Hello World!
Posted in Uncategorized
May 21, 2008
Who am I? I am learning to ride a bicycle. Technically, I started learning to ride sometime in the last week of March. I can do basics — center mount/dismount, hold a relatively straight line, look behind over my shoulders, make signals. If car traffic is slow enough — 10 mph or less — I’ll take the lane unless the bike lane is faster.
Goals? Emergency maneuvers such as the quick (usually right) turn, quick dodge, quick stop. Yeah, I need to work on these thing being actually quick. Also, I need to work on strength conditioning so that I can climb a grade that’s steeper than 5%.
Why am I doing this? Once upon a time, figure skating kept this body with a 22″ waist and 15% body fat and when my work schedule changed to overlap with the freestyle practice sessions, I stopped. Next thing I knew — well two years later — I had ballooned to a 30″ waist with 25% body fat. I had also noticed that as I was growing an office butt and my energy levels seemed to have an inverse correlation to that office butt. It was time to do something.
Time to do something plus one day I noticed that gas was $3.75 a gallon and spending $37/week on the stuff seemed like a waste of my money. And seeing more and more bicyclists around me made me realize just how envious I was at how much more freedom they seemed to have — no having to worry about gasoline prices or bus schedules or traffic. Bicyclists just seemed much more liberated.
So, here I am right now. I have a new hobby — bicycling — which I hope to turn into my sport, probably road racing. I’ve lost only three pounds but my body fat is 20% and my waist is 25″. And, as long as I avoid hills — yes, even in San Francisco — and go at a liesurely pace and keep food/water on hand, I can ride around all day long.
As for this blog? Well, this is how bicycling culture gets filtered through the eyes of a former figure skater, rollerblader, ballet student, gymnast. These are all the sports I’ve done from high school and ever since. You might count one summer I spent learning western horseback riding but I don’t since it was only for a summer and not years-long ventures like the others have been.
So here I am. Be patient with me as I try and figure out this bicycling thing. The San Francisco Bike Coalition’s bicyle education classes have been a confidence booster, teaching me tips and tricks and rights and strategies for dealing with the road. Now, it’s on to other things like getting back into shape, figuring out what clothes to wear, what streets to take, how to maintain and fix the bike.
So, I’m very enthusiastic and I’m wondering why I didn’t start bicycling sooner.
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