Only fools and cyclists

If there was any doubt I was back, it's been well and truly put to bed tonight. All week there has been a big wind blowing in from the south, and this evening it was accompanied by rain (albeit relatively light rain). There was nothing for it other than getting on the bike and making sure I was out there. Funny thing about riding in the rain, all of those little excuses you think of beforehand tend to disappear as soon as you're actually out there, it's almost as if all those things they taught us to fear from the rain as children seem totally pointless now, and the wind adds to it. It's just you against the world into a big headwind, and that feeling is incredibly liberating. For a while, all of life's other little problems are blown away, or washed away. For a while, it's good to get right back to nature on a very basic level.

It's also allowed me an opportunity to reflect on just what might have caused this illness in the first place. Indeed, it's not the first time I've had food poisoning (or something similar), and I've been looking for common links between 2005 and February 2003 to try to work it all out. The only possibility I've come up with is that some of those pristine streams I drink from occasionally aren't so pristine after all.

However, this opens up other questions -- firstly, how did whatever caused the problem stay in my system for five days before actually making me sick? On one of those days I managed to pull out a 240km ride in temperatures that hit 32 degrees C, so surely it should have been sweated out. It's not as if I drunk a lot from the Urliup stream on Good Friday (certainly not as much as other days in the past). Then of course, there's the issue of just why it should cause a problem this time, I've taken water from that stream on several occasions (just as I had done on the Springbrook one which was the suspect from 2003). On the other hand, perhaps I was just unlucky with something I bought at the supermarket. The frustrating part is that I'd like this question cleared up, but all I seem to be getting here are more questions.