Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
Our parents weren't kidding when they said cycling was the best exercise. After a lot of bugging by my roomie I finally decided to go and buy one.. under the pretext of making commuting to my job easier (Anything that lets me leave my home later than I can works by me). Also I felt I should do justice to the "bike-friendly city" that Minneapolis is with its well defined bike routes on all roads. Its actually scary to ride in the center of the road in downtown with the pavement being 2 lanes away on either side and cars and buses zipping past you. Especially when the last time you have ridden a bike is in your pre-teens.
I got a glimpse of the time ahead when I crashed into the helmet rack when trying out the cycle in good ol' Walmart.. symbolic isn't it? Then there were the gears... 18 levels of it! Cost was the primary factor in choosing the bike over comfort/tire thickness/lightness etc. Which was not the wisest decision probably as I later realized. The public buses here have this cool facility to put cycles onto a foldable rack in front of the bus (keeping with the bike-friendly nature of this city). What I didn't realize was that I had not factored in the weight of the cycle while buying it... and I was no weight lifter. I can barely lift 2 galleons of milk!
But well that comes later.. after I get beyond the point of riding the cycle. Couldn't muster it outside the store to ride to the bus-stop so I walked it down (with my friend). Both of us jointly weight-lifted it onto the cycle rack on the bus and got down a good 15 blocks away from home (the bus wouldn't take us any closer). Now it was do or die since walking 15 blocks with a cycle would look absolutely comical. In spite of that I was almost ready to do it if not for my friend who immediately got onto her bike and dared me to walk it alone :D. I will eternally thank the man on the bus stop who gave me instructions on how to start the bike.. one leg at a time :P. It is said we never forget how to ride a bike but I think we can forget how to start and stop it. After a few eventful days which involved me getting the pedal to the perfect angle with one degree precision in order to start the cycle and mentally preparing myself to get down one block before I actually got down, I felt confident enough to take it to work (which would also give me 7 more minutes at home :D)
Sun rises, alarm rings, I snooze it, alarm rings again, I go to snooze it but decide against it and wake up, get ready for work, ride cycle to the bus stop, bus comes, I lower the rack, go to lift the bike and I almost fall down. It is very difficult to lift a bike above your head. After wrestling with it for a couple of minutes I managed to put it on the rack. I could almost feel everyone's eyes on me when I got into the bus. That's when I had almost decided to never get it to office again. But then, thinking about the 2 jeans which I had stopped wearing, I realized cycling to office was a 20 minute workout involving the cycle and weights (the rush to get ready takes care of the treadmill part :P)
For lazy bones me, that was not a bad place to start the whole fitness thing, was it? :D
