Bicycling in My Life

When I was a kid, I hardly ever rode a bicycle. In fact, it wasn't until I was sixteen that I even owned one. The only reason that I instantly could ride it from the time I set it out in the parking lot was that, many years before when I was about eight, there was an old beat-up bicycle in our storage room at home that I would repeatedly get up on and try to balance myself in our backyard. But once I actually began riding one on the street in 1973, I fell in love with this activity. Yet I never did fall for the trappings and expense of "serious" bicycling. To me, that would have detracted from the utter simplicity and freedom of being so mobile with a vehicle that ran on no fuel, could be parked just about anywhere, had very cheap maintenance, and cost me only about a hundred bucks.

I continued my fervent bicycling for about 22 years, finally cooling off in late 1995 when I changed my work schedule to a shift when bicycling conflicted too much with the local traffic. You see, although I lived about eight miles from my workplace, I would often ride my bicycle to work and back. This also meant riding up some pretty steep (for Florida) hills. So I kept myself in pretty good shape with this activity.

Since that time, my bicycling tapered off considerably. Along with that went my physical fitness as well, and at times I got quite overweight. A few years ago I began to exercise at my YMCA's workout room. Then, a local Starbucks manager, Marty Bower, told me that with his suggestion Gainesville had started to hold an annual marathon/half-marathon in February (put on by LifeSouth). I told him that I wanted to run in it, but tarried in getting back to running. Finally, in 2007 I began to run in earnest, first on the treadmill, then in the vicinity of Gainesville's Westside Park, and finally settling down to designing and running lengthy courses up and down my neighborhood roads. So my fitness level improved again with the running, but I never did get back to bicycling very much. And I did manage to run and complete the 2010 LifeSouth Half-Marathon, but unfortunately Marty had left Starbucks by then and I couldn't brag to him about it.

During my "heyday" of bicycling, I felt relatively safe on the road. Sadly, I can no longer confidently state that. Motorists today seem very impatient and are too easily distracted with their assorted "toys", the worst being their cellphones. They tend to drift off the road too much into the bike lines that are reserved for me, not them. No, I have to admit it: I'm a little bit scared to undertake bicycle riding again to any appreciable degree.

Not that, from time to time, I won't just get on my bicycle and ride around for a little bit. My days of "extreme" bicycling are probably over, but I'll always cherish the memories of my journeys in the now-receding past...