As children, my brother and I spent more time on bicycles than we spent doing anything else (besides sleeping). We rode obsessively for the better part of a decade. Many times my first thoughts upon waking would be looking forward to just being in motion on my bicycle. Hours a day, day after day, summer after sweltering summer, we rode (and crashed) our bikes with Christmas-morning-like enthusiasm.
Until I was 10 years old my bikes were all comprised of junked components welded together by my grandfather, a detail which seems much more special to me now than it ever did as a kid. The other detail I wasn't keen to was that the bikes were all extraordinarily heavy and ill-geared. I just knew they worked. Over the years they were thrown to the ground, launched off ramps, tumbled down hills, left in the rain and snow, and recycled through 4 children. And they just kept on working. I don't actually recall one structural failure of any kind.
Then I hit my mid-teens. I started driving and traveling longer distances for work and recreation. I still loved biking, but there are few towns in which it's really easy to cycle and mine was not one of them. In recent years, even when I had a nice bike and a nice day to ride, I'd use my car. It's “easy” and “fast”.
Although any experienced biker has passed hundreds of cars in stalled traffic, and knows the joy of parking-hastle-free travel, it wasn't until I moved to New York that I re-discovered the child-like joy of regular cycling and many of the true benefits of donning a helmet and wielding a bicycle.
I showed up in New York two weeks ago with a duffel-bag and a $130 bike and felt like a kid again. I actually always feel like a kid, but that's another story. I started small, biking down the designated safety-zone, the greenway for bikes and pedestrians. I live right by it so there's no hazardous transit to safety. After a few ventures down the length of Manhattan, I branched out onto the streets. That's when my long-forgotted instincts began to kick in. Over the following few days I became more than the cyclist I thought I was. The childhood decade of cycling muscle-memory came flooding back, and I found myself in moment after moment of speedy bliss! You've heard this sort of thing before, but there really is some kind of zen state I reach after a few minutes zipping around on a bike. It's not really calm, but very focused and alert, more balanced, and with a quicker reaction time.
It took me all of 10 days to muster up the courage to bike from the upper west side to Brooklyn. Not on the greenway; I've already become bored by it's safety. I've been barreling right down Broadway, it's the most direct shot from where I live and work, to where I go to school. Fortunately it's also the most fun.
I've been dreaming of some pretty intense cycling trips for next summer. Have you been on a long bike trip? How long? What should I know?
Big Brother Noah
