Not dead; still riding

Well hey. Umm, so.

Thanks to Leon for reminding me this blog exists. I hadn’t forgotten, really, but I’d certainly let it lie fallow. Quite a lot happened, too, in the biking sense, and in a small way I feel a little bad about it. But let’s review.

When I last wrote it was October - October 4th, to be precise. Right then I’d clocked up 186.9 miles total on the bike since I bought it. As of today I’ve amassed 461.7 miles, so 274.8 more miles than last time I checked. So yeah. Still riding.

Truth is I kind of got bored writing about the same ride almost every day, but after I got out of the habit of posting, I just figured I didn’t need to post. When I read back over some of these entries though, I can see that there’s a style of writing here that I don’t normally do. So, perhaps not such a bad idea for me to continue to post, on occasion.

Last six months though, in a choppy, stream-of-consciousness sentence: puncture, pump, winter, New Year’s resolutions, new lights, night riding, broken spokes, new wheels, Undercliff Walk, biking partner (occasional).

Oh, and I didn’t enter the London to Brighton bike ride this year. I’m so not ready. Next year? Maybe.

Reading all that back I know there were definitely tales to tell, so I promise I’ll try and tell them a bit more often. Just don’t expect a daily version of the same “I biked to Hove and back for 30 minutes of exercise” story… ta.

Meta-exercise

I should be on the bike instead of writing this post. Should. Okay, so I choose not to be on the bike… and I choose to write this, instead.

I went on an internal training course a month or so ago that emphasised one very good point - that everything we do is a personal choice, and that everything we don’t do is a choice, too. The thinking is that you have to take responsibility for your actions, and ‘own’ them. This (in theory) breaks you out of a value-based cycle of “I should do this” and “I suck because I didn’t do that”. Which is how I feel right now.

Two reasons:

1. I haven’t been out on the bike since Tuesday.
2. I just looked at my log of cycling for September, and saw I’d ‘only’ done four hours total.

I can justify all this in my mind. But I choose, instead, to feel shit about it. This is my life, ladies and gents. A long slow process of internal criticism. It gets tiresome.

The one thing I will say - mostly to myself - is that I have to remember that the longer I leave it, the harder it is to get back on the bike. But when I get back on, you have always remembered immediately that it feels great. Always.

Go. Ride the bike.

Dagnabit weather

I feel like a chump. Yesterday morning was glorious sunshine, and I didn’t go out because on Wednesday night, I felt knackered enough that I figured I deserved a lie-in.

Last night? Rainstorms. This morning? Still raining and still cold. So no riding, after I told myself that I would go out. I am a wuss. But I am a dry, warm wuss….

So, uh, like - what happened to July?

The observant among you - and as there’s probably only one of you, I’ll assume you’re observant for the sake of argument - have probably noticed there was a great big honking gap here between me buying the bike and then, apparently, blogging about riding it. So the question is, what happened in July (that stopped me blogging)?

The easy answer is “I got a bike”, ha ha. Truthfully that had something to do with it, but not very much really. I was biking all over the shop during July, getting acquainted with Brighton’s roads and seafronts… but not blogging. I think the honest truth is I got intimidated, clammed up, and just didn’t force myself to get on with it and get down my thoughts.

As you can see, I’m now trying to change that. Nothing like writing posts about why you’re not blogging to get you motivated to blog again.

So, what do I have to get written down? Let’s see:

1. The rest of the story of Buying the Bike, currently entitled ‘Nigel looks after me’
2. The Tale of The First Bike Ride (This one, I really should have gotten down on the day… thank God I did notes)
3. Something about my favourite routes
4. A classic ‘whinge’ post about ‘being a biker’ (so I can pretend to be part of the ‘in’ crowd)

And I think that’ll do for now. Other things I want to do, in no particular order:

• Take my digital camera out and get some snaps during a ride
• Figure out a way to show my most frequent routes (dull though they are)

And that’ll do for now.

