Tag Archives: biking

{08 May 2010}

yay! bicycle finally fixed, rainy season finally over. back to commuting by bike. well, for two more months, till i move to berkeley. the richmond bridge isn’t exactly bike-friendly. still, for now, it is lovely, biking home in the twilight, sun setting over mount tam, working off the stress of the day on that last hilly stretch.

biking from berkeley to work presents considerably more challenge: bike to the berkeley BART station, BART to El Cerrito station, Golden Gate Transit 42 to the San Quentin village (for real?), then bike 40 minutes into Mill Valley. could they make it any harder?

more mechanical triumph

{19 June 2007}

I’ve grown quickly addicted to having my bicycle as an alternate mode of transportation. It’s a learning process right now; each mechanical error results in a half hour of learning for a fix that, in the future, will take minutes. As a result of wednesday’s tire, I learned how to operate the quick-release feature and took the wheel (much easier to fit into the truck of my car sans bike) past a bike shop on my way in to work. $10.45 and 5 minutes later, the flat was fixed. It took me 3 days, however, to figure out how to put the rear wheel back ON to the bike. (it was clear that something need to happen to move the brakes out of the way to fit the tire thru, but it took hauling my Mech-E friend over to look at the bike to figure out how to disconnect the brakes. Yay, bike fixed! When the SECOND flat occurred two days later, I decided it was time to learn how to fix a flat myself. I bought a patch kit, I had instructions (thank you dear internets), took the wheel off, figured out how to get the tube out. Used the bathtub trick to find the surprisingly elusive leak, then patched the tube. Scanning the tire surface carefully before reassembly revealed a teeny tiny thorn deeply embedded between treads, which matched the location of the hole in the inner tube. Gotcha! Mystery solved. It’s true that the bike shop fixed my flat in 3 minutes, compared to the 60 it took me from start to finish, but they didn’t bother to look for the thorn, which would have continued to cause me flats every third day.

baby steps

{09 May 2007}

i’m a big believer than a woman should own her own tools. i’m not talking about a circ saw or anything, but just the basics, whatever basics mean to you. it means that when you want to hang a picture frame you don’t need to guy down the hall to come over and do it. i hate feeling helpless, and as a rule, i try not to.

i was feeling good about such things today when i fixed a few bits on my bike that had come loose. my folks gave me a bike for my birthday earlier this spring, i picked it out and overall it’s a nice sturdy used bike in good shape, but after a couple of weeks of riding it there were some minor things coming apart – the kickstand fell off, the seat was wobbly, the front reflector hanging loose. i had been meaning to take it by the bike shop where i bought it, thinking that they’d probably tune it up for me if i asked nicely. but i got home from work today and wanted to use it this evening, and didn’t relish the thought of riding all the way to the bike shop without a seat. so i dug out a crescent wrench, some hex keys, a screw driver, and managed to put things right, and was pleased with myself for the effort as much as the result.

lately i’m making a concerted effort to drive my car less: still commuting cross town to work, but leaving it parked the rest of the time, and taking public transit or, even better, my bike. the nice weather is making such a resolution much easier to keep, and i’m quickly getting bolder about biking in traffic, a thing that a few weeks ago i was totally scared of doing. the not driving plan, like not eating meat, is born of a variety of reasons rather than one particular conviction.

1) financial: with gas at $3.50/gal in the city, driving less is kind of essential for financial reasons, plus my car, with 92,000 miles on it, isn’t getting any younger and i am a long way from being able to make payments on a new one.

2) environmental: i jog these city streets nearly every day and when the wind blows just right, choke on the smog and fumes. one of the best features of a city is that everything is close together (relatively) and linked by public transit. driving everywhere seems like i’m missing the point of living in a city.

3) sanity: i am not a nice person when i’m behind the wheel. i’m generally pretty patient when it comes to public transit; it’s all out of my control, whether it runs on time or not, so i just sit back and do my crossword or read and get there when i get there. but i’m the opposite when i’m driving my own vehicle. perhaps because there is the illusion of control, i’m constantly looking for the fastest lane, the most efficient route, the way to make the stoplight at ravenswood and irving park turn just a little faster. and then parking? don’t even get me started. i hate feeling like my vehicle owns me. i never, however, experience that sort of incredible hulk rage when i’m on my bicycle even tho it takes longer to get where i’m going.

4) political: one could argue that politics are pretty deeply entwined with the issue of environmentalism and lump these two items together, but given that our country has been fighting a war over oil for the past five years i think this gets its own item number. there’s a girl i see biking around campus a lot with a sticker on the back of her bike that says, “it doesn’t take war to power my bike.” given that i don’t bicycle exclusively or anything, i don’t think i can really get on my high horse like that, but i like her message. and she looks like she probably does echew petrol-based private transportation all of the time, so good for her.

for me, it’s baby steps. it’s karma, it’s the golden rule: i want to live in a better world so i have to start by reforming my own habits, one tiny step at a time. most of us, myself included, don’t have what it takes to make revolutionary changes in our lives. and i find it really easy to feel helpless in the face of something as huge as global warming or thousands of innocent civilians dead over oil prices and legislation for clean energy DOA in congress. but, at the risk of turning this whole post into a cliche, this is what marathon training is teaching me. the thought of running 26 miles isn’t just impossible, it’s absurd. i don’t spend very much time thinking about the upcoming race, in fact, because it’s just too daunting. instead, i get up every morning and i tie my shoes and i go out for 4 or 5 or 6 miles. at the end of the week i’ve run 20 miles. at the end of the month i’ve gone 80. by the time i get to marathon day, i’ll have logged almost 700 miles. and what’s 26 more in the face of 700? that’s how we accomplish big things. in small, unremarkable steps. so: i ride my bike on weekends. i don’t eat red meat. i buy cruelty-free beauty products. i recycle my kitchen trash. baby steps. maybe next year i’ll bike to work once a week, go completely veggie, use biodegradable soaps or start a compost heap. things i can’t do this year will no longer be out of my grasp.