god, it's windy today

Urban cycling is hard.

And I don't mean as an athletic challenge, which is the least of any city biker's worries. I mean acting like you're a driver. The price we pay for weaving in and out of traffic, mocking single passengers in Hummer H3s, and paying nothing for gas and next to nothing for maintenance is being easy targets for two-ton hunks of steel hurtling past us at twice our speed.

You can't stay to the right. You can't ride on the sidewalk. Unless you're in one of those modern cities that actually has bike lanes, you must be an element of traffic; signaling to other drivers, making eye contact, moving and letting move, and getting the fuck out of the way when cops and ambulances drive the wrong way at 100mph.

The bike you ride must be an extension of your body, and especially if you ride a city that's a mess of hills. If you're at a stoplight with ten cars behind you, and you've got to make a start going uphill, people are not going to want to wait up for you to do so. Shift into low gear and get your ass moving before you're flattened into the pavement.

Of course, most of the time, you can navigate through relatively calm streets to get where you're going on a bicycle--being an alley cat is one of the benefits of being small, after all. But sometimes, the only way to get down the hill is the way everyone else is, and you find yourself drafting a Port Authority bus at 40mph with a Buick on your ass, and you start thinking about your 30 year-old caliper brakes and crumbling pads, and whether or not it's time to replace that chain.

Speaking of the bike, I was doing some research today, and found out that mine may be a vintage piece of material... a Concord Pacer from as far back as the 70s. It's obviously been through a lot before me, considering what it looked like before I did some serious work on it. Just like my old Schwinn, it's fun to ride a piece of history like that.