First Bike Ride of 2016

I returned from running errands just a few minutes before five on an unexpectedly warm (forty degree) January afternoon, with sunset still a half-hour away. Sensing an opening after the recent cold snap, my legs started sending urgent emotional messages to my brain that translated as “we need to move it or lose it!” My lungs quickly added to the “noise,” chiming in with “we need a workout too! Mucous is building! Con-biotics finding a haven! Cough, cough…”

I knew the temps would be rapidly falling, so I decided to put on my leather jacket against the chill, covering it with my bright hoodie of the sort city street-workers wear in hopes of being visible over the glare of cellphone screens. Since I was in a hurry to beat the dark, the jacket’s zipper took the opportunity to balk.

Why do I have ten dollar hoodies I wear all the time, with zippers that outlive the fabric, but the (brand name) jacket I wear only in real cold weather, is already on its second zipper? Just another of life’s little mysteries, I guess.

Ten frustrating minutes later, in rapidly fading light, I’m wheeling my bike over the patch of ice at the end of the driveway. After a series of snow storms, I knew I was speculating on the ride-worthiness of the streets, but I live at the bottom of a south-facing hill and could see pavement all the way to the top of my block, before the street levels out for three blocks, then rises again, getting a more direct ice-melting hit from a sun riding low in the southern sky. 

I figured I could settle for some High Intensity sprints, up and down my block, if nothing else, but when I got to the intersection, I could see paths of pavement zig-zagging onward and went to check it out, after walking my bike across the small ice sheet there.

I crossed some more heavily traveled and, hence less-icy streets, but at this time of day, they were clogged by office workers, fleeing the confines of their cubicles. I continued on uphill, at least giving my lungs a mild challenge. Within a half-mile I was getting tired of picking my way through the icy patches remaining where the street was lined with trees. The setting sun no longer revealed thin layers of black ice and I started to question my judgement.

My left thumb turned into a fairly reliable “barometer” years ago, when a two-foot stretch of ice suddenly turned my forward motion sideways and down. My instant reaction to stick my arm out to break my fall put the brunt of the impact on my thumb. The lingering image of the ground rushing up at me convinced me that ice and two-wheeled vehicles are a bad combination.

Surprisingly, unless you know me, it wasn’t the fall that was the immediate cause of my vow to actually quit riding in slippery conditions. I had to start with a promise I’d be more careful. It was an uphill ride in an icy slush, where I had to focus on pedaling at a pace that wouldn’t make my rear wheel lose traction that convinced me that continuing in the face of difficulties isn’t always a good trait where addiction, even to exercise, is concerned.

A person addicted to Alcohol and Other Drugs will spend years revisiting life’s slippery spots, like old using-friends and places, avoiding the “dry pavement” of a new life, leading to recurring problems like lost jobs, utilities (even cable!) shut off, evictions, shrugging off legal consequences that mere mortals would blanch at, yet plowing on, undeterred. And that’s what I like about us addicts: we persevere! We pressed on with the using anyway, sure that each arrest, lost job, broken promise to kids and so on, was merely a fluke.

What makes that line of thought especially dangerous, is the fact that there is often a grain of truth to the grounds for that classification. “If I hadn’t decided to go for ‘breakfast’ after the bar closed.” “If it wasn’t for that small patch of ice that caused my car to swerve and gave the cop grounds to pull me over…” True, but how about if your BAL hadn’t been higher than your effective IQ? Or when you extracted your license from your purse that baggie was easily visible? Or the cop fearing the amount of second-hand smoke emanating from your open window might cause him to fail a random UA?

The fact is, there are a million possible flukes and the real “fluke” in all this is that we managed to stumble through that minefield without attracting unwelcome attention any more often than we did.

Bottom line for this bike ride was that I have learned a little something. I turned around when I encountered a wider sheet of ice, picked my way back downhill, even more carefully in the dim light, and settled for a disappointing 1.17 miles. A far cry from the seven miles a day I needed to average to reach my goal of 2500 miles for the year, but leaving me with a healthy body to use, in the 352 days left, to make up the shortfall.