Thursday, December 04, 2008
Why'd I start cycling?
I didn't get my driver's license until I was 17.
This was a big deal in a state where you could get your license just a few weeks after you turned 16. I don't remember much from before the test. I do remember that my parents wanted me to have a license so that they could stop picking me up from work late at night. I also remember hoping that I'd pass in order to go on a date that night. The test itself I remember quite well. Everything went flawlessly, despite the fact that the gentleman testing me looked a bit like an angry backwoods hippy troll and smelled similar. Then I got to parallel parking. Unlike my colleagues seemingly everywhere else, we parallel parked with real cars, on a real busy city street. I drove my mother's big green Ford Aerostar right up over the curb in downtown Endicott. My examiner even gave me two more chances, which I completely screwed up. Ultimately he had to talk me back onto the street, and he pretty much sweat bullets the whole way back to where we'd started. Still, I fared better than a friend who managed to drive into a stop sign on her first try. And then fail the second. And third.
I passed flawlessly on my second attempt, thank you very much. Still in that big green van, which could easily have eaten my current car and still had room for an entire Sumo wrestling team.
The driver's license marked the end of my career as a cyclist. Starting in the 7th grade I rode everywhere. I started by riding to the top of the hill by my parents' house and back. It was only two miles round trip, but the first mile was a 300 foot climb. I rode it daily for a summer in my ridiculous basketball shorts and sneakers. By the next spring I'd graduated to riding to my friend David's house (my best man). His house was only three and a half miles away but involved about 3200 feet of climbing round trip. I'd get home from school and sprint there as fast as I could, since he had a Super Nintendo. The ride home was often more of a sprint, since I had no lights on my bike and there are no streetlights. At least once it was so cold I stopped at the only store on the way to buy gloves.
It wasn't long before I'd ride to David's house and drag him out for a ride. A pretty common ride was to head off to two other friend's houses. Unfortunately for us, one of them lived on top of the hill. In addition to the normal ride to and from David's (7 miles, 3200 feet), we'd cover 10 or 12 miles with another 3000 feet of climbing. For me, this would mean a 17-20 mile ride with more than 6000 feet of climbing on a weekday after school.
My Sunday rides were always the same. I'd get up early and see if I could make it all the way to another friend's house and back within an hour. She lived almost exactly 8 miles away. I'd start by almost coasting downhill, just warming up. Then I'd ride as hard as I could for forty minutes, leaving myself twenty to get home. The ride was about as flat as can be expected - maybe a few hundred feet in short spurts. Then there was a monster climb to get to the top of the hill. Just steep enough that I could really power to the top, coast a little down the other side, then turn around and try to sprint back up, only to try to average thirty or forty mph all four miles back down the hill.
Looking back, apparently I knew what I was doing. I was doing hills three or four times a week, with sprints and long rides along the river (the only place in the county that was flat) on the weekends. About 150 miles per week.
But then, cycling was the only way I had to get around. My parents were gracious enough to drive me around, but I usually beat them home by an hour and a half. If I had to work before my parents were home, I rode there in the black pants and white collared shirt of a grocery store clerk.
So I rode on my little steel ten speed. And by ten speed, I don't mean 10 on the back cog, I mean 5 in the back and 2 in the front.
I started this post thinking that I was going to write something about training for our ride. Instead, I just want to say that a big part of me wishes I'd never gotten that driver's license, and thus still rode everywhere.
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| posted at: 20:54 |
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