discipline vs. regret

I stumbled upon this quote two weeks ago, and it's my new favorite:

We must all suffer from two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is that discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.

Since finding this quote, I've realized that this is exactly how I look at bicycle commuting. There are those days where I want to take the easy way out and *not* support myself on my bike. For example, some mornings (especially in the winter), I find it real, real hard to get out of bed. The mornings in Felton are dark. And cold. And wet. Getting out of a warm, fluffy bed and climbing onto a cold, steel bike before 6am takes a lot of discipline. But that discipline, as tough as it is, really does weigh less than the regret I feel when I *don't* support myself on my bike. For example, on the days that I should have ridden my bike to work but chose to drive, I find myself looking out my office window at my truck...and I regret having driven.

On Tuesday of this week, this realization paid off for me on my commute home. As of Tuesday, it had been raining in Santa Cruz non-stop for 48 hours. I was tired of riding in the rain. I was tired of being cold. I just wanted to be home. I came very close to steering my bike to the nearest bus stop and taking the bus home (we can put bikes on buses here).

Then I thought about this quote and I considered how I would feel after arriving home, stepping off the bus. I knew I would regret taking the bus home more than riding in the rain! So I took my normal route up Hwy 9.

The payoff was that a couple of miles up Hwy 9 I passed a guy on a mountain bike. He was riding pretty slowly because he had something large and bulky swinging from his neck, bouncing off of his chest. It was getting dark, so he had strapped a flashlight to his helmet, facing backwards so oncoming traffic would see him. Interested in his story, but also leery of the characters one can meet on this stretch of road, I passed him and said "Hi." He said hi back and commented that my headlights were bright enough to make him think I was a car.

Convinced that he wasn't one of our local wierdos, I slowed down and we started talking. Turns out he's a kayaker who was riding back up to his truck. He had put into the San Lorenzo river, which was running very strong due to the rains, and paddled down the river. He stashed his boat after the river run, then jumped on his bike to ride up to get his truck. I was super-impressed by that!

As we rode, he pointed out a section of the river that, during heavy rains like the ones we've had lately, turns into a Class III rapid. The section of river is one that I look down at, through a split in the redwoods, nearly every time I ride home. I've always known that the river was down there, but I never thought much about it because it just looks like a lazy, slow moving river snaking through the woods. I was so grateful to him for pointing that out - in all my days of riding along this river, I've never seen it under the circumstances that transform it into something so powerful.

Had I chosen to take the bus, I would have missed out on meeting this guy and learning this.

Discipline.