Summer usually is gin season, but this summer I've been drinking a lot of whiskey sours.

File that thought for a moment.

This summer I have been riding my bicycles much more than in the previous two summers. Last year, the low mileage was due to laziness and waiting for the perfect day to ride: warm, but no overly so; sunny, but not too much; no wind; and no rain. Around here, we get maybe a dozen such days a year. The lack of perfect conditions gave me great excuses to not ride. The summer before last I needed carpal tunnel surgery on both hands in July because when I was riding, my hands were going numb, which is not a good situation when you're zipping down a hill at 30 mph. By the time I recovered, I figured I'd just put the bike away for the season, even though I had recovered by early September.

But this summer I've decided to ride, perfect conditions be damned. I have two bicycles. One is a road bike that's the equivalent of a Porsche: The frame and fork are made of super-light carbon fiber, any metal parts are made of lightweight alloys, the lightweight wheels only have 24 spokes, the tires are less than an inch wide and roll at about 90 pounds psi, and I have 30 speeds to choose from, with the gear shifters and brakes cleverly combined into a single lever on the handlebars. My second bike, a road bike, is the equivalent of a Jeep: slower and harder to ride, but able to gobble up terrain that the road bike simply can't be ridden in. It has 24 speeds, a frame that's part aluminum and part steel, tires that are more than two inches wide that roll at about 45 psi, and in low gear I can practically climb a tree with it. I have been riding the off-road bike almost exclusively this summer so I can get my road bike legs worked into shape for the 20-, 25- and 30-mile rides I take on it.

I rode five days last week, each ride lasting over an hour and requiring nearly two quarts of cold water and three bandanas to soak up the sweat. So this morning, I figured the scales would be kind to me; I'm trying to lose 10 pounds before the semester starts. I was more than somewhat dismayed, then, to discover this morning that I weighed the same as I had last week.

And then I thought about those whiskey sours. I did all the calculations and figured they are about 500 calories per drink, and I was downing two a day, sometimes three. At two a day, that's 7,000 calories in the course of the week. No wonder my weight was staying the same.

So now, I have banned the sours from my list in favor of (shudder) light beer. Granted, it will be Heineken, but still, if I don't do that, I won't have any pants that fit at the start of the semester. Unless I wear my cycling shorts (which contain plenty of Spandex) to class. And that's so ugly a mental picture that I apologize to you for bringing it up.