Sucking the Marrow out of Life!

I often feel like Thoreau when he wrote...

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, To put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die Discover that I had not lived.”

I was able to get out on the bike today. It's been a few weeks. Being the last day of October and a miraculously gorgeous day, I decided to ride up the canyon in search of some cold mountain air. I rode to Alta, surprising myself that I had that ride in my legs, since I'm really extremely out of shape right now. Alta is at the top of little cottonwood canyon, the hardest climb along the Wasatch Front. It's a full hour of suffering. It felt great to get out and breathe through every pore in my body, especially after a freaky stressful week at work and school. The temperature at alta was just over 40 degrees which made the descent marvelously cold. The pain makes me feel alive!
For me, there is nothing more purifying than riding up a high mountain pass or through a beautiful canyon and inhaling the thin mountain air and loving life. When I'm on the bike, it's like time atands still and the world temporarily falls silent as the only sound I can hear is the sound of my own breathing and the whir of my tires on the pavement. At that moment, the world is perfect. That's it. That's why I do it. It's something I will do until the day I die.

PS. Yeah, I also ride so I can eat anything I want. For example, I ate an entire box of chocolate dipped strawberry creamies today....no guilt, friends. No guilt!!