Chasing MailBoxes

Recently someone remarked that this blog did not contain much current bicycling content. Despite its truth, the comment jarred me since the bicycle has been, if not front and center, integral to my existence for more than 20 years. 

I’ve written here about my return to transportation cycling as an adult. Felkerino’s and my first date was a 100-mile tandem  outing, a ride that not only introduced me to my future parter, it led me to see bicycling as a favorite way to spend time with others. Randonneuring, bike touring, tandeming, short rides and long ones. Bicycling could be physically hard sometimes, but it inflated my spirit in so many ways. 

How can people not love bicycling, right? The bike presents an immersive transportation experience. Unlike car or metro, the bike plants you in the world in a totally unvarnished way.

You see the world right in front of your own eyeballs, no screens or steel in between. You feel nature’s elements on and through you. We are in and of the world when cycling. 

My relationship to the bike changed in December 2023 when my husband was hit by a truck driver while cycling. A driver ran a stop sign on a rural road, hit Felkerino, and drove off. I won’t go through the litany of injuries, but they were many and even though it was terrible I’m glad it wasn’t worse. 

As Felkerino began the long process of healing from his physical injuries I deflated like a tire with a slow leak. The bike— this thing, this pastime, this unique way of connecting to the world and other people— had completely let me down. 

Everything about bicycling enervated me. I wasn’t scared of riding after Felkerino’s incident (likely because I had been so tangential to it that day) but I just did not see the point.

Those feelings settled into my body and didn’t go away for years. I didn’t even realize the extent of them until recently.

I stopped riding my bike and made my way around via walking or metro. Felkerino was unable to ride for months and months as his body healed, and our tandems sat still in the Dining Room Bike Shop. Who were those two people who used to randonneur and ride everywhere? I did not remember or know them most days.

During this long season of estrangement, the Coffeeneuring Challenge was the one thing that kept me tenuously tied to the beauty of the bicycle. It reminded me of the goodess of cycling and the gentle nature of the bicycling community.

So thanks to that community and Felkerino’s willful determination to be back on the bike again, I maintained a few puffs of optimism in my slowly leaking tire. 

A couple of months ago, time appeared to decide it had flattened my bicycle joy long enough and I felt a change. A desire to give the bike another go. In May, I started regularly riding to and from work again and for the first time in years actually enjoyed it. 

Earlier this month, an urge to take the long way home just to prolong the enjoyment of riding my bicycle seeped into me so I did it. 

It had been since December of 2023 that I had seen my bicycle as more than a sometimes necessary transportation machine. Finally, after more than two years, I craved that immersive experience only a bike can deliver. 

Why now? I’m still puzzling over it, but maybe the timing doesn’t matter so much. The important thing is that the bike and I are forging a new relationship.

Time has helped me patch this slow leak and reinflate enjoyment for the bike. I look more squarely at the world these days and know it may throw giant potholes in front of us at any moment in ways I naively hoped I could avoid. But I no longer feel the past knock the wind out of me so much as I move from present to future.

If you’ve read this far, you may be asking what is up with this post. Well friends, I wanted to share that I think it’s okay for the relationships with our passions to morph. Sometimes time away is necessary. Felkerino likes to say that the bike will always be there whenever a person feels moved to ride it, and I guess this time of estrangement has proven him right. 

I needed to go through this period away from the bike. I needed to be disappointed and flattened and to let my relationship to cycling rebuild in its own way.

Time can be a devil, its ways perplexing, maddening. Still, after two-and-a-half years, my relationship to cycling is finally healing and this change feels good.

I don’t know where this relationship with time, the bike, and me is headed, but fingers crossed it includes sunshine, tandem bike rides, and coffeeneuring. I’ll keep you posted.

Until next time, dear readers, thank you for reading and Always Be Coffeeneuring.