Tales from the early days

Like an old man on the porch outside the general store, I’ve been reminiscing about my early days of bicycling, before I knew what I was doing, before I considered myself a bicyclist. Each of my stories has a moral.

4. My first real bike (the future Hulk)

When my husband Iain started college the first time, he bought a pair of roller blades with his first student loan check. During winter break he spent the last of his money on a huge jar of cheap peanut butter and an enormous package of cheap frozen chicken patties. When those ran out, his friends took him out to eat sometimes but otherwise he didn’t have any food. Finally he got emergency food stamps. When his next student loan check came he bought his new girlfriend a pair of roller blades. That was me. But I guess he did better at budgeting because he didn’t have to eat cheap peanut butter or get food stamps again. The bicycles arrived the same way– a student loan check came in, he bought himself a bicycle, and used the rest of it to buy me a bicycle.

He didn’t buy a cheap bicycle. He had a friend who was a serious bicyclist (and roller blader) so he knew not to buy a bicycle from Walmart. We went to AB Cycles in Springfield, MO, which still exists. If I wanted to, I could take that bicycle there for free tune-ups even today, 22 years later, because it has lifetime tune-ups.

When I went in to pick out my bike, I said I wanted to use it to go to campus. Our apartment was a 20-minute walk away. Especially on my way to the 7:00 a.m. calculus study sessions, that was a long hike. With a bike, I could make the trip in 5 minutes. I didn’t know anything about bikes and the bike shop fellow recommended a hybrid. I got a 15″ maroon Specialized Crossroads. It was completely different than any bike I’d ridden before. I felt wobbly and wondered if I would be able to ride it. But my boyfriend had spent a lot of money on it, money that frankly he could not afford. So I wobbled along the sidewalks. I didn’t know you shouldn’t bike on sidewalks. I didn’t know anything about biking.

It didn’t take me long to get the hang of riding it, but I’m not sure I really figured out the gears until I became a real bicyclist, 13 years later. When I became a real bicyclist, I learned that a 15″ bike is too small for me.

The moral of this story is that when you get something so you can be lazy, like bike 5 minutes instead of walk 20 minutes, you might use that same bike years later so you can be cheap and bike 20 minutes instead of drive 15 minutes.

Remember those days? It was a while ago, as you can tell from the hairstyles in the audience, as well as the KU jersey on a young Danny Manning!

Tales from the early days

Like an old man on the porch outside the general store, I’ve been reminiscing about my early days of bicycling, before I knew what I was doing, before I considered myself a bicyclist. Each of my stories has a moral.

3. Danny Manning Basketball Camp

In high school I went to a summer camp at KU in Lawrence. My dad had bought 2 used Schwinn bicycles. He thought they were a really good deal because Schwinn was supposed to make such great bikes. But he didn’t know much about bikes at the time and they weren’t really that great. I took one of them to KU to go to my summer camp classes and to downtown. The turnoff to my dorm was halfway down a really steep hill. Coming down that hill, I braked and nothing happened. My brakes were not slowing me down.

At the bottom of the hill was a busy street. I had to attempt the turn before I got to that street.

A man was standing on the side street that I was trying to turn onto. His parked car was just behind him. I wasn’t able to make a narrow enough turn at that speed, and I was heading straight at him. He jumped out of the way. I collided with his parked car. The bike was totaled, I was bruised and scraped, and his taillight was busted.

He was a college student, in town over the summer because he worked at the Danny Manning basketball camp. I was excited to meet a teammate of Danny Manning! My parents were not so excited about paying for the taillight of his fancy foreign car. It cost $155.

The moral of this story is to keep your bike in good working order. If you buy a bike anywhere besides a bike shop, take it to a bike shop for a safety check.

Tales from the early days

Like an old man on the porch outside the general store, I’ve been reminiscing about my early days of bicycling, before I knew what I was doing, before I considered myself a bicyclist. Each of my stories has a moral.

