Books, Breads and Bikes: May 2019

Awhile back I got into some trouble ... isn't that how all of these posts start?

"Awhile back I got into some trouble and yada yada yada, here is what I learned, I hope it is useful, take it or leave it, not to preach, etcetera etcetera, passive aggressive voice, should have learned my lesson but here I am" and so on and so forth.

So let's start with the Big Wheel. I didn't have a lot of toys as a kid. Star Wars figures in my neighborhood, and in my peer group, were the status symbol. I had a few, but also random oddities ... a Thundercats figure, a Tron figure, some Gobots; I was more Catholic in my tastes, you could say.

So the story goes I had a circuit I would ride on my Big Wheel, out my parents driveway, down the block, up a neighbors sloped driveway, skid turn, ramp down, back towards the parents driveway, over a grassy knoll, onto the concrete driveway of home, skid turn and start over. It was a dead end so how many times I could do it was more essential than watching out for passing cars.

Eventually, I got ambitious and tried a larger hill leading to my parents house. After a few tries I incorporated a skid turn, (remember the e-brake on the right hand side of the old all plastic Big Wheels?) and there begins a series of long and complicated crashes.

Skateboards, bikes, rollerblades, roller skis, skis, snowboards, cars ... just about anything that rolls down a hill I have crashed, with the exception of an oversized tractor tire. Don't ever try that. I strongly do not recommend that. Also wear a helmet.

Anyway, so what?, you crash and you get up and that's it. But not so with a decent working bicycle.

Sometimes the bicycle needs repair and then what? I have posted various DIY efforts on this blog before, and I am not sure anyone is really paying attention; sometimes I get it working sometimes not. I made a huge mistake in 2010, and therein lays the trouble I got into.

On a forty or fifty mile ride in Northern Washington County, past Big Marine Lake and William O'Brien State Park, I got a flat tire.

After breaking two tire levers, ripping two replacement tubes, cursing in frustration for forty-five minutes on the side of the road and eventually succumbing to a spiral of failure, I rode home on a flat tire. About nine miles on the aluminum rim of a new-ish wheel set.

Don't ever do that.

8 Years ... 8 very long years, with a lot of cycling miles later, I wore out a different wheelset. It took a little more than 10,000 miles over 5 years, but I needed to go back to that damaged pair of wheels, and I did. They were never right. The rear axle had been damaged and it occasionally oscillated so badly (usually going over 20 mph) that the rear hub would vibrate like a 1980s pager. So yeah, that was aggravating and embarrassing.

Couple that with trying to find out why it was not working without acknowledging I had ruined them made it worse, so here is an apology to those I harangued. The good news, and there has been a lot of it lately, is that life continues. Time passes. Sometimes the only person who rememberers how or why you came to be upset 9 years ago is you, and maybe explaining it isn't going to help anyone. What helped me a lot more was acquiescing and allowing someone to throw out that wheelset before I could try salvaging them one more time.

I enjoyed another 30 Days of Biking this spring, getting through another characteristically unpredictable Minnesota Spring with maybe a little less drama and fewer contradictions than how I came to be riding a bicycle year round to start with. The fishing has been a bit off due to high water (the Mississippi has set a record for being at flood stage for the longest period of time in recorded history, breaking the 1927 flood that shows up at the end of 'Oh Brother Where Art Thou?').

To be certain the potential for crashing is greater while cycling in the Twin Cities than on a dead end street in the suburbs; bike trails and multi-modal commuting are real world alternatives to making a poor decision or applying a little too much ego sauce on your plans and failing gloriously, "...in a cavalcade of anger and fear."

Did you know that while pitching the only perfect game in World Series history, Don Larsen threw a strike outside of the strike zone, and the umpire called it a strike?

I guess there is a lesson there about ethics and standards of operation, perhaps deviation from accepted norms and even the normalization of deviance, somehow, but I don't follow baseball.