It’s Time To Dust Off The Bicycle

I guess you can tell by my previous post I’m taking on a new activity, biking. When I first started out to save my foot some 3 years ago, one of my team members told me that my exercise activity should be something I truly enjoyed. When the hard days come, and they will come, I may only have the love of the activity to motivate me. Well I needed that motivation when my job location changed about 20 months ago, whereas I could no longer make it to the gym to work-out. My lack of passion to work-out didn’t motivate me enough to seek out another facility and/or modify my schedule to keep it up. Since I’ve always loved riding my bike, even during my younger days growing up in Quincy, FL, it just may be the right activity to keep me active.

I remember calling my first Spyder bike a GTO, I would tell my sisters that “no one could handle my bike but me.” My cousin and I would jump over boards, ditches, and homemade bike-seesaws, all in an attempt to see who could go the farthest, jump the highest, and have the longest hang time. The best part of riding was being chased by the neighborhood dogs while we adhered to the golden rule, “DO NOT get off your bike!” I think the dogs had just as much fun as us.

I got my first 10-speed bike my 8th grade year for Christmas and I won a second 10-speed bike in the March of Dimes Walk-a-thon about a year later. Now with a 10-speed, I figured I could take longer rides. So my first so called “long ride” was when my cousin and I rode our bikes to “town” (approximately 20+ miles round trip). Oops!! I wasn’t supposed to tell that we were forbidden to ride our bikes that far, sorry Mom. I even made this trip a few times solo, the fun in it was trying to beat my Mom home from work. Not only did I have to make sure I was home when she arrived, I had to make sure I wasn’t on the road primarily because there was only “one way” to get to and from “town,” so conceivably she could catch me on her way home from work. Needless to say I never got caught and I never told anyone.

During my college days I attempted to ride my bike some but I had not one, but both of my bikes stolen while I was in school. Since the good ole-days of yesteryear, I’ve only casually biked in Tampa, Little Rock, Sannibel, Schwenksville, Seattle, etc. with my family. However, in order to have cycling as my new exercise I will have to get my heart rate up while riding which may be kind of hard since no one let’s their dogs roam free anymore.

Oh well, in the words of William Earnest Henly, “It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.” Now if I can just settle in on a bike to purchase.