Today was great.

I went mountain biking at South Fork with Lance and broken-footed Tyson. I have a new bike. It's a Giant Trance X1. I finally understand what mountain bikers are talking about when they say to flow with the trail. My last bike did not flow. This bike flows. It's beautiful.

We even saw a black bear. Lance and I tried to see how close we could get...because we're intelligent like that. hah. I asked Lance if he'd protect me and he said, "Well, I'll carry a rock." haha, Oh Lance. Then we chickened out, but we were probably 15 feet away.

The problem is, I really beat up my knee. Again. My poor left knee. Thank goodness neither Tyson nor Lance saw me crash, because it was just plain embarrassing, not even a good story. Seriously. I never even did tell them exactly what happened.

Previous to this summer I had a pretty decent scar on this knee, after getting sliced by a piece of rebar. Seven weeks ago, I crashed on this same knee, on a much more impressive crash where I went over the handlebars for good reason. (Well, maybe there's never a good reason to go over the handlebars...but my point is: there was a good story.) So then I had a bunch of scars on my knee and it looked like an exclamation point. This had just finished healing up, until today. Now I don't know what it'll look like. But I can tell you what it looks like right now...GROSS.

I cleaned it really well, but I still can't get all the dirt out of it. I have lots of left over bandages from my last crash...and even then, it just oozed all over my jeans. Sorry, I warned you, it's gross. I'm kind of annoyed. Like, really? Could I hurt myself somewhere besides the knee for once? Somewhere that doesn't bend all day long? Some place that doesn't make you gimp, so that everyone asks what happened? I need to make up an impressive story. I thought biking was supposed to be easier on the knees, as opposed to running. haha

Oh well, the mountain biking was great. Good trails, good company. All this crashing is completely worth it. I sometimes wonder why I've fallen in love with this brutal sport, but not very often. At least my foot isn't broken like Tyson's. That'd be worse for sure.