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Floyd Landis may be on the skids, but I am back on the bike. It's an even-better place to be than the Arc de Triomphe.

For 15 years, until 2003, I commuted to work and otherwise tooled around our sprawling, hyperactive city on a Raleigh SC-30 mountain bike, a tank of a two-wheeler. It was my main ax, year-round.

My rather large family shared only one car, so the bike made fiscal sense: It was an inexpensive second vehicle. It also made fitness sense for an exercise junkie: I could get where I needed to go and work out, saving time at the gym.

Deja vu.

Fiscal and fitness considerations are combining again to put me back on the Raleigh. Maybe similar issues are tempting you.

Yes, three years ago I broke down and bought a car. Honestly, it was a blessing. There were too many new places to go and new errands to run. The slow, single-seat bicycle couldn't keep up.

The bike, meanwhile, had piled up its share of unpleasant memories.

By then, I had endured: numerous flats and leaks, Slime and thick tubes notwithstanding; broken spokes; snarling dogs, to whom, I imagine, the bike represented the profile of a game animal; pedaling against wind storms; taking shelter, or not, from hail, lightning and torrential downpours; negotiating blizzards, freezing temperatures, darkness, potholes, close encounters with road-raging motorists and so on.

Nevertheless, I'm still paying for the danged car. Though it's a somewhat efficient vehicle, I'm feeling real pain at the pump. If I can rest the car more, I can save on gas and extend the demon's life so it's drivable longer after the payments end.

Exercise-wise, it's time to rest the legs, too, in a manner of speaking, by subbing some cycling into the running regimen I've embraced. (No, I won't entirely abandon the car; I'll mix things up in moderation. Call it a form of "periodizing.")

But the most important reason for returning to cycling came to me while riding to work this soggy week along the Paseo del Nordeste trail - one of the nicest in town.

The morning air was cool and fresh. The skies were gorgeously threatening in their mixtures of grays and whites, sun and rain. The trail was peaceful - nearly devoid of cyclists and free from motor traffic and its attendant stress. I could nod or even say good morning to passing cyclists, and they'd nod back.

I could feel the body come alive, feel my movement in the wind, feel gravity and balance in my turns, as if gliding in a sail-plane - all reasons I've found cycling a joy, a solace and a release since childhood.

Landis was mobbed by cheering fans and dogged by vehicles as he rode through Paris to victory in the Tour de France. Steroids or not, it must have been a rush.

But give me a quieter procession, along the Paseo trail, past smiling stands of datura, saltbush and snakeweed, waving chamisa, horse nettle and globe mallow, madly singing birds and leaping jackrabbits - headier than any parade to the Arc.

Ehn is Tribune opinion editor.