best

To ride or write? For me the answer is usually ride. Any given week i usually spend anywhere from 10 to 20 hours riding my bike. Occassionally i think, "man, if i spent as much time writing my diss as i did riding my bike, i'd have been done a long time ago." I feel a twinge of guilt, then i push my bike out the door and ride. This is no doubt the single most effective method for me to avoid writing. But it has its benefits. There are plenty of good reasons to ride a bike rather than write:

Writing makes me fat, riding helps me get skinny. When i write i have a bad tendency to wander the house while i'm thinking between sentences. More often than not this wandering takes me to the kitchen where i grab a handful of chips, cookies, cheese slices, whatever i have. When this process repeats itself multiple times a sitting, it doesn't take long to consume outrageous amounts of calories. One time in grad school i realized at the end of a day of writing that i had eaten a whole bag of ginger snaps. i couldn't eat ginger snaps for months. Sometimes when i'm planning ahead and know i'm going to be writing a lot i buy a bag of grapes or those little baby carrots so that i can munch on something healthy. Carrots or cookies, however, riding i'm burning calories, writing the calories i burn with minimal finger movements on a keyboard don't even begin to compensate for the calories i consume on my frequent wanderings to the kitchen.