The £400 question, redux

I don’t go out to spend £400 every day. I know some people do, especially in our credit-card wielding, guilt-free, devil-take-my-credit-history society - but I don’t. Particularly on stuff for me.

(Sure, I’ve blown wads of cash on ordinary, necessary, socially acceptable things like sofas and beds. We did a lot of that when we got to Brighton… but ever since then we’ve been good. Well, fairly good. Plane tickets don’t count, right?)

I just don’t go on shopping sprees of any sort of size. In fact, I feel guilty buying stuff on sale these days. So after I recovered from the shock of my wife-remembered savings, and I figured I should get myself down to the bike shop and put my money where my mouth was, that’s when it suddenly hit me. I was thinking about spending £400 on a bike. An object which, last time I checked, was something that kids rode around on, perhaps with brightly coloured tape tied to the handlebars.

“We still have savings?”

Or, “Where the hell the money came from”.

I think the title maybe gives it away. On Saturday I told Amanda that I wanted to talk about when I could buy the bike - just talk about it, mind you. I was thinking perhaps I’d use the remaining credit card that we have, then pay it back over a couple of months. And then she says the obvious thing:

“Why don’t you just pay for it out of the savings?”

We’re back to the post title. After I realised she was right and that yes, indeed, buying a bigger fridge earlier in the year hadn’t wiped out our carefully stockpiled winter nuts (of cash) , and that as she put it “It’s better to pay for it out of the savings now, and then pay it back with the money you were going to just pay off the credit card with” well, I was outta there.

Not actually strictly true. As you’re about to see.

Ladies and gents, I have a bike

And here she is… bikes are female, aren’t they? Well the male in me says if I’m riding it… ahem.

‘She’ is a Dawes Sonoran - not a Sontaran, as I suddenly thought I might have purchased while riding it earlier today. (That would be a Doctor Who villain with a head like a… wait, this is a family blog. Right, right….)

The £400 question

So, last night Amanda and I had the briefest conversation about The Price of The Bike.

She knows about the decision to buy it (obviously) and supports it too (bonus, considering how many other gadget fantasies I have, usually involving items of imported, Asian origin). Now the real question is how we are going to afford the damn thing.

I do pretty well for myself, thankyouverymuch, but living and working in Brighton ain’t cheap. Nor’s paying off our debt, which isn’t mountainous, more… hilly. Still, it doesn’t leave much cash aside each month to fritter away on things like two-wheeled vehicles.

This is where you expect me to slap a PayPal icon on the side and ask for donations, right? Wrong. But hey, I need something to talk about before I can go on about the wind in my (lack) of hair and the road underneath my wheels.

Things I’ve already learned about bikes and biking

In just over twenty-four hours. See, I work fast. In no particular order:

• Bikes are nowhere near as cheap as they were when I was a lad. Either that, or the economy is screwed up, or my pocket money doesn’t go nearly as far.
• Bikers are geeks. This is good; I will get on fine with them, once I understand the lingo, which is many and varied.
• Bikers have blogs. I guess this shouldn’t have surprised me. I mean, who doesn’t now. Still, it’s pretty heartening to see other bike blogs with bad puns for titles.
• Bikes are marketed in much the same way as cars. Y’know, names that make them sound far too macho (’Velocity’, ‘Comet’) etc. It’s only the fact that they cost about a twentieth of their car equivalent that we don’t see wall-to-wall advertising for them.
• Twenty-nine inches is apparently an important measurement.

More ‘revelations’ as they strike me.

In the beginning, there were bikes…

… a lot of bikes. Streaming past us at varying intervals, but still streaming. All kinds of bikes, with all kinds of riders; young and old, black and white… whatever that third pairing is.

Which was to be expected, as it was the day of the London to Brighton Bike Ride, 2006. 18th June to be precise.

And apropos of nothing, I turned to my wife - for she was with me - and said “I’m going to get a bike. And next year I’m going to enter the London to Brighton Bike Ride.”

Yes, I know. Perhaps I’d been out in the sun too long… but this is what beginnings are made of, right? A good hook. Now we just have to follow-through.