I bought an bike about a month and a half ago at a little shop north of here, on Clark. It's a late seventies or early eighties Schwinn Traveler Xtra-Lite, baby blue, with new chain, tires, grip tape, and a cranky derailleur. I can't quite place the date because I can't find the serial number. At any rate, it's steel, it's older than me, and I've been creaking around the city on it for a couple weeks now. Before moving to Chicago, I had probably been on a bike three or four times in the last ten years. Now I'm riding daily, commuting to a new (temporary) job at a little architecture studio on the west side of the Chicago River. According to Google maps, it's a 3.7 mile haul each way.
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| The Blue Beast. |
The first two weeks of riding, back in the heat of the summer, left me so sore I couldn't bend my knees to get things out of the fridge. While I've done my share of manual labor over the years, and spent a lot of time on my feet, I haven't really worked aerobically in a long time. While Chicago is blessedly free of hills, I was definitely hurting from the unfamiliar motions. Bicycling competitively has always been a dialogue on pain -- lactic acid searing muscles on hard ascents, the burn of October air in windpipes -- but I mistakenly thought I would escape that conversation by riding slow and easing into things.
Besides the pain, biking has given me a new perspective on the city. Walking, you experience the city at a certain remove: traveling in a protected pedestrian zone (the sidewalk); moving at a very slow pace; and operating untethered to objects. In a car, you experience the city in a different kind of isolation: sealed in a climate-controlled steel container, listening to your own music and conversation; viewing the outside world through windows that tightly frame your view; moving over a wide continuum of speeds, from zero to forty miles an hour; traveling in an exclusive area (the street); and experiencing propulsion untethered from physical effort.
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| In motion. |
