I ❤️ 🚲

A love story

In 2025 I fell in love, for what then felt like the first time in forever. The distance that would separate us was too great to overcome, so it wasn't to be, but it was only a few weeks later that I fell in love all over again, this time even stronger than before.

Of course you read the title of the post so you know I'm talking about bikes.

I've long held that everyone should own a bike, because you never know when you'll need one; when I moved into my first apartment out of school, one of the first things I did was buy a $70 beater off Craigslist to replace the bike I'd had on campus that vanished under mysterious circumstances. (A story for another time, and no, I'm not actually sure it was stolen.)

I did not love this bike, or to bike, and I used it seldom, but when I moved into a group house that advertised among other amenities its six-hook custom bike rack, I felt at home.

Then I met a certain bike, and things changed.

My dalliance abroad

In early 2025 I was visiting some friends abroad for a month. They live in a mid-sized city that's very walkable, so they walk everywhere, but I would have a month to kill poking around the city and after a single day of walking I decided I needed a bike or I would go crazy. Walking is slow!

I took to the internet to run my usual playbook. By the end of the afternoon I had a deal locked up with some dad on the north side of the city for his old road bike; I don't believe the sum was much over $50 USD. I also don't remember how I got to the spot, but I remember how I got back, because my plan was to ride the bike back.

Reader, I did not ride the bike back. I *did* spend thirty minutes or so trying ineptly to refill a tube with a hole it in (not that I knew that) as the sun set and it got steadily colder; finally I called in ground support and my friend drove over to bail me out. I walked the bike over to a shop nearby their flat the next day, though, and they had me up and running in short order.

My second-hand Spectrum road bike.

I had never ridden a road bike before, and I had never ridden a bike with drop handlebars. It took a lot of getting used to: I could barely keep the front wheel straight at first, and using the brakes felt like climbing out the window of a moving train with the way it made me shift my entire posture and then hold it while accelerating. It was not, in the first week or so, my favorite purchase of all time.

However, as the time passed, I started to notice how well it fit my body--I had never stopped to consider that bikes could be *sized* other than Adult or Child--how easy it was to push the pedals--how it felt to move on it. Quickly frustration turned into delight, and getting on the bike turned into jumping on the bike, and going places turned into an excuse to ride the bike.

Craig Mod wrote a paean to the electric bike that converted me on the spot when I read it. (I had been a hater who thought electric bikes were Cringe before, and I have Craig to thank for letting me off the ride without chastisement.) He says:

Indulge me — a summer afternoon: Soaring down the coast, the ocean to one side and a strand of old pines to the other. The afternoon sun beats down but it feels cool and there’s something irrationally stirring — downright emotional — about the efficiency of this dumb machine beneath my body. The motor looks too small — just a black cylinder on the hub of the wheel. And yet it *moves*. It *sings* that song. A subtle hum. A beautiful hum. It makes me want to ride and ride, ridiculous distances, nonsensical distances. I don’t want to get to where I’m going because I want the ride to last longer. I want to linger in this space as long as possible, this space of smooth and efficient movement through the world, gliding in near total mechanical silence, just the sound of rubber on the pavement, wind in my ears, breaking waves, salt, the smell of pine. This is what electric bikes do: They drive you insane with the poetry of the world.

(Go read Craig, his bike essay is better than mine.)

He's right about electric bikes--that's another story--but this is how I felt about this bike, too. By the end of my trip I was scheming franctically, trying to nail down a way to bring the bike home with me, thousands of miles and likely hundreds of dollars for this $50 bike with $15 of repairs on it. It was one question after another, and the uncertainties and costs piled up; facing down the return to real life after a month of freedom, I couldn't imagine doing it all. None of my friends wanted a bike, so I found a second-hand store in the city that accepted donations, and a few days before I flew home I pedalled there and walked away.

The melodrama! But I was despondent. All I could do was hope that one day love would find me again.

