perfect day here for just riding a bike around

5 hours again today, after 3 days off due to a trip to tokyo - if you`ve never been to tokyo, trust me, there`s nowhere to train! it`s just one massive, beautiful, mad sprawl. i know some good racers who live there and it amazes me that they can get into decent condition for the season - they have about a 2 hour ride out to the hills through endless traffic on roads with stop lights every 100 metres or so... but the place is amazing and i spent a few good hours in some very cool bike shops, drooling over some very nice hand-built fixed-wheel machines and all the usual hi-tech road stuff...

so the ride today was a real pleasure, as seeing all those bikes made me twitchy to get on my own... i did quite a hard 5 hours, just to see where my form is - and it`s not bad. it`s amazing the way that a good season the year be4 stays in the legs. it was a beautiful day too, out by the coast on quiet roads, and to top it all off, a tailwind for the last 40km home... doesn`t get much better than that!

i was reminded on the way back of the words of Jean Bobet, the brother of the great Louison, and a fine rider in his own right - he wrote a fantastic book, Tomorrow, We Ride - and in it are these words - he`s talking about those rare days when you go out on the bike and have a flier...

…it is delicate, intimate and ephemeral. It arrives, it takes hold of you, sweeps you up and then leaves you again. It is for you alone. It is a combination of speed and ease, force and grace. It is pure happiness.

nicely put!