Sunday, January 23, 2011

I Ride Bikes

I thought I'd grow out of that. Riding bikes that is. I started riding bikes when I was young. I think the training wheels came off at four or five. I can remember my dad holding on to me that first time without training wheels and then he wasn't and I was, for a brief and glorious moment, riding on two wheels. Then I got to the hill in our driveway and I had to put my feet down and stop.

Soon after, I was seeing how fast I could bomb the hill on our dirt road. One day the speed was too much for me to control and I went down, filling my knees and elbows with oily rocks (my dad would pour used motor-oil down the road to keep the dust down). My mom fixed me right up, though, and after a couple days of recovery, I was back to riding bikes.

As a teenager, riding bikes meant jumping and dirt-roads. Once I even went on The North Umpqua Trail with my dad. That was my first single-track experience ever. I remember I lost my balance and fell down a steep bank toward the river. My bike and I were saved by an exposed, Ent-like tree-root.
I had so much fun that, when I was 18, I sold my truck for a mountain bike--a Specialized Rockhopper FSR. That bike is currently hanging in my garage. Eight years later, it's still my only mountain bike.

It wasn't until I lived in Spokane that the revelation struck me to ride bikes as a means to transportation in place of my Chevy. I put slick tires on my Rockhopper, had the guys at REI replace my cables and housing and I was riding bikes in traffic. The story of my obsession really begins here.

The day I put slicks on my Specialized is the day I began wanting more bikes. I was having fun riding around town on my mountain bike, but I knew I could go faster. I was going to get a geared commuter bike like the Cannondale Bad Boy Ultra. After shopping around and trying out several bikes I decided that I wanted to trim down to the bare essentials: Frame, fork, wheels, bars, crankset, one handbrake and one gear. Instead of the Bad Boy, I bought the Capo in black. Made in the USA. Simple. Sophisticated. My first bike with skinny tires and drop bars. This bike demanded that I ride it everyday. And the best part about it--it's fixed (not in the reproductive sense). From that day forward I had to have my Daily Fix.

The Daily Fix is a blog about riding bikes everyday. Though, I now own a Raleigh Sojourn tourer that I often ride to work, it is still my fixie that I ride when I want to go fast and it is my fixie that made me realize that I don't actually want to grow out of riding bikes.

1 comment:

  1. You are an addict ;) Nice blog...looking forward to the next one!

    ReplyDelete