Meet-cute

As it turned out, that's exactly what happened, and I didn't have long to wait.

I'm a long-time thrifter; there were a few years when I didn't buy any clothing that didn't come from a thrift store. My wardrobe is still recovering from those days, but I still buy a lot of second-hand clothes and try to get out to the local Goodwill every few months. Less than four weeks after I was back States-side, I was at my local Goodwill, when what did I find but a road bike: in good condition, perfectly sized, for what couldn't have been much more than $100 USD.

My second-hand Schwinn road bike.

This time it was love at first sight. I could go anywhere on this Schwinn; the steepest hill could hardly be distinguished from the most level straightaway. It wasn't long before my mind turned to a long-term ambition of mine, one that suddenly felt more within reach than it had ever been.

Here in the DC area we have a trail called the Washington & Old Dominion trail. It goes from just south of Arlington, VA out 45 miles to Purcellville, VA, and for years I'd imagined biking the whole thing, camping out in Virginia, and biking back. When I first came up with this plan my obsession at the time was hammock camping (this obsession is perennial, but waxes and wanes depending on my attention; ask me about the month I tried sleeping in a hammock indoors and the subsequent mild to severe self-inflicted back pain), and I'd never ridden more than 5 miles on a bike at a time, so it seemed like the kind of dream to remain a dream.

Then I got my Schwinn, and the math changed dramatically. One weekend I took it out for a 15-mile spin through Rock Creek Park, Washington, DC's own great wooded mystery. (If you've ever driven through DC and suddenly found yourself in the middle of a forest wondering what you did wrong: that's Rock Creek.) I expected I'd barely make it if at all, but instead it felt *easy.* I was enchanted. If I could count to 15 without even trying, maybe I could count to 45 after all.

Commitment

So I pretty much locked in. That summer I got out on the Schwinn as many weekends as I could--which was fewer than I hoped, because it was a crazy summer--and watched as the number slowly went up. By the end of July I was doing 30 miles, and by the end of August I had hit 40. My route took me out of DC, down to the W&OD trailhead, and up the trail itself, creeping just a bit further every time.

On the W&OD.

I took the bike to get a checkup and came home with kit. I had a portable tire pump. I had a replacement tube and a saddle bag to keep it in. I had *panniers.* (Er, one pannier actually, I still don't have the second.) I ordered a bike computer online. I had *numbers.*

My weekends turned into puzzles that could be solved by determining when I would manage to get on my bike for four hours and then lie on the ground afterwards for another hour. It was 90° F and 80% humidity; I was on my bike. I drove up north visting family out of state; my bike came with me, and I was on my bike. (Thank you family for putting up with me.) I called this a love story because I really was in love with biking, in a way I've not really been in love with any other sport.

Seeing the world

As determined as I was, I was still losing more weekends than I'd hoped to plans that simply could not make room for obnoxious quantities of time spent biking. For example, the first unexpected two and a half weeks in June spent visiting my family in California (a story for another time). Later in the summer I had to fly to CA for the second time, and I knew I had an opportunity I couldn't let go to waste.

Here in DC we are blessed with the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Much has been said about DCA by more responsible authors than I; personally, I just think it's very pretty, and very on the Metro, and very close to my house.

Interior of Terminal B at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia. Wikimedia.

I could bike to the airport! (I couldn't get the idea out of my head.) Like I'm European, or something! (Whatever this means.) I could have my bike with me while I was in California! (The number must continue to go up.) There were many logistical problems to solve, and not much time to solve them.

In short order I assembled a way to transport the bike. I was uninterested in the typical solution to this problem--a hard case--because the whole point was that I could ride to the airport (or at least to the Metro). So I found a crappy little bike bag on Amazon, bought the sturdiest bubble wrap I could at Home Depot, and tried looking up any bike-related deities I could pray to. (Not really.)

