My Two-Wheeled Teacher

BIKE BEAT

By Michael Schwalbe
Columnist

One of the first things I learned from cycling was that I could travel far enough under my own power to get in trouble. It was the summer of 1963. We were staying with my mother’s parents in a southwest Milwaukee suburb until we found a place of our own. The flamboyant red Schwinn “Typhoon” 20-incher I’d gotten for my seventh birthday was only a few months old.

One day, while pedaling around the neighborhood, perhaps a mile from my grandparents’ house, I saw my grandmother pull into the parking lot of a small shopping center. As she stepped out of the car, I hollered, “Hi, Grandma!” expecting her to be happily surprised to see me. She was surprised, all right. She told me to get my tail home and not venture so far again. Twenty-one years later, I reminded her of this episode, as I explained that I’d taken up ultra-marathon cycling. “So, you didn’t listen to me, did you?” she said.

I may have listened, at first. I didn’t want to displease my grandmother, especially while we were living under her roof. But after we moved out, the bike afforded another lesson: I didn’t have to limit myself to what others thought was safe or reasonable. If I could go farther, I would, staying just this side of recklessness and parental wrath. “Out riding my bike,” I might say, if my mom or dad asked what I’d been up to all afternoon. I didn’t have to say precisely where or how far. I learned to be discreet.

A bicycle is, of course, only a machine, and what it teaches depends on how it’s used. Yet the very mechanical nature of bicycles can teach us something—for example, the need to take care of the material objects on which our lives depend.

Under my father’s tutelage, I learned how to fix a flat tire; how to disassemble, clean, and repack bearings; how to true a wheel. I learned that while it was okay to ask for help, it was my job to look after my bike and keep it working properly. The lesson generalized to the cars, motorcycles, and other machines that later became mine. If I took time to learn how they worked and how to maintain and repair them, they would reliably do what I needed them to do.

Many years later, in the mid-1980s, as I was getting into cycling in a serious way, the bike taught me other things. I would have said, right before that time, that my body was what it was, no more likely to change than my shoe size. I learned that this was wrong. My body was more mutable, more reconditionable, than I’d previously imagined.

In the spring of 1984, after a year of dissertation writing—a year of physical languor and too much beer—I had topped 200 pounds. That summer I spent a chunk of my graduation gift money on a nice bicycle. The Southern California landscape and climate drew me out of the apartment and onto the road. I went for ever-longer rides, mainly for the fun of seeing how far I could go. I upgraded my diet and cut out the beer, and by the end of the year, I’d lost 50 pounds. I never felt deprived. I felt liberated.

This wasn’t a lesson about weight loss or dieting. It was about hidden potential. When I first got to Southern California, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could ride very far on a bicycle, given the mountains that said, Forget it, you can’t go this way. Yet less than two years later, I was spinning up those mountains like the Energizer bunny. The bike helped me discover, as I saw other newbie cyclists discover over the years, that I had underestimated my body’s capabilities.

Even after gaining a good deal of fitness, I was still intimidated on my first public rides—gran fondos, as they’re now called. What was I doing, I wondered, heading down the road with a thousand or more people on bikes? Could I ride for 60 miles? A hundred miles? Two hundred? As it turned out, I could, and I gained confidence along the way. What I learned is that if I paced myself, if I stayed in the saddle and kept pedaling, even when it was hard and I was tired, I would eventually reach the finish. This was a lesson about the value of tenacity, on and off the bike.

There is irony in the fact that while the bike has taught me about tenacity, it has also taught me about impermanence. Resist as we might, nothing lasts forever—not stamina, not strength, not health. In recent years, as I’ve aged out of the back of the grupetto, I have at times imagined a corruption of Shakespeare’s lines from Cymbeline. Golden lads and girls all must, like bikes and riders, come to dust. It’s an unflinching last lesson, one learned, I hope, long before the last ride.

Michael Schwalbe is a retired professor of sociology and an unretired cyclist. He has lived in Chapel Hill since 1990. This reporter can be reached at: Information@TheLocalReporter.press.