“I’m in love again. I don’t know of any other way to describe it.”

My mother cocked her head. It hadn’t been the answer she was expecting. She’d asked me how my ride had gone—an impromptu jaunt to spin the legs out and get a feel for a new pedal/shoe setup. She’d expected a quick summary, perhaps. Yet I’d struggled to find an appropriate explanation and eventually there was only that one that made sense. She smiled as mothers do.

Truth be told, it’s been a difficult past few months: I haven’t been riding.

What started as a dull ache in my Achilles evolved into much of my leg hurting in some form or another. If it wasn’t the Achilles, it was the calf, hamstring, quad, glute or hip. Sometimes, it hurt to just stand. Being a responsible Healthy Young Adult, I sought medical attention. This kicked off a long process of finding a practitioner that could look at the "whole chain” and not just the individual links. I finally found someone and had some immediate results. I may or may not have used “giddy” to describe my mood once I got to that point.

Yet I’d been away from the bike for longer than I’d like to admit. When stubbornness overruled reason and I rode anyway, I hurt. A lot. So I’d stopped riding, because things were definitely not okay. That reality had pained me even further. Much like after a crash, just looking at a bike had taken on a different tone… a beautiful machine became a thing that was associated with pain. Instead of prompting fond memories of great rides, memories of aches and days of limping around surfaced. It wasn’t fun.

So after working with my specialist for a bit, I was instructed to ride on a new pedal/shoe setup. Immediately, my mind found itself doing all sorts of entertaining and contradictory acrobatics of uncertainty and excitement. But I love this! But it’s a cause of pain! But! Butbutbutbutbut!

My curiosity, though, overrode all of that. I wanted to see how things felt, pain be damned.

So I rode. And I remembered how much I love riding. I remembered the meditative spin, the intuitive and rhythmic dance of climbing, the motions out of the saddle, the burn of lungs and the remarkable memory of muscles. I ended up riding longer and farther than I’d planned simply because… it was the only thing that made sense. I was reunited with something that defies explanation.

Since that day, I’ve ridden more. It’s been rocky at times, with what seems like a cruel moving target of positioning, habit-breaking and strength training, but… well, it's okay. I’m back on the bike, and I know this is part of the deal. Give and take. Upstroke and downstroke.

Yesterday, I was rewarded with a morning commute that featured lifting fog, a surprising lack of traffic and an overwhelming sense of quiet and peace. The soft pre-dawn light and a curious owl silently gliding over an isolated bike path didn’t hurt the experience, either. The evening commute, though, surpassed all of that with a truly mind-blowing sunset that demanded attention for well over a half-hour.

At one point, after having stopped to soak in the view, a simple thought crossed my mind:
It’s good to be in love with riding again.