A Suspicious Stranger and An Old Friend
Cyclist in Training
The sun is shining, the air is warming up, and people are reemerging from their winter hibernation, including me. I headed out for my first before-work ride a couple of weeks ago.
Winter’s grip on the world started loosening in January and I’d been able to get out for some mid-day rides, but I was impatiently checking sunrise times, waiting for it to be light at 5am, so I could start riding before work again. I am not a morning person and I dread the thought of waking up at 4am. But my first early morning ride reminded me of why I drag myself out of bed before dawn all summer.
I wheel my bike out my side door and into the gray light of pre-dawn. I am greeted by the sweet, clean smell of the cool morning air. Air doesn’t taste this good at any other time of day. Rolling through downtown, the streets are empty and the world is quiet except for the song birds. I have the city all to myself. I climb up the south hill watching the sky turn lovely shades of pink and lavender. The sunrise feels like a heavenly display just for me.
As I race my husband back through downtown at the end of the ride, traffic is picking up, people are walking around. The city no longer belongs only to me. I love riding my bike at any hour, but morning is my favorite time, by far, and I’m thrilled that the season for morning rides is finally here.
The other day I was reminded that not everyone shares my comfortable enthusiasm for exercise in general and cycling in particular. My husband and I were out for a quick after work ride on the Centennial Trail, a popular paved recreational trail that runs through Spokane and into North Idaho, and I noticed a gal getting ready to start out on a ride.
She had a ’90′s mountain bike without suspension that she had swapped out the original knobby tires for a brand new pair of slicks. She clipped on her helmet and suspiciously eyed the bike, the way a weekend visitor to a ranch would eye an especially feisty horse. She steeled herself, grabbed the handle bars and awkwardly lifted her leg over the top tube.
Watching her slowly ride away, I imagined that she probably dragged that bike, covered in dust and with two flat tires, out of the back of the garage a couple of weeks ago. Making a new commitment to her health and fitness, she hauled it to the local bike shop and set about getting it ready to ride. It looked like her first ride in a long time and her suspicious attitude towards her bike was in striking contrast to how I am used to seeing the people that I ride with approach their bikes.
Chatting at the beginning of a ride, one hand resting lovingly on the handlebars. As the ride leaders roll out, people fluidly swing up onto their bikes, and the bike disappears, becoming an extension of the body. Sitting comfortably on their mounts, they roll through the country side, alternately chatting and good-naturedly challenging each other’s strength and endurance.
As my husband and I continued on our way I found myself hoping that she enjoyed her ride, that her bike would transform from a suspicious stranger to an old friend. That her rides would transform from an obligation to her health, to an opportunity to feel the strength, power, and grace in her own body.
-By Arielle Dykes, fitness contributer
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