In short, the plan as executed was:

• Show up at the airport on my bike
• Unpack the bubble wrap and bike bag
• Remove the bike pedals and lower the seat so the bike would fit in the bag
• Bubble wrap the bike and put it in the bag
• Check the bike bag at the airport
• Feel extremely smart

(Not shown: spending far too much money at REI on a backpack big enough to fit everything I'd need for another two week trip to California. Also, the paracord I used to lash the bubble wrap to the bike so I could transport it getting tangled in my back gear because I didn't tie it up properly and my having to spend fifteen minutes on the side of the road 500 feet from the house covering my hands in chain grease getting it unstuck.)

This worked great! (Aside from the whole thing with the paracord.) The only question was, of course, whether my bike would survive its journey.

As we all know, they really beat the shit out of your stuff when you check bags. I concluded based on "thinkin about it" that it would *probably* be fine, and anyway, as much as I loved my bike it was only $100, and if this killed it I could get another one, and if it *didn't* kill it think about how awesome it would be.

And, in fact, it did survive. There was some *minor* bending back into shape that had to be done once on the ground in CA before I could do my weekly ride, but ride I did. As part of this second trip, which in its most pared-down form could've been a single weekend, I decided I would spend a week in Los Angeles, so not only did I have my bike for training, I also had it for transit in LA during the week I was there. (No, I didn't ride my bike to LA, my family doesn't live in LA and California is very large. Also, say it with me, story for another time.)

On the streets of LA. IYKYK.

Of course... then I had to fly *back...* And while LA is also a real city and you can bike to LAX (or more accurately, bike to the bus that takes you to LAX) perfectly well (though it's no DCA), that meant giving the bike back up to the whirlwind. And it definitely had to survive this time, or I'd be walking home.

In the end... it lived. Tempest-tost though it was, all the powers of the spirits of the valley couldn't muster the strength to destroy it. They could, however, muster the strength to push it within, say, 1.5mm of its life?

The front fork was bent all to hell, and there's a huge dent in the chainguard; the steel was deflected very nearly to the point of catching on the chain as it sits on the sprocket. If it had been bent really any further it probably would've rendered the bike unusable, unless I could find someone who could, idk, bend the 2mm steel back out without completely trashing the crankset. Thankfully the good fellows at REI *could* bend the front fork back into a more functional shape, and though it's still not really back to normal I no longer notice the slight deflection caused by the asymmetry.

I felt sort of lucky to have lived after that, and as satisfying as it was, I unfortunately cannot recommend this method of travel unless you really do not care if your bike lives or dies. My bravado got me through it once, but the dent in the chainguard is enough to remind me that I was lucky, not good, on this one.

Cooler heads / Quiet

Anyway, you know the rest of the story: that was July, and my August was finally normal, nice and quiet. I put my head down and racked up the miles, but the chaos of the rest of the summer had done its work, and by September I was just barely short of 45 miles; and anyway my real goal was 60 or more, because the trailhead itself is 10+ miles from where I am in DC, and of course I would need the endurance not just to make it to Purcellville but to make it *back* the next day. Then I went to Japan, where I certainly did not take my bike, and by the time I was back it was nearly October, the weather was cooling down, and even if I got myself fully in riding shape, there likely wasn't time left to make the trip up the W&OD.

So, I called it quits, and prayed that the fire would last through the winter and come spring I would get back in the saddle.

That's not quite what happened--this spring and summer were as busy as the last; busier, if anything. While I yearned for the bike, I also barely had a Sunday to spare, let alone one on which to spend 4 hours biking. But also, I've moved, and my new place is in a much more bikeable location than my old one, so I've been finding myself getting on the bike just to jet around town much more often than I would before.

I guess I'm kind of back where I started. But hey, there's always next year. 🚲

The kanji of the day is 車

• Its Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course keywords are VEHICLE and WHEEL.
• Its readings are くるま and シャ.

Bicycle, 自転車: 自/SELF 転/TURN 車/VEHICLE. That is all.