Bicycling, Maintenance, and Repair
Elaine got a bike for her birthday (it's a Trek FX-1), and she seems really happy with it. She's taken it out for a spin a couple of times, and I gotta say, I got a little jealous. It also made me realize we don't have a lot of "family" fitness things that we can do together, so after a little while, I decided to get one myself, and we also just got a new bike for Lyla as well (a cheaper Gravity Swift 7 that I'll assemble myself).
Anyway, while I'm waiting on the bikes to come in, I got a little obsessed with thinking through all the things we will need to do to care for our new gifts to ourselves. We haven't historically been great at taking care of our bicycles, but that's probably partially because a) we were young parents and didn't have the time and energy for much else and b) we bought cheap bikes because it's all we could afford.
Now that we have nicer bicycles that are meant to be well-loved, I want to be the kind of person that takes care and gives genuine attention to what we have.
To that end, here are two helpful links I found over the weekend:
- Intro to Bicycle Maintenance - REI Co-op Classes
- Tips for New Cyclists - Traipsing About - I found this one while search for Austin Kleon's blog posts tagged with cycling. That's kind of a side note -- he's more of a new enthusiast with the "zeal of a convert." But it's probably because of him that I've gotten more and more interested in cycling as a hobby. I'll always be a runner in my heart, but with my new need to take a break from it, maybe swimming, cycling, and rowing can be my fitness mistresses when running and I can't get along...
In the meantime, all this thought about cycling and maintenance has me thinking more deeply about repair and maintenance as humanish practices (Part of me wants to say "spiritual" practices, but that word is loaded for many people and doesn't quite convey what I want it to. Maybe there is something there to explore. Humanish. We'll see.). Alan Jacobs has been slowly blog gardening about a concept he calls "Invitation and Repair"; his focus is cultural in nature, but he does have several posts in this tag list which focus on craft, maintenance, and physical repair. He even considers blogging itself, at its core, as an invitation to contemplation and focus on subjects without the need for "completion" or expertise.
Maintenance and repair of broken things is perhaps a way for us to not only focus our attention away from screens and the relentless monsters of culture that thirst for our attention. It helps us get into our own bodies, into our own lived realities, try new things, and to not waste as much. Not to mention, the things I'm repairing, in this instance, will be objects that are designed to help me move in the world and be free for a moment of the trappings of the internet and the culture wars for which it often serves as their battlefield.
Tagged: cycling, fitness, maintenance,
