Getting started

This is a test… of what it means to attempt to journal my cycling trips for the next X number of years.  (The first step was to figure out how to create and launch a damn blog. Give me few days to figure out things like photographs and other design elements.)

I think, though, that I want to “get started” by going back–way back–and saying a few words about me and bikes.  My first bike was a fixed-gear monstrosity with a sparkly purple vinyl banana seat and those goofy Y-shaped handle bars.  It was godawful.  And since I was a puny kid and every street in our neighborhood had some degree of incline, I really struggled with riding.

I think that it was probably my 12th birthday, the summer between 6th and 7th grade, when I got my first 10-speed: a Sears “Free Spirit.”  As I recall, 10-speeds were all the rage and cycling was going through a surge of popularity… at least in suburban St. Louis.  To be sure, Sears was never going be confused with Raleigh or even Schwinn, but it didn’t matter.  The ability to downshift and actually pedal up hills was liberating.  I never had any pretenses about racing, but I sure wanted to go places, and I did. In retrospect, a 20-mile round trip to visit a friend who had moved to another suburb doesn’t seem like all that much distance, but it was huge for a 13-year-old. I remember especially the feeling of being at street-level with the shops, and houses, and bridges, and creeks that I had only ever seen from the backseat of a car. There were a couple of years, before I turned 16, when I told myself that I didn’t need (or want) to get a driver’s license. Of course, that feeling passed, but I don’t know that I ever gave up the joy that I felt from riding long distances. What I gave up, for a very long time, was the actual riding.

Six years ago, that all changed.