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If you want to read Bicycle Freedom in Spanish, click here. If you want to know why, read on.

This isn't strictly about biking, but it goes along with the theme of pushing your limits. 

When I first went to Italy, I only spoke a limited version of Italian. But I quickly learned by creating situations where I had to do it. I called up landlords with an English/Italian dictionary in my hand, and rented a room using only Italian. I dated a girl who didn't speak a word of English.

In fact, whenever I needed a can opener or thumb tacks or a pair of scissors I had to whip out the dictionary and figure it out. (This got me in trouble once in a while, like when I tried to buy my first bicycle pump, but that's another story.)

So now the next big "ride" of my life is learning to communicate with the largest population in Los Angeles, get closer to the family of my sweetie, and hopefully do a bike tour of South America in the next few years.

This means learning Spanish. So I've set up a subdomain en espanol and I'm going to start writing in the language. Someone will no doubt say, "I didn't know you could write in Spanish."

I can't! Which is all the more reason to start doing it. Remember how  you first learned to ride a bike. You get on it and ride, and then you fall down. You get back up and ride again, and fall down. At some point you ride your bike more than you fall off it.

My Spanish blog is going to be a joke at first, riddled with horrible mistakes and errors. If you speak Spanish, feel free to laugh. Better yet, correct me and help me learn it.

For me, bike travel, bike touring, and just riding a bike in general are an analogy for all the growth and change you can go through in life. I suspect that nobody ever reaches their full potential. We just don't live long enough for that. So keep on pushing your limits, do the things you can't do until you can.

And never forget to enjoy the ride.