2. My first wreck

We lived out in the country on a highway. It wasn’t a busy highway, but it wasn’t a place a 9-year-old could bike by herself anywhere. I biked in the driveway. When my sister got a bigger bike I inherited her bike. It had a banana seat and a white basket on the front. Sometimes we biked with Mom down the highway to the first gravel road and went around the gravel road “block” until we came back to the highway. Once I fell on the gravel and skinned my knee. We walked our bikes a little while, me crying, until Mom said we’d get home faster if we pedaled. I didn’t think I could pedal with a skinned knee, but I could.

Mom and I biked 14 miles to Oskaloosa (or, as we called it, Oskie). I was amazed that a person could bike that far! Way out in the country, the only way to go anywhere was in a car. There were a couple neighbors we could visit on foot, but we never did. My sister babysat for the neighbors on the other side of the highway, and our 2-year-old brother tried to follow her. A trucker saw him toddling down the highway and stopped and brought him back to our house. As far as I knew, a car was as necessary for life as air, water, and food. Biking all the way to Oskie was an epic journey.

When we got to Oskie, we stopped at a gas station to put air in our tires. I had the impression that after all that biking, the tires had run out of air, like a car would run out of gas after a lot of driving, but I guess the tires were just low. My tire immediately exploded. The gas station attendant (they had them in those days) told us it was because the tires got too hot from the friction of the highway. Funny how that seemed like a reasonable explanation to me. We didn’t have spare tubes and if we had, we didn’t know how to change the tubes. It didn’t matter though, because Dad had already planned to meet us at the gas station with a truck to take us home.

This is actually 2 stories so it comes with 2 morals. 1) Gravel sucks. 2a) Learn how to inflate a tire. 2b) Learn how to change a tire. 2c) Carry a spare tube.

Tales from the early days

Like an old man on the porch outside the general store, I’ve been reminiscing about my early days of bicycling, before I knew what I was doing, before I considered myself a bicyclist. Each of my stories has a moral.

1. Learning to bike

Some kids learn to bike almost before they learn to walk. Others take… a little bit longer. Like me. Frankly, it always took me a bit longer to do physical things. I was small for my age, the smallest kid in my class except for the kid who had an endocrine disorder. I was smaller than most of the kids in the grade below us too. Maybe that’s why it took me longer to learn physical things. My head was a magnet for balls– even if I wasn’t part of a game, balls invariably hit me on the head sooner or later. I didn’t much like ball games, for that reason. It took me a long time to learn to swim. Every summer I went to swimming lessons. Other kids moved up to the next class, but not me. Finally I was determined to pass the beginner class. I had to tread water for 60 seconds. It was the longest 60 seconds of my life and I was pretty sure I was going to drown. After that, I never went to swim lessons again. PE was the worst class for me, all through grade school.

The surprise then, is not that I was slow to learn to bike, but that I ever became such an ardent bicyclist. I learned to ride a bike when I was 9. We had a red bike with coaster brakes.

Most parents don’t know how to teach riding a bike. They use training wheels are the ticket, or run alongside holding onto the seat of the bike. But the best way to learn how to ride a bike is to lower the seat until your feet can touch the ground, remove the pedals, and scooter along with your feet, until you get the trick of balance. In our experience, it takes 1 to 3 hours of practice like this to learn to ride a bike. My mom didn’t know all that. She was too short to run alongside me, and we didn’t have training wheels on that bike. So she told me to coast down the paved part of the driveway. She got it right by accident.

Our driveway was gravel, except for the bit in front of the garage. I coasted down that over and over, putting my feet down as necessary to not fall over, until I coasted the whole distance of the paved bit– perhaps 20 feet. I didn’t yet have the knack of steering, so I veered off to one side and landed in a rosebush.

The moral of this story is to save your back and don’t bother with training wheels to teach kids how to bike. Let them scooter along until they get the knack.