I am a life long runner. Between gymnastics and soccer and lacrosse, I've been a devotee of running, whether I liked it or not. I can not run on a track or a treadmill. It's a form of torture, the boredom, but I can run through neighborhoods or scamper over rocks and boulders or through trails. I always viewed cycling as a form of cheating, yea sure you get the cardio, eventually, but where's the working class ethos? I always thought something was missing, that cycling was something less than running, it wasn't as down and dirty, it was almost bourgeois. Don't get me wrong, I owned a bike as a kid and loved it, but it was only as a child, and after it was stolen sometime around the age of 12 I never got a new one.

Two months ago I moved into a new house with 3 roommates, and one of them just so happens to come from a family that owns a bike shop, in College Park, Maryland. And she also just so happens to have 5 bikes in the house, and just so happens to go on daily bike rides in the evenings. I wouldn't call them rides so much as ambles: I've never before experienced the leisure of slow rides through the twilit evening of a quiet neighborhood still sitting down to dinner, where there's not a car driving, where every part of the street is open for you to swim and lean curb-to-curb through, where there are sloping hills that go for blocks and blocks and you can just coast and feel the wind go at 30 miles an hour through your hair and over your sweaty body without pushing the pedals once, and don't even get me started on the one time we did this high. I'm not a hippy (alright, I sort of am), but I was about to quit my job and renounce all earthly possessions except for my bike and a bottle of water and do that forever.

That evening ritual extended to exercise. I noticed that I always built up a bit of a sweat while on my bike rides, so why not push it further? I love a good run, why not a ride, I thought. The thing about running is that no matter how fast you go, you're familiar with how fast the scenery passes by you. You've been walking and running for your entire life, and you span and take in the environment quicker than it takes for you to move through it. With bike riding, you cut through horizons in fractions of the time running takes you, so my greatest fear with running, the boredom of it, is instantly solved.

I love moments when you get to witness your assumptions about how the world works get reworked before your very eyes. When you experience a paradigm shift and are cognizant of it. It humbles you and teaches you that no matter how much you think you know, you still don't know shit. Bike riding did that to me. And I really fell in love with it. Now excuse my woody for cycling, I'm going to excuse myself and go on a ride right this minute.