I hopped on my road bike again after a relatively lengthy hiatus. Early sunsets, late working hours, an aching back, and the holiday vacation had curtailed my riding habits, but even so, I spent more time this past year riding trails than zipping along asphalt. The reasons center on my sense of well-being: woodchucks rarely roar past me at fifty miles per hour, and though squirrels cuss me out something awful, their worst words don’t offer the same threat as various epithets snarled at me through the windows of jacked-up F150s and stripped-down Geo Metros.
But I’ve lived long enough in my neighborhood that I can piece together a ride relatively free of high-speed roads and road-raging lemming-bots. So early this week, I pulled on the spandex (I know, bad picture—keep moving), eased the bike from the shed, and rolled out the driveway.
If you’ve perused this blog before, you know that sometimes I lose myself in giddy descriptions of mountain biking. Patience, balance, a willingness to take risks—all those qualities meld themselves into a sport involving knobby tires, fallen trees, big rocks, and stomach-lurching descents, fingers tweaking break levers.
Road riding, or at least my version, generally simplifies matters. Rolling along blacktop involves two major qualities: speed and dirty teeth.
Within half a mile, I found my first downhill, a gentle slope that, nevertheless, lasts long enough for a rider to build speed. Lance Armstrong and his records have nothing to fear from me, but I still loved the zzissss of my thin tires on the pavement, the weightlessness of screaming down the road, the revolutions of my legs as they drove me faster, faster, faster…More hills followed, as they are wont to do. My quads remembered, vaguely, the circles.
At its best moments, road biking makes you feel weightless as you swoop down the grades, through the intersections, up the next inclines, the humans in their cars looking at you with surprise and jealousy.
I rode for thirty-five minutes, listening to the wind, breaking from gravity (or convincing myself that I was doing so. Oh—and the dirty teeth? I smiled for the entire ride.
Who doesn’t love being Peter Pan for half an hour?
Robin Follet lives, writes, and cartoons in North Carolina.
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January 24th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
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