Cartoon: Bicycle Exercise

     Sadly, the cartoon says it all.  I love riding my bike, when I was working I used to ride it to work almost every day for half of the year.  I will always remember riding it to work listening to CBC radio through my ear plugs, when the second Twin Tower came down on 9/11.  

    Since retiring, I still get the bike out in the spring thinking about how I will ride it during the summer, and I generally do ride it to town periodically during the warm months.  

    Another bicycle memory:   I was on my bike after going to the writing group at the library, and when I got out to the highway, I looked east and saw a great plume of smoke from a forest fire in the sky.  It was on the same mountain slope that ran above our house, so I began pedaling home in a hurry.  We ended up having to evacuate, but luckily our house wasn’t effected.

    Yet another memorable ride was seeing a couple of elk on our road in front of me, and not knowing what I should do.  Should I just pedal by them?  That is what I did, and fortunately, they weren’t at all disturbed.

    I never ride my bike just for exercise, I only ride it with the purpose of going somewhere, always to town, which is about 4 miles away.   It seems that this summer, there were always things that hampered my bike rides into town.  Either I had to take something in, or bring something back home, or I knew I needed to get home quickly after my purpose for being in town had ended.  A bike ride into McBride, or coming back takes about 20 minutes.   

    And of course there is always the weather.  If there is a strong wind, it really makes biking more exhausting, and the route into town first means going east, then turning at the highway and going west.  So it is guaranteed that you will be facing the wind for half the trip.

    The other thing that is becoming a discouragement is biking on the highway.  While Highway 16 doesn’t have a lot of traffic, it does have a lot of big freight trucks barreling down the pavement.  I have always found them a bit intimidating, especially biking on the narrow bike lane on the Fraser River Bridge, facing the traffic.

    While biking to town is mostly a downhill ride, riding back home becomes the killer.  The elevation gain on the 3/4 mile long hill I have to pedal up by the Mennonite Church is 100 ft  (30 m).  I always found it a difficult climb when I was a younger man, and now in my dotage, it is worse.

    Well, I have put my bike back in storage for the winter, and feel bad about not riding it this summer.  I remember one other summer I didn’t use it and always felt bad about it.  I will get the bike out again next spring, and hopefully the guilt I have about not using it this year, will motivate me to actually ride it next year.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca