A group of lovely yellow flowers. Taken some time ago.  Notice the bee in the upper left area.

After a few days of grayness and clouds, the sun has decided to return, and I am so thankful. The last five days have had a little bit of everything weather-wise. I left Venice Thursday with a gray sky. Then Friday morning I awoke in Santa Ynez to a beautiful blue sky and decided to go on a bike ride. About ten miles into it – with nowhere to go except continuing the way I was going – I was cranky and yelling bad words. Thank goodness I was on a busy road with cars whizzing by so no one could hear me and think I was some kind of lunatic. The stretch of road I was on had a head wind that was miserable, and the sun was beating down on me, so I was not a happy camper. It was only a 15-mile ride, which I can usually do without much trouble, but I barely made it home. Two days later it was gray, cool and almost drizzly, but I set out on my bike anyway and finished 30 miles feeling better than my previous ride. Funny how the weather can make one ride feel twice as long as it really is and the other half as long. Wind is not always a cyclist’s friend.

I have been a cyclist for most of my life. As a little girl, I lived on my bike and my skateboard. I was also crashing a lot, and was rarely without a Band-Aid. I did not ride much between high school and when I moved to California, but for the past eight years or so I have stayed with it pretty consistently. I have a love-hate relationship with exercise and working out, but after any long break I usually end up back in my running shoes or on my bike. Even during long stretches where I don’t exercise regularly, I am at least cycling now and then. In Santa Ynez I am in cycling heaven, with multiple beautiful rides that have little or no traffic. Lance Armstrong and his team even train there – riding right by our house, in fact.

I had a serious bike accident in 1999 when I was training to do the AIDS Ride from San Francisco to LA. I was in a back brace for three months and physical therapy another three months, and I didn’t ride for a year or so after that. I kept feeling afraid I would get hit by another car, and that I had used up my good fortune by not getting killed by the first one. My friend Carol helped me approach it from a different place, and I still think of it. She explained that I just needed to go back to considering by bike as my friend and my playmate. I needed to just spend time with it, take it for a walk and then take it for a spin. Once I looked at that way, it was easy to remember why I loved cycling so much in the first place, and why it was so important I get back into it. Cycling was my friend, and considering I only got hit by a car once in all the thousands of miles I had traveled on my bike throughout my life, chances are I’d be just fine. So far so good.