Like Riding a Bike

• 03 August 2024
• reflecting

The cliché, it turns out, is mostly true. But only mostly.

Since I moved to East Lansing -- seriously, for seven years now -- I have had the itch to get a bicycle. Nothing fancy, nothing fast, just a commuter bike that I can tool around town on and maybe hit a well-paved trail or two with.

But I haven't scratched that itch, largely because I wasn't sure it was real. I mean, it's been at least *coughcoughcough* years since I've been on a non-stationary bike. (The number you missed is big enough that even I'm shocked by it.) So I wasn't entirely convinced that if I had a bicycle I'd really ride it. And as that number of years got larger and larger (not to mention the number of years old I am, which just seems to keep increasing) I got more and more convinced that riding a bike again was out of the question.

I had a series of bikes as a kid, as you do, and loved to ride. In high school my bus stop was about a mile from my house, so I rode my bike there most mornings and left the bike locked to a pole, and then rode it home again. One day, though, when I was maybe 14, I hit a patch of wet gravel on my ride home and lost control of the bike. I slid one way and then overcompensated the other, and wound up with a pretty nice road rash. That healed quickly, but the fear produced by that fall didn't. I got my driver's license soon after that (this was Louisiana in the '80s, a time and place where I am horrified to remember that we let kids get full-on licenses at 15) and got a crappy car and just put the bike away.

Some years later -- I think I was in my masters program -- I wanted to ride again, and so I bought a pretty cool bike and rode back and forth to campus a bit, and around the campus lakes a bit. It was nice, but not as great as I wanted it to be. I think I hadn't really shaken the fear. In any case, after my masters I moved to a series of non-bikeable places, and that was that.

So when I moved here and discovered how many of my colleagues cycle -- some quite seriously, others for basic getting-around-town -- I started thinking about it again. Thinking about how fun it would be to have a bike to run errands and ride the river trail on. But I did nothing.

Until today. One of the people I follow on Mastodon (hello, malena!) has been posting a bit lately about the feeling of freedom that riding can generate, and it's had me looking around online to see if there was something that would call to me. And today it did.

Before I could let myself overthink it, I drove out to the bike shop that had the model I'd fallen in love with, got into a great conversation with the guy who worked there, and took the bicycle out for a test ride in the parking lot. Getting started was a little awkward, but once I was going... it was exactly right. It felt great.

So I bought it -- spending WAY more than I wanted to, but boy do I love this thing -- and brought it home, and went out for a several-times-around-the-block ride to start the process of relearning how to ride.

That cliché, again, is mostly true. Parts of riding feel absolutely natural. But there are several things that I'm going to have to work on. My balance is not what it was, and feeling a little wobbly, especially when I'm going slowly, produces a flicker of that old fear. So I need to work on balance, both for confidence and to get to the point where I can comfortably lift a hand off the handlebars to signal turns, which I'll definitely need to be able to do before I can venture any further.

I so look forward to venturing further.

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