All right, let me start today's episode with this story. A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were out on a bike ride.

We live in an area that's well known for the amount of road bikers that are attacking the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

And while we look pretty darn close to sea level, within a few miles, you can find yourself on a gradual climb that will slowly but surely make your thighs burn, but it's not bad enough that you necessarily

want to stop, or you can find yourself on a short climb so steep that your heart is beating

out of your chest and you can feel it in your head. And you seriously just want to jump off your

bike and walk it up the hill, which I've felt like doing so many times. Now my wife is the cyclist

and the runner and the swimmer,

for that matter, and I have been the runner, period. But over the last year or so, we've gone out

almost every Saturday for anywhere from an hour and a half to a three-hour bike ride, and it has been

an absolute blast. I take back all the things I've said about cyclists over the years.

And yeah, I have the padded shorts and the bike shirts with

the pockets in the back and all of those things. And I think I definitely can look the part. But again,

my wife is the one that has done the century rides or the 100 mile rides as well as a double

century or 200 mile ride. And the longer and longer we go in hopes of preparing me for my own

century or two, I find that no matter how

padded my seat is, my bottom at some point just is not a fan of being on the bike for hours and

hours. But I'll get there. But anyway, back to the story. So we hit a particularly difficult, a very

short hill in the area called Chili Hill. And again, it was hard, short but hard. And when we

crested the top, we stopped for a quick drink,

and we were going to admire the scenery and take a picture, because of course, in this day and age,

if you do not have a picture, then it perhaps never happened. But I was still huffing and I was

puffing. And when she said, where do you want to go from here? I asked about the various routes home, and when she laid out three different routes to get back,

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