I never learned how to ride a bike as a child. I’ve always carried this like a minor dark secret: a basic rite of passage for children across the world had eluded me. In my mind, I was a person that learned to crawl, walk, run, and then skipped straight to driving a car.
The reason for this is simple: I picked the wrong horse. Growing up there was a feeling that you had to pick a mode of transportation: biking, skateboarding or rollerblading. Scooters were not yet en vogue. Most kids picked biking, others picked multiple options. I chose to take up rollerblading, at its height of coolness in the mid-90s. I wasn’t great at it, but I learned how to get down the street and got used to falling on my tailbone. Unfortunately, the rollerblade soon fell out of fashion, and became one of the dorkiest things a kid could do. So, for 33 years, I harbored this useless, uncool skill of being able to rollerblade and not bike.
I was fine with this. Biking would rarely come up and by the time I was able to drive it seemed redundant. Why would I need to learn how to bike when I can just meet everyone at the spot in my car? For shorter distance trips, I liked walking because it let me listen to a lot of music.
When you’re set in your ways as an adult, one of the few things that can shake it free is the influence of another. My partner was an experienced biker and wanted a future where we could, conceivably, bike along a beach on vacation or someshit. I wasn’t against it but I wasn’t making a real concerted effort to prioritize learning, either.
But then the pandemic hit. One of the first feelings of dread that I wrestled with was the idea that we had to just throw away an entire year. We hadn’t really understood what life in quarantine would be like, and my mind kept going to the worst-case scenario: a Fallout-like scenario where we sheltered from the outside world until the coast was clear. I couldn’t believe that an entire year would basically be wasted while we tried to save as many lives as possible.
As we took on small hobbies like jigsaw puzzles and wood carving, I started to form a minor salve for this anxiety: we can’t lose a year if we do things that we wouldn’t otherwise. If I took this sheltering year and used it to do something I’d always intended to do but never did, it would become a year I would not take back. It would be a year that counted.
So biking became one of my first projects. We bought two new bikes, a bike stand, and a bike rack for my car. We started at first in a parking lot, and I pretty quickly got used to gliding. Once I learned the basic core strength needed to use my momentum to stay balanced, I could even go in a circle. We stuck to parking lots until I had the confidence and skill necessary to bike without stopping. My butt was sore and I had all kinds of bruises on my knees from stopping the pedals, but I felt like a person that could technically bike. I felt like I had fulfilled the promise of a 7 year old me that picked the wrong horse.
Earlier in the month, my partner and I took a trip to Santa Barbara. We biked along the beach in the bright sun. It was a crowded beach path and we had to dodge people and carts every now and then. But we plowed through, uphill and downhill, and sweat through our masks. I felt like the point of the spear cutting through the wind, and I understood, at last, that subtle feeling of freedom that every child already knew.
I don’t think I’ve caught up with my peers. I still have trouble with sharp turns, stamina, and kicking off from a full stop without zig zagging a little bit. I get nervous in bike lanes around cars. But I’m not embarrassing myself. I’m pushing down, helmet on, getting through the year.