Cycle/Psycho (Cycling in General)

Member Name: Virtuoso

Product:	Cycling in General
Date:	12/03/09 (105 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Gets you places, enables you to eat as many doughnuts as you want

Disadvantages: Might get you killed

I have been in love with cycling for the majority of my life. I still remember the thrill it gave me and the feeling of independence when I climbed astride the purple monstrosity with the white tyres that was given to me as my first bike. I remember it had no gears, but I would push one of four bolts sticking up from the stem in the pretence that doing so would change gear! I would thunder about the pavements near my house, steadily daring to go further and further until I was convinced that I knew the back alleys and thoroughfares of the urban jungle better than anyone else alive.

As I grew older I caught wind of the phenomenon that is Mountain Biking. Mountain Biking was in its formative years as I grew up and certainly wasn't the accepted Olympic sport it is now. This sounded like an absolutely brilliant idea to me, it combined my love of hills (my father had taken me hill walking on many an occasion) with my love of cycling. Only trouble was I live in a very flat part of the country, was too young to have my own transport, and I knew nobody else who wanted to join me. So my love of Mountain Biking was stillborn to my great regret.

I did however find a branch of the sport that I could perform in my urban jungle, and this was 'Trials'. This is where you have to hop and skip over a series of impossible looking objects, rocks, oil drums, cars, benches. I spent countless hours in the back garden practicing 'track stands' - keeping dead still on the bike and maintaining my balance and,'Bunny Hops' - raising the bike off the ground so that I could leap onto or over objects. I was never able to get myself to a standard that I could be competitive at this, and I believe that this is partly because I was always on my own. Again I had no friends that were interested in it, and never saw anybody on the streets doing this. I reached a standard where I could impress most people, for example I could leap onto the top of a picnic bench and down the other side, and had I had a willing car owner I'm certain I could have got on top of a car. Of course now it is a common sight to see teenagers trying to do trials on the streets, it seems that I was just too much of a pioneer and got there a few years early!

Fast forward a few years and I found my second incarnation as a cyclist, I am now a commuter (boo, hiss). I had just bought a house and money was looking quite tight, so I desperately scoured my expenses for any cutbacks. I was spending an outrageous £100+ a month on transport to work, which seemed particularly painful because I was paying money to go and earn money, I was almost working the first hour of each day for nothing!

So I bought my shiny new steed, a bright red slick-shod road bike from Halfords. I have since learnt from considerable forum reading that Halfords staff generally know as much about bikes as I know about the surface of Pluto, so of course the bike was set up very badly. I have since used a small local bike shop for my servicing, and they have done a superb job. So my piece of advice would be that although Halfords bikes are very good value for money, if you know nothing about bike servicing you need to have it checked out by a competent bike shop, because it will most likely disintegrate whilst you are flying down a hill at 30mph and leave ashphalt embedded in your face.

The round trip I cycle is 23 miles, at first this was incredibly hard as you may imagine. At the time I was doing no cardiovascular exercise of any sort, although I was not overweight at the time which certainly helped. My first few trips took me roughly 1hour 15minutes to cover one leg of the journey, I had to stop several times to stretch my legs and catch my breath, I pushed the bike up the hills. Basically I was a wreck, and a sorry sight when I got home. I would lie on the sofa thanking God that I had made it home and that the pain had ended. The body is a remarkable thing, and extremely adaptable, so this torture steadily lessened as time passed. Eventually I reached a stage where I had the journey down to 32mins one way and 40 the other.

My greatest thrill I get from cycling is from racing other commuters. This idea might baffle some of you, because of course there is no 'race', we bicycle commuters are just making our own way to our destination in our own time, are we not? Well let me tell you, the competitive fire burns deep within the average cyclist, particularly those who have road bikes and are kitted out in lycra. One of the only methods by which to make the tedium of the commute seem worthwhile is to add a competitive edge. If there is no one about to 'race' this means timing yourself or looking at your speed and beating previous performances. If there is a fellow cyclist travelling your way this means passing them, and not letting them back past you.

For the majority of people I pass, this 'race' I am engaged in goes unnoticed, however occasionally I have been challenged and have engaged in a titanic battle in which we overtake, reovertake, rereovertake and so on until one of us has either burst a lung or reached our destination. Despite the fact that I am commuting I take enormous pride in the fact that I have never been beaten!
Why don't I partake in some real bike races? Several reasons really, firstly my bike is a heap of junk and I would be quite embarrassed to put it amongst the carbon fibre steeds that I know are the norm at a race. Secondly it is ruddy expensive to race, not only do you need to pay the entry fee but there are also race licenses that need to be held, plus travel expenses. I am still not in a position to afford all of that.

Overall my experience of cycling is that it has enriched my life greatly and I would not be without it. When you look at what cyling is from a logical vantage point it is quite bizarre that anyone could be in love with it, after all it's just moving along under your own locomotion, no one loves walking do they? Oh hang on, people do like to walk, well there goes my argument! I'll shut up now.

Summary: Please cycle, Boris Johnson does it and he's never wrong