I hadn’t been on my bike for a long time, perhaps eighteen months or so, ever since I had suffered from kidney stones. The doctor had said that exercise might unsettle the stones and so it was a good reason not to do anything strenuous but that was just an excuse because really I was just being fat and lazy. I had been thinking about getting back on the saddle for some time though, I even got my bike out of the shed several months ago and cleaned off the spiders’ webs and oiled the chain in preparation for the grand re-emergence but I needed some definite reason to start again.
The Tour de France had been and gone and yesterday was the men’s road race in the Olympic Games and that was inspiration enough to start pedalling again. I felt fine, it was sunny with a light cooling breeze and I needed to go down into town and I had run out of excuses. I put on my shorts, wheeled the bike out of the garage, put my left foot on the peddle and with a gentle push I was away.
You never forget how to ride a bicycle. It felt great to be riding, the pedals were spinning, I was moving through the gears, the wind was playing with my hair and I was free, a freedom you only get riding a bike. I turned left out of the street in which I live and freewheeled down the hill into town. I signalled to move to the right, I weaved between the stationery traffic waiting at the lights, I avoided the pedestrians who crossed the road in front of me oblivious of my approach and I arrived at my destination. I only needed to run a couple of messages in town. I hopped on and off my bike as I went in and out of the various shops and then it was soon time to go back home.
Why had I put off getting back onto the bike for so long? It felt so good and then I remembered. I live at the top of a hill!
The ride home started well enough, a gentle canter through the flat streets flanked by shops but then I was over the bridge and the road tilted up in front of me, up and up climbing the steep banks that the river had gorged over thousands of years. Don’t get me wrong, it is not a hill that should bother any professional cyclist or even a practiced amateur but in my lack of condition it might as well have been the Alpe d’Huez. My legs started to hurt, my lungs started to burn and I could taste the metallic taste of blood. I had only got half way up and I had run out of gears, I needed something lower than a granny gear but it just wasn’t there. I had slowed to a crawl and pedestrians were passing me by. I stood up on the peddles and pulled on the bars. Foolishly I had brought a bag back from the shops and it smacked against the front wheel every time the bike rocked from side to side. My legs weren’t functioning, my arms could feel the strain and I could remember everything I had eaten and drunk over the last year as I fought to get back some sort of rhythm and restore some sort of cycling pride. Eventually I made it home, puffing and panting and wheezing. It was a pathetic ten minutes of cycling that took me two hours to recover from.
Why had I put off getting back onto the bike for so long? It’s funny but I remember now!
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 