Just like riding a bike.

I’m not a sporty person. I enjoy the feel of nature and love being outside, but I’m usually happiest when I smell nice, so I prefer to be still-ish. There are a few high-octane activities that I will willingly hit my target heart rate for, but generally they involve horses or attackers. I’m not a couch potato, but I am sort of girly sometimes.

That being said, I’ve made a decision recently to be more proactive about my health. I go through this every once in awhile, with the dieting and the determination and the questionable allies in exercise counsel. But this time I’m approaching my goals in a more general sense, with two simple aims: sensible eating and increased daily activity.

It’s this latter aim that nearly killed me twice in one afternoon.

Looking for a way to increase my daily cardio without involving anyone wearing spandex and a clip-on microphone, I decided to rescue my old bicycle from the depths of my parents’ basement. It was a good bike, but I hadn’t really ridden it since high school and so it had fallen into a minor state of disrepair. I would refurbish it, I decided, and use it to explore Omaha. This would be fun! I gathered up the old bike, my dad’s old bike rack, and some big plans.

The local bike shop worked magic on my old Trek hybrid. I authorized a full overhaul, complete with new tires and new brakes and new grips and new bearings and a few other new things that may or may not have been made up on the spot, I can’t tell. At any rate, when I picked my bike up a week later, it sure was pretty. It looked new again, all shiny and calibrated. I also picked up a new helmet and an Omaha Bike Trail map. I was ready. I took the bike out for its inaugural spin around the neighborhood. Whee!

"Whee?" Yeah, no. More like "HOLY HELL, WHAT AM I DOING? I SEE A WHITE LIGHT!" I completely kicked my own ass in ten minutes.

I haven't seriously ridden a bike in many, many years (except for that time CJ and I rented bikes at Cape Cod, which was fun, but caused us to go back to our campsite and sleep for two hours immediately following). I neglected to acknowledge the fact that a refurbished bike does not equal a refurbished biker. I also kind of forgot that my neighborhood had so many hills.

I started out fine, gently getting the hang of the thing again, when I turned my first corner and promptly went down a hill. It might have been a mountain. Possibly a cliff. Before I knew what was happening, I was gaining speed. And gaining speed. And gaining speed. And gaining…Jesus Christ, I was going to die. Those new tires sure were speedy. I didn't want to completely ruin my new brakes so I tried not to use them too much but then I was suddenly going faster than a locomotive and the hill just wouldn't end and I kept gaining speed and I started to look like the colorfully blurred-out Superman when they show him zipping around in the movies and I thought, "Well, it's a good thing I'm wearing my new helmet because if I hit a bump I am going to go sailing into somebody's house at 95 miles an hour and won't have had a chance to say goodbye to my family."

Finally I had no choice but to lay on the brakes. I don’t know if it was a product of my speed, or the new brakes, or the new tires, or just God trying to make me a nerd, but the brakes started to squeal. Loudly. Children stopped playing catch and looked in my direction. All the dogs in the neighborhood started barking. And somehow, I didn’t feel like I was slowing much. Now I was a colorful, ear-piercing blur, racing down the street.

I eventually screeched to a slightly slower pace at the bottom of the hill (oh, thank you Jesus, the bottom of the hill!) just in time to barely make a turn at the T in the road. Gravity once again on my side, I rode along slowly, gathering my heart up to stuff it back down into my chest. Bike-riding was not as fun as I remembered. I wanted to go home. I turned the corner, aiming back toward my apartment complex.

Which, of course, was up that hill.

F***.

I got halfway up before I started placing bets on which would explode first: my heart or my muscles. The answer, as it turns out, is both at the same time. I was so winded that my teeth hurt, right down into the very roots. That can't have been healthy. I really didn’t want to be a punk and walk my bike up the hill, so I turned around decided to try to find a gentler route home.

I wandered, red-faced, around the rest of my neighborhood for about two hours (in reality, it was only fifteen minutes, but it seemed longer), and finally went home, almost making it up the hill before I had to actually get off and walk my bike home. Like a sucker. I went back to my apartment and collapsed on the floor for several minutes while Izzy attacked my hair and I let the blood return to my limbs.

That was three weeks ago. I haven’t touched the bike since. I’m not giving up, I just need to stop being mad at gravity. I plan to take the bike out again, and often, but it’s going to be someplace flat. Very, very flat.