Bikes are Beautiful

To continue my apparent theme of post titles, my next entry will be called "bikes are bicycles" and my next will be "bikes are cookies". I seem to be just stating things that are true and creating an image, so consider me as a painter.

I shared my excitement with you all in my last post, and I just want to reiterate how great bike riding is: it's pretty great.

I've now had a couple weeks of outdoor adventuring, and I've really been soaking in just how much bikes mean to me. This year has provided me with a lot of time to... reflect... and it's rejuvenating to bask in the bliss of bikes. Don't get me wrong, I have loved bike riding the last couple of years, and there is no profession that I would rather have ended up in. Bike racing is a different type of fun for me. I enjoy the process of training, the satisfaction of completing painful intervals, and the fun of working towards a goal. On a very rare occasion, usually when it was terrible weather, I would come back from training and tell Marissa that "bike riding was a job today". 99.9% of the time though, bikes never felt like work, and that's wonderful. The fun with bike riding as a means to improve at bike racing is still great fun, it is just a more calculated and focused glee.

The past couple of weeks, I have rediscovered the pure, child-like freedom of bike riding. It is soul healing to catch myself smiling just at the act of riding bikes. Speaking of smiling, this happened:

We're stuck in traffic. And I just got new teeth. I'm incredibly embarrassed that I did this! #newgrill

A video posted by @ianmcrane on Mar 24, 2015 at 5:35pm PDT

I could endlessly rant about the perfection of going out on bike rides, but I hope all you reading this find that. If it's tough training or a casual ride, make sure and remember that bike riding is loads of fun. Pure joy! Sure, we may also do it for other reasons, be it: for racing, weight loss, transportation, or many others; but we all started bike riding because it's fun and freeing. If you catch yourself gleefully giggling on your next ride, go ahead and blame me! That's fine.

I dropped that tooth video in there just because it fit so well with where my sentence was going, so let's hit on that world really quickly.

After ~8.5 hours in the dentist's chair, I am about 75% to done with teeth work. So that's exciting! While it may look as if I have a full mouth of teeth again, this is not the end of the dental work adventures. My ...real... fake teeth are still being manufactured, but this week I had the broken teeth prepped and this round of fake teeth put in. They're basically a mouth guard that's cemented in. With this, most of my upper teeth are now one piece. That means no flossing and no spinach getting caught up in there. That's pretty convenient! Now I can go to bed SO much faster without the flossing step in the routine!

Downside to this part of the fake teeth world is that although I have objects there in my mouth, I still need to eat as if I didn't have anything there. So no sandwiches, apples or burritos YET, but soon! When I get the real ones in here at some point in April, I'll definitely be celebrating that step with a big ol' bite into something exciting. Now that I don't have most of four teeth missing, I bite my lip a lot more, and can also whistle again. AND I ate a banana like a normal person, so feeling pretty smug about that.

That's all for now. Have a great weekend!

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