My new bike, or why I’m not normal…
So entering the New Year I was determined to shed some extra weight that’s slowly been accumulating the past several years. A diet is good, but if I throw in some exercise I’ll lose the weight even faster, right? Anyway that’s the theory. So I decided to get a mountain bike to start riding everyday. I’m not going to go overboard or anything like these ridiculously healthy people who ride 50 miles a day, but I’ll try and take a 20 or 30-minute spin on the days it doesn’t rain - aha! A loophole, you see I live in the Portland, Oregon area.
So here comes the part about why I’m not normal. The normal person would go to a local bike shop, pick out a really nice bicycle, pay the owner of the bike shop god knows how many hundreds of dollars, put the bike in the back of their vehicle, take it home and start riding it.
Not me. No sir. I go online and find the cheapest bike I can find (sold by Amazon for an embarrassingly low $99) and wait 3 days for it to be delivered. So it arrived via Fed-ex at the office where I work and one of my co-workers had signed for it. When I got to work I saw that the box looked like it had been used for a battering ram. Now here is where the normal person would probably show some alarm. Not I. I was sure it was fine. After all, bikes are sturdy aren’t they? I pulled it out of the box and immediately discovered that one of the pedals had some small pieces broken away and the reflector had fallen off. Ah, that’s not so bad, it’s only a pedal. Who cares about that? So I tore through all the paper wrapping around the frame and snipped the tie-wraps that secured the front wheel and the handlebars to the frame so I could start assembling my new bike. And then I discovered some more significant damage. That gearshift thingy on the back wheel that moves back and forth to guide the chain onto the different sprockets was bent all the way into the spokes of the wheel. Now here’s where the normal person would have stopped, packed it all back up and tried to contact Amazon to complain that the merchandise was damaged, and demanded to know what they were going to do about it. Not ol’ Mark. I can fix that. Who wants the headache of convincing Amazon of the damage and getting them to replace it, not to mention the hassle of putting it all back together into that dilapidated box and hauling it to a shipping facility? I wanted my bike then, not 3 days or even 2 weeks later. So I disassembled the bent thingy, and using a vice and brute force, I managed to make it almost straight again. Anyway, after hours of fiddling around with it I managed to get it working. It works though not quite as smoothly as it would if it hadn’t been mangled in the first place.
So day one, I take my bike out for my first ride. I made it all the way around the block, my heart pounding, hardly able to catch my breath. Well that was enough for day one, don’t you think? Maybe I’ll go around two blocks on day two. Holy smokes, when did I get so old?