Why do I ride?

Yesterday, I blogged about bicycle commuting, but after reading my Aunt's comment stating that riding my bike to work sounds a lot like work, I started to realize that maybe I left something important out of my blog; the passion.   Riding a bike is the pulse of my life! I love to ride a bike, for me riding a bike is like breathing,  When asked how I do something on a bike it takes me a while to explain, if I can.  Usually, I have to do it to break it down into an explanation, like breathing, I don't have to think.  I ride all different kinds of bikes and my favorite type of riding really depends on my mood.  Speaking of mood, if I spend too much time out of the saddle my mood starts to suffer.  Luckily, I married a woman who has good feel as to when I "need" to ride my bike and the sense to kick me out the door when I need a ride!  There is nothing better than feeling the wind in my hair generated by the power in my legs.  Riding a bike gets my blood pumping, my adrenaline flowing and my brain surging with endorphins that make my world right!!  Freedom and bliss, oh yeah!!

My passion for riding a bike started when I was very young...                                                                       

My first bike looked very much like the one to the left.  It was your typical Toys R Us bike that was set up with training wheels.  I remember riding it around the apartment complex with the training wheels bouncing back and forth, back and forth.  Then one day my mother took me to a nearby parking lot.  I remember being nervous and excited at the same time.  In that parking lot she removed the training wheels from the bike (I'm sure she was nervous and excited as well)!  The next thing I remember is that she was running along with me while I am pedaling the bike, breathing hard and encouraging me to keep pedaling and shouting and yelling and telling me to keep pedaling and shouting and yelling to keep pedaling.  Then I realize that her voice is coming from very far away and I turned around to see where she was...

Well, this happened a couple of times before I was able to get the bike going and keep it up all by myself without any assistance.  From that day on the bike had replaced my feet.  As long as I had a choice the rubber that touched the ground was manufactured by the biking industry instead of the shoe industry!!

At some point I was hit by a car and the yellow bike was replaced with a blue one.  And then the BMX craze hit the nation and the banana seat was replaced with a BMX seat, the bars were replaced with BMX handlebars, the tires were replaced with BMX tires, pedals were changed, grips and pads were added to the bike to make it ride and look like my friends cool new BMX bikes.  From that time on we would ride through the neighborhood looking for things to jump off.  Curbs at the end of driveways made excellent places to launch from, especially in my neighborhood where there did not seem to be a standard curb height.  One of my best friends fathers entered him into a "professional" BMX club and he got to race around a track with a helmet and stuff.  Well, it wasn't long before we were throwing our bikes over that fence and riding the track.  Unfortunately, that track was several miles away and against the law, so we built ramps to launch off using wood scavenged from our tree fort building project.  It wasn't too long after that my Frankenstein bike started to suffer the consequences of major abuse and I landed face first into the pavement due to the failure of the handlebars.  Soon thereafter my mother realized I needed a better bike if I was going to be keep out of the emergency room and away from broken bones.  

That next Christmas I received the largest gift ever... a brand new BMX bike very similar to the one pictured to the right.  The one here is a brand name bike, which would have been lightweight.  For some reason my mother thought the heavier no-name brand was the safer bet for me.  You see she realized that steel was a much stronger metal than the new fangled chromeolly and wanted me to be as safe as possible!  From that point on me and the bike were inseparable.  My friends and I would spend every waking hour outside school and meals on our bikes.  Either launching off of things or terrorizing the neighborhood!  I remember we built our own BMX (now called pump) track near the KFC and spent time at the official BMX track, fence be damned!  The feeling of flying through the air on a bike is as close as we will get to being birds!  The beautiful sound when the tires leave the ground and go silent and you can hear the wind in your ears until the knobs of the tires roar again.  I remember one of my friends missing a jump and having a double sized purple ass for weeks from slamming it on the seat.  I also remember balancing 2x4's and sheets of plywood across the bars that we scavenged from construction sights for the use in our tree fort projects; the only thing to take us away from riding our bikes around the neighborhood.  Once we hit the end of junior high school bikes kind of faded from the picture and were replaced by skateboards, but bikes would soon return in my high school years in a new and different form...