No bike
January 31, 2020 § 8 Comments
I was going to bring my bike on this business trip but I didn’t. It’s not often that I go for this long without my bike, and when I do, it’s not good. At all. Here are the symptoms.
- Irritability. Too much energy and it all gets pent up, like gas.
- Bloating. Still eat like you’re riding, so your gut swells, like gas.
- Coffee. Constantly trying to trick your dulled body and mind with the alertness that comes from riding with caffeine. You think you can’t drink too much coffee? YOU CAN.
- Cloggage. You know how you’re used to going from “eat” to “expel” in half an hour? Shit slows down, so to speak.
- Benvy. Short for “bicycle envy,” which is what you feel when you see other people riding bikes, any bikes. Don’t matter how rusted, how ancient, how clunker.
- Bantasy. Short for “bike fantasy,” where you are in a constant daydream of imagining all the riding you would be doing, even though you’re stuck in some urban hellhole where they’d run you over at the first intersection.
- Seizures. This is where your back and pretty much everything seizes up from the non-exercise. Aches start to grow where you never, ever had them. Limbs bend with the agility of a dry tree branch.
- Fakecercise. This is what you do to compensate for not riding. Yoga, jogging, hotel gyms, and Internet are the main types of fakercise. THEY DON’T WORK.
- Bad sleep. You can kiss your solid eight hours good-bye.
There’s more but I’m too irritable to think about it or write them down.
END
Cycling in the South Bay 
First off – I dig your writing. Good stories told well! And when you want to bust someone’s balls you absolutely kill me.
Second off – I travel for work. Very heavily – like 150 nights per year heavily. I’ve finally discovered the relative ease and incomparable joy of renting bikes…and I’ve found no matter how remote I am while you can’t always get the bike you’d want to ride…I’ve found you can always get a bike to ride.
In the States it’s pretty easy, in Europe not any harder (even in remote mountain towns of southern Italy bikes magically can be delivered to obscure addresses), and in Asia and Latin America you take what you can get which is often a hard tail mountain bike that weighs about 2000 pounds
But they’ll happily put on your peddles, if you packed them, and seeing Mumbai, or Jaisalmer, or anywhere else on the seat of a bike is getting to know the city as intimately as one can
Safe travels, I’m going to get off my ass an subscribe one of these days, and I hope you can find a bike
I just got back from India for seriously the 80th time. For the first 75 times or so, I did what you did with the running and lifting and what have you. These last times I rode the bike and it has made all the difference
Thanks, I will see what I can rustle up. They have city bikes here which won’t accept my credit card. Weird since I bought them off the Internet from that nice Russian fellow.
My wife has one rule: at no time shall I be off the bike for two consecutive days. For exactly these reasons. I ride similar hours to you, and firmly believe that our older-than-dirt bodies can’t adapt to change like we used to. So, keep riding!
https://www.bimbimbikes.com/bike-rental/turkey
No Bike, Mo’ cry – didn’t Bob Marley sing about that ?
I think so …
What’s the matter you?! You know better!! I have learned this lesson and thus I brought my bike to Portland this week to ride in the 42 degree rain. Its better than the alternative, which is literally every point you make above!
What matter? Dumb.