My Life On Two Wheels: A Reflection On Bicycles

2021-06-23

This post just grew and grew as the words just kept spilling out into my terminal. Thank you to my fediverse friends @c0debabe whose toot sparked this post and @montagsoup for the nice title that is much better than what I was going to call it. TLDR: I love bicycles. Riding them, working on them, looking at them etc.

Bicycles have been a bright spot in my life. Possibly my favorite invention of all time. Growing up I was ALWAYS riding my bike somewhere, building a ramp to jump bikes off of with my friends or dreaming of a nice new bike I wanted that we couldn't afford. The time period I grew up in was a bit different to how the world feels now. Most kids were allowed to ride their bikes around on their own and explore, play, sometimes get into a little mischief. Parents didn't seem to be as worried about the many dangers of the world that are more in our collective consciousness these days. This was pre- or right on the cusp of the widespread internet after all.

Then there was an abscence of bicycles in my life for a while. Obtaining a driver's license in high school distracted me from my love of bicycles for a handful of years. After going away to college I also didn't really think about bicycles much for the first couple years. I lived either on campus or only a couple blocks away from campus so walking everywhere was easy. At that point I switched colleges, moved in with a friend a bit further away from my new campus but within a comfortable cycling distance. So poor college student me went and bought a terrible cheap bike from Walmart. It was such a poorly made bike but it got me riding again in a small capacity. What really got me fully back into bicycles was actually an injury.

I am also an avid soccer player and right after graduating college I went down in a game with a torn ACL, MCL and lateral meniscus which required knee surgery to repair. This was devastating to me mentally. At this point I was playing on 3 different teams and playing soccer 3-4 times a week. After much pestering about how long until I can do physical activities again, my rehab therapist and doctor informed me that riding a bicycle would be the very first activity allowed.

This is when I really started to be a bicycle junkie again. In the lead up to getting the green light to start riding I began shopping for a new bike. Being a college grad and having slightly more than part-time grocery store employee income, this time I had my eyes on a higher quality steed than a Walmart bicycle. I wound up with a gnarly Motobecane with a ragged almost paintless frame from a bike co-op. It didn't look like much but it was well functioning thanks to the passionate people at that co-op. This kicked off a new hobby that became an obsession for a while (as I'm known to do) of finding and rebuilding vintage bicycles.

Over the next few years I rode my bike(s) a lot. I was constantly on the lookout for cheap vintage bikes to fix. I bought and rebuilt quite a few bikes, reselling most of them for a small profit because they weren't the right size for me. Motobecanes, Gitanes, Raleighs, Hercules and even some low end 10 speeds and 3 speeds from Montgomery Ward and the like went through my garage. The coolest ones that fit me are still with me and you'll find a couple of them with their own gemlog posts.

My wife and I met around the time I was getting into vintage bikes and our shared love for cycling was part of what sparked a bond between us. A new volunteer based bike co-op started up where we lived and we started joining some of the casual rides the founder of the co-op organized sometimes. It was good fun. Not long after that my wife (though she wasn't my wife at the time) relocated for a job opportunity. A year after that I joined her there but there were no bike co-ops and no social rides like we used to enjoy.

So we decided to start our own. We would start at a friend's coffee shop every other Saturday and do an 8 mile out and back ride partially along the beach at a moderate pace. Afterwards, we would just hangout out at the coffee shop and sometimes ride over to the brewery with whoever wanted to join. It was a lot of fun and we made a lot of good friends. I will forever cherish the group photos we always took at the turnaround point at the end of the beach road. I really miss that part of that time period in our lives and would like to find a nice smaller community where we can have something like that again in the future.

If you read this far, wow. Thanks for sticking with me. This is probably not that interesting to most people but going down memory lane while I wrote this was fun for me.

*briiiiing* *briiiing*

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