Life will keep trying to knock you off your bike

As an adult cyclist, you are a member of a minority group. It's a voluntary minority, like a religion, rather than one with inescapable physical characteristics, but we still wear varying degrees of identifying garb, and place ourselves in the public eye by propelling ourselves around on our machines.

Road cyclists inspire the most adverse pressure, followed by riders on multi-use paths. Within riding categories, different degrees of orthodoxy breed conflict and contempt among the riders themselves.

Cyclists have the advantage in places where distances and terrain favor our size and maneuverability. But when you leave the bike to proceed on foot, you always run some degree of risk that it won't be there when you get back. And every ride carries some risk of falling. In traffic, you might be brushed or hit hard by a motor vehicle, or be herded into a collision with a solid object. While the vast majority of riders reach their destinations without injury, you can't deny that gravity can be used against you in numerous ways.

For a commuter or a person living car-free, the longer the ride, the more you have to adapt your lifestyle to it. You will find that proper cycling clothes make longer rides more comfortable. A more aerodynamic position makes riding more efficient. You either have to dress and equip more like a racing or touring road rider, or budget even more time in transit to make up for the inefficiency of riding in an upright position.

If you think recumbents are the answer, bear in mind that the trikes tend to sit very low compared to the tall vehicles dominating the roadways, and that their width is at ground level, making them awkward on narrower paths. Recumbent bikes can be very tricky stopping and starting. And even though you are no longer holding your head up the way a cyclist on a road bike has to do, you have to hold it up the other way, like lounging in a chair watching TV. A head rest is only partial help, because you have to keep looking around. Nothing is perfect.

Busy people have to fit their schedules together into complex mosaics of admirable responsibility and social engagement. In my case, with a commute that hovers around 30 miles a day, my time in transit doubles when I ride the bike compared to using a car. I've never been a model of admirable responsibility and social engagement, but connections have accumulated. As soon as you have another person in our life you probably have someone who will put pressure on you to quit riding, or at least skip a day, and maybe another day, and do you really have to do that today, and are you riding again? Add in a few voluntary obligations and the number of normal people looking sideways at you because you insist on pedaling steadily increases. This is more prevalent in a rural area, where nothing is close enough together to give a cyclist a time advantage getting from place to place. You're just a weirdo at that point.

If I was a real responsible individual, I would be driving to work every day now, because so many people want their bikes fixed. I would be working extra days and longer hours so that other people could think about using bikes that they obviously have not paid much attention to in years. Instead, I'm the same selfish jerk I've always been, riding an awkward distance because I was once married to someone who wouldn't be happy until we owned a house, and we ended up buying this one. Then she wasn't happy anyway, and off she went. If I'd been a good normal guy, I would've had a job that paid better, that I drove to, and been more amenable to the desires of the majority.

People can change, but usually they are developing a potential that was always within them. You may now spin off into philosophical musings about how the potential to be absolutely anything lies within each of us. True as that may be, you can look at trends in a person's life and take a reasonable guess. When it comes to riding, every one of us is a potential quitter. That's the handle that life will use to make you think that riding is just too much trouble.

Nothing is normal in the bike shop

The repair lineup so far includes a 70-pound smokeless moped,

A recumbent trike,

and a tall bike:

This is after the previously mentioned modern marvels with press fit bottom brackets, and shares the jumble in the storage area with bikes ranging widely in price, quality, and age.

You never know who will need a bike fixed:

We've also worked on bikes for a guy named Bill Murray, who is just Bill Murray, not Bill Murray.

Behind the tall bike in the photo above you can see a Rocky Mountain full suspension bike with XTR from back when eight-speed was the top of the line. The disc brakes on it sounded like a couple of truck horns.

I revamped the repair queue. It used to have dividers for the days of the week, but no subdivision to tell us whether one tag stuffed into a particular day slot was more or less urgent than another. After years of dealing with a bushy mess, I finally yanked out the day dividers and made two category columns:

The "Regular" side is straight first-come-first-served. The "Hot" side is for people who have stated an urgent need. During triage, when we ask the customer about their timing, some of them will say that they definitely won't be back for days or weeks, so we can fit them in down the line. The days of the week were meaningless, which is how the days of the week feel anyway when we're buried in work.

Now that Memorial Day Weekend is here, the next thing we know it will be Labor Day and we'll be going back into grayness. Foliage tourism has dwindled even more than summer tourism, so what little we see tends not to amount to much in work load or cash flow. Maybe we should be in the ATV and oversized truck business, so we could make some money off of the final destruction of our planetary ecosystem. We could import some elephant ivory while we're at it, and host weekly cookouts of giraffe steaks.

The thing is, you don't have to be busy for the best of life to evaporate. You just have to be at work. Mere incarceration is enough.

This story about two bike shop employees who burned down their shop as they were trying to cremate a mouse reminded me of the first shop I worked in. A regular customer of ours used to say that he liked coming in because there was no adult supervision. Our antics never extended to pyromania except perhaps a little bit outside in the back parking lot, but the spirit of unfettered experimentation runs strongly in all the bike people I know. The tall bike is an example of that sort of thing. My bike guru in Florida, who grew up in her father's machine shop and went on to have one of her own, has built a tall bike. She and her husband built aero road frames in the 1980s, using aircraft strut tubing. They also built and repaired more conventional frames. Not all of us are skilled enough to get beyond the nuts and bolts level of improvisation, but that still opens up a lot of territory. A bike -- or other pedal-powered machine -- is the sum of its parts. The industry makes it harder and harder to mix and match, but if you look around you can still find stuff to work with.