Today I started working part time for RAGBRAI.

This is excellence. RAGBRAI is annually the best week of my year. Maybe you don't know what RAGBRAI is. It is a bike ride, across the state of Iowa. It is the largest organized ride of its kind. Lots of other states have their own version, but I'm told by people who have done those rides that RAGBRAI is just the best. On any given day of the week there's roughly twenty thousand people on the ride, and most of them are smiling as if the moment you see them is the best moment of their lives. Strangers ride next to each other and talk, people fall in love. My mother and my step-father met on RAGBRAI. Now granted, I come from a family of cyclists and a lot of our family friends are cyclists, but I've heard a lot of stories like that.

This morning I rode my bicycle downtown to work. I rode through Gray's Lake park, along the trails past the lake and north to the river. A morning ride along empty bike trails, skirting the puddles, pedaling occasionally. I weaved a bobbing trail along the path, enjoying the luxury of the space, the empty trail, the whole park was mine to use.

Today was the first day it has been warm enough to ride this year. On March 1st the temperature in Des Moines was -7, that's Fahrenheit, not Celsius. The weather finally broke though. There's nothing like the first warm day of spring to remind you how nice optimism feels.

You step out of your door and hear birds in the morning, birds are coming back, and the sun is out, and you are wearing less clothes than you've worn in five months. Maybe you're walking or maybe you're driving, but you will undoubtedly see someone jogging on your way to work. Today, the first warm day of spring, is the first day that the act of running around outside doesn't seem insane, in fact it seems like a really nice idea.

Everything is ahead in spring. That is why we talk about love in the context of spring.

I had lunch with some of the guys who I ride with. They're actually the ones who got me the RAGBRAI gig. We were talking about what causes drama on a RAGBRAI team. We decided that it was people who were unprepared to suffer. I think it's a little bit more than that. I think it is people who don't laugh at their own pain. I might be wired differently though. My Dad told me a story about what I was like as an infant. He said "You know when a child is first learning how to walk, they fall down a lot. Usually when they fall down their parent rushes over and the kid just starts screaming and crying. That's what happened with your sister, every time she'd fall down I'd rush over to her and I'd have to calm her down and wipe her eyes and nose. You though, you were the complete opposite. I'd see you fall down, and Michael, you've never fallen over gently, when you fall, you fall hard. I'd rush over to you expecting you to be crying and screaming, and more often than not you'd be sitting there laughing." I like to believe that I understood in a sort of instinctual way that it is fun to be alive and pain is incidental to that. It is certainly incidental to bicycling. I'm two days back in the saddle and my ass hurts already, in a really funny way though.