And so for my first post I thought I'd write about my first bike. No, not the Morrie Mages Sporting Goods banana-seat special that I learned to ride on, nor the Huffy bmx bike upon which I charged, baby teeth gritted in determination, at makeshift plywood ramps propped up by milk crates and half-full paint cans, in a futile attempt to launch myself into the air like my hero Evel Knievel. Unfortunately, I discovered that while I couldn't quite fly like him, I sure could land like Evel. Which is to say, in a heap. Minus some of the aforementioned baby teeth.
No, I want to write about my first 'real bike', which I'm sure we all agree can be defined as 'the first bike you actually pay for yourself.' I was living in that real hotbed of American cycling, Bloomington IN, the home of Little 500 and the Cutters, and the site of the canonical bike movie about both, 'Breaking Away'. The town had changed appreciably little since the movie was filmed, all tree-lined streets with wooden clapboard houses and a picturesque college campus complete with limestone buildings and an estuary of excellence (I'm not making that up, that's really what it's called) burbling contentedly through it. And bikes were a big part of that burg. Co-eds cruised to class. Group rides flicked through the streets like schools of fish. Basketball was godhead there, of course - I moved there the year Coach Knight got removed from his post, and I believe I actually saw people rending their clothes in mourning - but that was a winter sport, and come spring people got outside and got on bikes.
Except me. I just walked everywhere. And I walked far, man. I'm talking three miles each way to work, five days a week, rain or shine, all year-round. Typing this now, I have to marvel at WHY exactly I didn't ride, why I didn't think to cut down my commute from a fifty-minute death march to an easy fifteen-minute cruise. I guess I'm just that special kind of stupid (recurring theme ALERT!) but buying a bike never even occurred to me, even though I walked past two bike shops on the way to work.
After a number of years in a pedestrian haze, I finally tired of small-town life and, like a reddening salmon, I wanted to move back to the grimy city that spawned me. I had some money saved up (you can live pretty cheaply in a small town so long as you don't die of boredom first - just ask the Coug', John Cougar Mellencamp, Bloomington's other celeb) and decided to pull up stakes and move back to Chicago in the summer. So I packed up my life and waited for moving day to arrive, and a month before my friends were gonna come by with their truck and spirit me away, they told me that they'd made plans for a special trip. A mountain bike trip. And they were leaving next week.
I have to say, there's nothing quite like quitting a job early to go on a vacation. And so I took some of that money I'd saved up, walked into the shops I'd previously sauntered past, kicked some tires, went on a few test rides, bought some bike mags and devoured them, along with the myriad catalogs from the shops, and finally made my decision: a Trek 4900. Jett elastomer fork, triple chainring, plastic toeclips and straps, shorty bar-ends on riser bars, oh yeah. I loved that bike if only 'cause she was all mine. I bought a pair of baggy ZOIC shorts and the nicest helmet I could afford, and for a week straight I rode all over town. Then in a fit of bravado I went and ordered a pair of clipless pedals and Shimano shoes, rode ten feet down my gravel-lined alley, and promptly fell over, still clipped in. It didn't matter: my friends were picking me up tomorrow! I was going to Colorado!
A buncha city dudes, three SUV's, two big-ass tents, and a mess of hardtails: thus equipped, we were going mountain biking in actual mountains. In lung-busting Crested Butte, to be specific. None of us knew what the blue hell we were doing, and we were having the best time doing it. I should cringe when I recollect what I looked like back then, almost ten years ago: white (!) Nike Dri-Fit t-shirt, those same baggy shorts (I think I only thought to bring the one pair - you can guess how that worked out by the end of the week), fanny pack containing the requisite rations, seat bag hanging from the saddle holding a tube and a multi-tool I didn't know how to use, two water bottles in cages, with a mini-pump tucked discreetly behind one of them. And let's not forget about the bar-ends perched on the riser bars: I can't stress those enough. So, yeah, I should cringe when I think of it now, but all I could remember was having the goddamned time of my life.
Crested Butte really is one of the more amazing corners of the world, and it really is best seen on a bike. Trails snake through valleys of wildflowers, alongside rushing mountain rivers, and lead over ridges straight out of 'The Sound of Music'. You half-expect to see the VonTrapp family cheerfully marching across the sun-dappled fields, away from those nasty Nazis. And overhead, like a cathedral ceiling, all blue sky and white peaks. On the first ride, I found myself way out in front of everybody, zigzagging along the edge of the timberline, when I heard a loud splintering crash and right out from behind my left ear a startled deer leapt out from the brush. I looked over, disbelieving, still pedalling, as the deer bounded alongside me - once, twice, in time with my cranks - then veered off silently back into the trees. It was about the best thing that ever happened to me.
As it turned out, though, that was the second best thing that happened on that trip. On the last day, we were gonna go out with a bang, planning to ride the longest, most technical trail we could handle. The Dyke Trail was daunting, with steep ups and downs, culminating in a long, uninterrupted downhill run to the trail's end. I was stoked. I couldn't wait. And on the first descent, just over a mile into the six mile trail, I washed out my front wheel and pitched over the bars at speed. I ducked my shoulder and rolled through the fall well enough, but as my body cartwheeled back over I was suddenly stopped short by a worn tree stump making swift, arresting contact with my right knee. Once I got the screaming-in-pain part over with and wiped off the dust mask that had adhered to the spit and blood on my face, I screwed up the courage to survey the real damage. My knee throbbed and was swelling visibly. I tried to stand and couldn't support my weight without pain. Gathering around me, my friends watched me hobble about and declined to say what I already knew: that I was well and truly fucked.
But I didn't want to ride back to camp. It was all uphill, anyway. One of the guys generously offered to ride back with me, but that was even worse: two of us would miss out on the last day's ride. It appeared clear to me that the only solution was to finish the goddamned trail. To ride it out. My leg couldn't really support me, but I was mountain biking, not hiking, right? I couldn't really rotate my foot too well, but once I clipped in, the pedal tracks straight on its own. The swollen knee didn't really want to bend too far, but I thought that if I wrapped it tightly enough, this wouldn't be a real problem. So we emptied out our fanny packs and seat bags and I ended up swathing my knee with a roll of athletic tape, covered by an Ace bandage, all tied down by a short bungee cord for good measure.
And I finished the ride. Which was as great as I had hoped, with the final descent an endless bobsled run that turned the serene white aspens into a holy screaming blur, and the grin on my face at the end of the ride stayed there for about three or four hours straight. By then, I realized that my knee wasn't gonna get better by ice and Advil alone, and that a severe limp was prominent in my immediate future.
But it didn't matter: I was a mountain biker. I haven't stopped riding since.
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