Some­thing ter­ri­ble has hap­pened to me these past two weeks. No, I didn’t have a “run in” with the cops,  nor did I hydroplane my car on the free­way, instead I am the vic­tim of some­thing much worse. I am the vic­tim of not being able to ride my bike for two weeks in a row. Now, a few of you may be think­ing to your­selves “Oh bo-hoo Patrick couldn’t ride his bike for a few days, there’s kids in Africa who would kill for the oppor­tu­nity just to ride a bike once in their lives, stop cry­ing you big baby” While I cer­tainly agree with this notion, I think it’s impor­tant to illus­trate just how impor­tant rid­ing my bike has become to me.

Like most peo­ple, there’s a few things that I do through­out my week to make the week bear­able. I start off each morn­ing with a mas­sive power dump, I eat Chipo­tle at least once a week, I check Owen’s and Alex’s blogs daily only to see the same posts that they’ve had listed for months, I adhere strictly to Waf­fle time,  and  on the week­ends I ride my bike for as long and as hard as I pos­si­bly can. Now given the fact that my body is usu­ally very exhausted from swim­ming, and I am out of good cycling shape to begin with, it’s been hard for me to enjoy cycling to the extent that I used to over the course of the sum­mer and the off sea­son. How­ever, the weekly bike ride is just as essen­tial to my well being as the occa­sional drink of water is for the plants. Which is to say, that if I don’t get my weekly bike ride, I will even­tu­ally wither away and die.

With that anal­ogy in mind, it could be said that I’ve been dying these past two weeks.  Last week I took my bike out for a spin only to find it act­ing in a very pecu­liar way. When I shifted, it had a very loud clank­ing sound, and when I got to spe­cific gears the chain would occa­sion­ally slip  which was not only scary, but dan­ger­ous for me as a rider. Need­less to say, after a few miles, I imme­di­ately turned around and returned home to search for the cause of the prob­lem. Obvi­ously, the bike wasn’t shift­ing prop­erly, which meant that some­thing was wrong with the rear dérailleur. After look­ing at a few crappy guides online which “explained” how to adjust the rear dérailleur, I tried my hand at it, but it was of no use, I only made the bike worse.

Torn over not hav­ing a bike that was usable, I imme­di­ately rushed it into the near­est REI for a tune-up which cost me $55. Now, I wouldn’t have minded pay­ing that much for a tuneup if it wasn’t for the fact that I already took my bike in on Jan­u­ary 1^st, and had only put on 200 miles since then. To me, pay­ing that much money for just a minor repair seemed incred­i­bly unrea­son­able. In fact, it was prob­a­bly twice as unrea­son­able as hav­ing a Geek Squad “spe­cial­ist” dust out a com­puter for $30. While I don’t hate REI as much as I hate the Geek Squad, after all, REI does do a good job tak­ing care of my cycling needs, I real­ized that I can’t depend on them in the same way that the aver­age per­son depends on the Geek Squad to fix their com­puter trou­bles. If that where to hap­pen, I would prob­a­bly end up resent­ing cycling much in the same way that the aver­age per­son sub­con­sciously resents com­put­ers because they don’t know how to fix them.

Thus, I vowed that I would learn how to prop­erly do my own bike main­te­nance so that I could become self reliant and ulti­mately enjoy cycling to its fullest extent. For­tu­nately for me, I have the per­fect plat­form for learn­ing how to do my own bike main­te­nance on, my Dad’s old road­bike. For those that don’t remem­ber, I started “seri­ous” cycling using my Dad’s old road­bike. About halfway through the sum­mer the front tire on that bike kept pop­ping, and instead of tak­ing it in to fix the tire, as well as a slew of other addi­tional prob­lems that it had, I decided to sim­ply upgrade to the beloved road­bike that I have now. Right now, my dad’s old road­bike suf­fers from the fol­low­ing prob­lems. 1) The wheels aren’t true. 2) The front tire keeps pop­ping. 3) It needs a new chain. 4) It needs new brake pads. 5) It needs new bar tape. 6) The front fork, bar, and stem all need adjusting.

As one can see, learn­ing how to fix all of these issues should make me fairly pro­fi­cient at main­te­nance, but at the moment, I suf­fer from just one  lim­i­ta­tion, I lack the fund­ing to pur­chase the tools and sup­plies nec­es­sary to make my repairs.  So for now I’m stuck in the hor­ri­ble “gath­er­ing funds” stage that all of my bril­liant endeav­ors, start off with.  How­ever, once I get past this stage, I look for­ward to res­ur­rect­ing my dad’s old bike. Hope­fully I will be able to repair it to the point that I can bring it with me to college.

That issue aside, the rea­son why I couldn’t ride this week is because the weather sucked and it looked like it was going to rain vir­tu­ally all week­end. Any other week, I would have sim­ply dealt with get­ting my bike wet so that I could go ride, but  this week I couldn’t because I don’t look favor­ably upon tak­ing a freshly tuned up bike out on a dirty rain ride. It’s like hit­ting a girl­friend on the first date, you just shouldn’t do it until she’s already made you a sandwich.