In a few weeks, I’ll be doing a hundred-mile bike ride to raise money for diabetes research. And while I have definitely been A Bike Guy for a while now, I didn’t ever really expect that I’d get to this level with it. It’s been a journey, and it didn’t really start with bikes. It started because, just under a year ago, I quit drinking alcohol.
I’d been thinking about quitting for a long time. Especially working as a medical copywriter putting together flyers and web pages about how even moderate alcohol use is correlated with all kinds of bad outcomes, I couldn’t escape that background whisper of “you know that’s not good for you.”
You’ve heard this story before: I ignored that whisper until I couldn’t. It’s an embarrassing cliche, but of the major lessons I’ve learned this year is that life is full of cliches. Everyone’s a unique snowflake, but we all fall to the ground and melt. The point, the only important thing, is that I’m never drinking again. What a cliche.
Another cliche: endurance sports. Some people say that people in recovery are good at endurance sports because we’ve endured. If you can get up and go to work with a hangover, they say, you can grit your teeth through a long, hard workout. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know that when I quit drinking I had a lot of nervous energy, and it kept me up at night. The internet said cardio would help, but running hurt my feet, so I borrowed a road bike, and immediately fell in love. Within a few weeks I’d bought my own, a 2006 Trek Madone in glittery blue-black carbon fiber that, when new, had been top-of-the-line.
I started adding distance, riding fifteen or twenty miles at a go. I snagged a cheap stationary bike from a neighbor and subscribed to an online cycling simulator to train indoors in bad weather. I bought the padded shorts, then threw them out and got the padded shorts with shoulder straps. I started going to organized group rides. Forty miles. I got foul-weather gear so I could ride outdoors in the cold, and ended a fifty-mile ride with my fingers so frozen I had trouble unbuckling my helmet. I got the special shoes that clip into the special pedals, and paid someone to help me adjust my seat and handlebars centimeter by centimeter until the bike fit me perfectly, and now I can spend all day riding without my feet and hands going numb.
At this point, a hundred miles doesn’t seem all that far. It’ll take me all day, but that’s just a day. And I have a lot of days ahead of me.
Featured selections of bad news and cute animals will resume with the next post.
Secretly Ironic 