Saddle seat

We bought bikes.

It was at my insistence, a desperate middle-aged Hail Mary to try to find some form of exercise that I don’t hate so that I don’t end up in a Little Rascal at Walmart before I’m forty. “Let’s get bikes for Christmas!” I told my husband back in October, when we were settling on the notion of not buying Christmas gifts for one another. He agreed, as he is wonderful and actually enjoys physical exertion.

It is a sensible, thirtysomething thing to do, buying a pair of bikes.

I recall when my parents, themselves once sensible thirtysomethings, did the same. One was canary yellow and the other cobalt blue. They were both Diamondbacks. My dad bragged about their hefty price tags. These bikes are good bikes, he told us. The best you can get. We lived among rolling grassy hills of cow pastures and the scrubby underbrush of pine and oak forests. Two out of five county roads you could take to get to our house were made of gravel. I’m not sure where, exactly, my father intended to ride those bikes, but they stayed hung up in the garage for years. They are likely still there.

This is not the fate I want for our new bikes. We live two minutes from an entrance to the Greenway, which is a nice, flat, paved loop of trails that runs alongside the Cumberland River. It is the kind of place that is frequented by taut runners in Spandex, families walking their dogs, deer who have a suppressed sense of fear, and cyclists calling out, “On your left!” just as they zoom by in a blur. It is also the kind of place that is visited by beardy men who smell like dank weed, and, like we saw yesterday, women walking alone while conducting Bluetooth phone conversations about HR with metal bat gripped in their hands.

It is the kind of place where you can experience these lovely little vignettes of nature even while the roar of traffic from Briley floats around you. There’s a creek where we see turtles and herons, and you can collect strange seed pods and leaves the size of your head from alongside the trails. And, if you look into the brush a little ways, you can spy all the empty vodka bottles your heart might desire.

Our inaugural ride was exhilarating. The difference in adrenaline between walking at two miles per hour and riding at five miles per hour is remarkable. I made it about five minutes into our journey before my thigh muscles started to sing. I expected my crotch to be first out of the gate with a complaint, but my crotch has chilled out a lot over the years in many ways. We made the loop and my husband said, “Do you want to ride up to the bridge?” to which I said, “Nah, not today, but soon!” but which came out as a dragon-throated “NO!!!” on account of my being so terribly out of shape. We pedaled back to the house and I made it halfway up the driveway hill before walking the rest of the way up. Small steps, I’m telling myself. Don’t get discouraged.

I haven’t ridden a bike in two decades, at least. And one could argue I barely rode a bike before then. I tried to learn how to ride without training wheels as a five-year-old, but I remember heading straight for a tree. I don’t remember if the tree and I had a proper collision, but I do remember thinking That’s enough of that for a lifetime, thanks. And not getting back on a bike until I was twelve or so.

Holden has taken a similar posture of resistance toward his bike. We got him a new one back in spring and he was very excited about it. But each time we put him on it and guided him slowly around the extremely flat and level stretch of street out front, he screamed and hurled curse words at us and surely made all the neighbors very worried. So, we put training wheels on and have been giving it another go. He’s somewhat less profane now and will allow us to actually let go of the bicycle while he is on it, but he a) never answers “yes” when we ask if he wants to go ride his bike, so just getting him on it is a whole thing and b) he refuses to pedal if his legs meet resistance. I think maybe he is offended by the concept of how a bicycle works and would rather have a motorcycle. I understand that emotion and yet.

We push on.