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Posts tagged ‘Mountain bikes’

Mar 12

on a bike

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This story originally ran at The Toast about four years ago. A slightly different version ran in Adventure Journal Quarterly. What I love about it now, actually, is that some of the commentary about culture and gender seem almost out of date. Like ideas about women and sports and what we can and can’t do, that terrain is shifting fast. So I guess what I’m saying is maybe there’s a glimmer of hope in these things. Either way, I still like this story. It has a lot of bikes in it. And bikes are good.

***

I’m working in my kit again. I thought I could escape, but then the phone started nagging. So I sat down to answer it and to answer that other thing, and to edit that one thing and to make that other thing. Sitting still is hard. I just want to go ride. The internet is such a dick sometimes.

So here I sit, my padded shorts feeling like diapers in my cushioned office chair. On the bike, I don’t notice the padding. Off the bike, it shifts and bunches like an over-sized maxi-pad. Finally, I pull up the straps on my bibshorts and zip my jersey.

If you’ve never seen bibshorts, they look like shorts with suspenders attached. Before the time of lycra, cyclists wore wool shorts with actual suspenders. These days bibshorts are a weird, one-piece contraption, the parts sewn together painstakingly by women in a factory somewhere in Romania. The sewing process is not easy. The lycra is pieced together and the seams placed just so. No one wants a seam in the vagina.

I’m a Title IX girl. I swam in college, my team funded because the law required it. Eventually I got bored of chasing the pool’s black line and turned mountain bike racer. My friends and I used to say that women’s participation in sports was one of the last battlegrounds of feminism. We were more optimistic about feminism then, and in truth, about life.

The wheels thunk as I ride down the stairs to the sidewalk and shoot through the grass to the street. The bike doesn’t really stop. Somewhere between the emails and interview transcripts and editing corrections and can you just do this one thing, I need to adjust the brakes, but I haven’t gotten around to it. It adds excitement to the whole thing to ride a bike that doesn’t really stop. You just go faster.

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Apr 16

first race

This is a story about a bike and a bike race.

Once upon a time I was a swimmer, but I got bored of the pool and bikes looked pretty fun, so I thought maybe I should get one.

A boyfriend in college used to lend me his. Yes! It’s true! And a total cliché. Ask just about any woman rider who she got into the sport, and there’s probably a boyfriend or a brother and a borrowed bike somewhere in the story. So, there’s mine. I also borrowed my brother’s bike, which is funny, if you only knew how much taller than me he is. 

Eventually, I decided to get my own bike, but really, I didn’t have any money. So, I bought this green steel thing. <Grandpappy voice> In my day, they only put suspension forks on the expensive bikes! </Grandpappy voice>

So, I got one without. It was steel. And forest green. And rigid. It had cantilever brakes that didn’t really work. It also had hideous decals that I eventually tried to remove with disastrous results.

I took that bike on lots of adventures. Including this beautiful disaster outside San Diego. 

After a while, I thought it would be cool to have a suspension fork. So I bought one. But still, I had no money, which meant I couldn’t buy a good one. Hey! At least it was yellow so it looked like a Judy, even it wasn’t one.  The Yellow Fork – because who remembers low-end anonymous product names – was only slightly better than nothing.

I rode just about everywhere on that bike. My helmet was always crooked, because it didn’t fit. Also, bar ends. I don’t even know why we had them. The first day I rode clipless pedals, I fell over in front of all my dude friends. Because that’s what you do on your first day with clipless pedals. Who was I to argue with the pattern that Fate had outlined?

Then one day, my friends were going to a bike race. I’d never been to a bike race, and they convinced me that somehow it would be fun. I think I’m a very convincable person, maybe. 

So we piled in cars – I did not drive my VW bug to this edition, that came later – and headed up the coast to Sea Otter.

I stayed at some random house crammed full of people. I think it was in Santa Cruz, but I don’t really remember. I do remember the next year involved a crowded hotel room, and one of my dude friends eating donuts in bed. But that’s another story, my friends, for another day.

Then, I went to the bike race on my heavy steel bike with the shitty yellow fork with no name and the brakes that didn’t really work and my helmet on crooked. And it was the funnest thing in the history of the world. 

After that, I went to lots more bike races. I put roofracks on my VW Bug. And I bought a nicer bike with a real suspension fork and brakes that mostly worked.

But I think the first race is always the best race. Because you go there with no expectations. It’s all just one crazy who needs brakes anyway adventure. You can’t be bothered with the results and you can’t be bothered with fixing your crooked helmet. You’re too busy having fun.

Really, life should always be exactly like this.