This past February a friend from Bible Study encouraged members of the group to sign up for the Worst Day of the Year Ride.  Its an 18 mile bike ride through downtown Portland that falls on a weekend in February that is anticipated to be the coldest / wettest / just plain nastiest of the year.  While I was intrigued by the idea, I also realized that my bike was in another state at that point and I hadn’t touched it in at least a decade.  Actually my bike skills are even sadder than that since I didn’t learn to ride a bike until Middle School (a good bonding experience with the step-dad) and even then I preferred a scooter or, in all truth, the television to riding around my hilly neighborhood.  So when I saw the email I thought “Yea…no” and hit delete. 

But the idea stayed in my head, especially as I would attempt to weave around bikers on Division, Lincoln, Hawthorne, 96th, Powell, Naito…seriously where are all of these people coming from.  After a few weeks, I decided to ask my parents about my bike in the garage to see if it was salvageable (not sure what a decade does) or if I’d be starting from total scratch.  My step-dad, as a surprise, had my bike all cleaned up with new wheels and brought it to Portland as my birthday present (my b-day is June 12th so plenty of shopping days left).

So now that I’ve shared all of that context, the real point of this post is that this morning, after some repair work to the chain, I went for a four mile bike ride up 96th and then the I-205 trail.  I purposely waited for a weekend morning, in case “easy as riding a bike” was not quite true for me.  But in my gym clothes and cute new flower helmet, I manged to stay upright the whole time and my legs are only slightly spaghetti like.

I will need to learn a few things before February though, like how to signal, how to add air to my tires, and where to put my keys.  But this was a first step, and a I’m happy to share that I hope to take a second next Saturday.

Aaron and Joe, I’ll be there next year!