple crank.

Some things have become clear to me since then, most notably that performance road riding’s not my cup of tea. Occasionally I take on something that seems big and challenging out of curiosity or to prove something to myself, or in the case of the Livestrong Challenge because I wanted to do something good and difficult. But the truth is that I just don’t have much of a passion for pushing the envelope, my competitive fire doesn’t burn all that hot, and that anything that starts feeling like Serious Business loses my attention. I’m bliss-driven.

For example, I’ve gone weeks without making it out to a disc golf course, but I’ll still get up at 5:00 a.m. a few times a week to head out to a field with a stack of Rocs or Teebirds for an hour or so before work. There’s a peripheral motivation to become a better disc golfer and a stronger competitor, but that’s not really why I do it. I do it because I love throwing discs, I love shaping lines in the sky and watching the disc follow them. If there were no courses nearby, I’d still get out to a field because I love the snap of the throw and the shape of the flight, and I experience a lot of perfect moments doing it.

The perfect moments I have on bikes are blissful and joyous, very few of them have involved much suffering. The best rides I’ve had this year have been on partly cloudy days in the mid-60’s, flying down brick alleys on 60mm balloon tires with my hands wrapped around a pair of Albatross bars. I love riding my Xtracycle with my daughter to her school. I love wrenching on our bikes and building wheels and tuning drivetrains until they’re quiet and smooth. I love bunny-hopping and off-street bike trails and saying Good Morning to crossing guards on my way to work and cranking and rolling and flowing with traffic and breathing the air and having nothing but the sky above me the whole time. My brass bell is one of the prettiest tones I can think of. Sometimes, I like to go slow.

There’s a hundred things that make me smile about being on a bike, but there’s not a single one of them that a heart-rate monitor would make any better for me. Sometimes I wish that weren’t the case. Sometimes, I think it would be awesome to be driven to achieve peak performance, to measure my effort by my perseverance and endurance, to conquer and win. And I enjoy watching folks with those qualities struggle and grind and endure, I’m amazed by their superhumanity (as well as their humanity) and take delight in their performances. But the only measures of my cycling experience that really motivate me are grins and laughs.

I realized that I wasn’t dissatisfied because my Long Haul Trucker was the wrong bike for how I wanted to ride, but rather that I wasn’t doing the kind of riding I truly love doing (for which the Trucker actually is perfect). I put the fenders back on, the clips came off the pedals (though I may pick up a pair of these or these for traction), and it’s getting mustache bars at the earliest opportunity.

I also picked up a beautiful Paramount Series 3 earlier this year, and had plans to outfit it for road riding. But I think I’m going to put riser bars, platform pedals, and 28’s on it instead. I may not have room for a serious road bike in my stable, but I can make room for a zippy street bike. Especially if it’s fun to ride.

My favorite moment during yesterday’s festivities came while watching the swearing-in and post-swearing-in speech, I realized I was needlessly bracing myself for cringes that weren’t going to happen. There were no ‘Nookyuller’ moments, nothing about putting food on my family, and I realized that I could relax a bit. Then, a little while later, I realized (again) that President Obama is not simply an adequate speaker that won’t embarrass us with his grammar and pronunciation, but that he’s an excellent speaker that leaves one feeling better than they did before he delivered the speech. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve enjoyed seeing a presidential speech delivered, that was really nice.

And you know, I thought my farewell feelings for Bush would have been angrier, but they weren’t. I just can’t attribute as much evil to the guy as I can to someone like, for example, Kissinger. There’s a lot of people in Washington that are sharp, informed, and experienced enough to know what kind of evil they’re unleashing on the country and the world, after 8 years I’m not convinced that George W. Bush is one of them.

Cheney, by contrast, I expected to be sent back to wherever he came from via a circled pentagram drawn with magic powder on the floor of a red-walled room in the White House’s deepest basement room. Ya know what I mean? Like the kind of room where the door is made with 8″ oak timbers, and has a small window with thick, wrought iron bars and a message carved into it in Latin?

But now that they’re gone, I wish them a pleasant retirement and beseech them both to resist any temptations to come out of it. For anything. Neither of them should probably do any vacationing near The Hague, for that matter.

So, the first real ride of this glorious new America, a seemingly routine commute in to work this morning, was in the 20 degree range, but the wind was light and the sun shone brightly. After I made egg sammiches for the family, Rebbie and I rode together to drop Ruby off at school, which was a rare treat, and then I headed in to work solo. I did add a quarter mile to the trip finding out why North Capitol was completely closed off south of Washington Hospital Center in both directions. Evidently there was a fire on the west side of North Capitol, just south of Adams, that required a bunch of pumpers and a lot of water. And you know what happens when you spray the street with a few acre-inches of water in the early morning hours of a 20 degree day? You guessed it, a sheet of ice between a quarter-inch and an inch thick for about 3-4 blocks, but with formations like you’d expect to see close to a recent lava flow. So if your north-south or south-north commute this morning seemed way, way worse than usual, don’t blame the out-of-towners.

After that, the ride was wonderful. Not just wonderful like, zippy and without confrontation. Wonderful like, just this side of Sister Maria running and singing across Austrian mountain meadows. You see, last weekend I replaced my old drop bars with Nitto Noodle Bars, and my first impression after riding them for more than two test blocks is that these bars are alive with the Sound of Music. They’re nice and wide, and the top section is swept back a bit, about as much as my wrists need to feel perfectly natural. The ramps behind the brake levers are almost flat and super comfy, and the drops are dreamy. Every place on them is a usable hand position, and all the ones I’ve found so far have been really comfy. Seems like something I should review after I’ve had more time with it, more on that later.

All in all, I gotta say, it’s been a great weekend, great couple days, and it’s so good to wake up in Obama’s America. I’m not a fanboy or anything, but at some point early in Bush’s second term, I kinda started believing deep down that it was never going to end, and that this day would never come. It’s here, and it brought Noodle Bars with it. Rad.

How were your Inaugural Festivities?

There’s an Au Bon Pain downstairs that I frequent in the afternoons when I’m feeling peckish and need to top off the tank before the ride home. Nothing extravagant, a small cup of coffee and a little treat, typically.

Yesterday, I was perusing the baked goods and was drooling a little over a creme de fleur, which looks like a muffin-ish confection with 3 buttons of custard on the top, indicating what lies below. That sounds pretty good doesn’t it? But wait, it gets better: it’s actually 3 sections, baked together into a muffin-shape, so that you can actually tear 1/3 of it off, and that little guy is a self contained pastry packet of custard!

Oh man.

I gained some control over my visual appetite, and decided that I’d be better off with a pumpkin muffin. “There’s no need for the triple-cripple custard bomb,” I chided myself, ” when that pumpkin muffin will be very good with a small coffee, and a healthier choice overall.” I was feeling pretty good about overcoming my impulsive, custard-laden first choice, and making a wiser, healthier decision.

Except I didn’t. That goddam pumpkin muffin has 530 calories, 81g of carbs, and almost no nutrional value. By comparison, a Big Mac has 540 calories, 45g of carbs, and 25g of protein, as well as calcium and iron. I’m not saying that a Big Mac is healthy, and I’ve certainly got ethical concerns over the source of a lot of those calories, but there’s no denying that from a nutritional perspective, I’d have been better off with Le Big Mac.

Oh, and the creme de fleur? 490 calories with 57g of carbs. And it’s filled with custard, in each of three discreet sections, like a pastry custard tanker filled to overflowing, the tops shaped like little custard flowers. I think it’s even dusted with powdered sugar.

Stupid pumpkin muffin.