Embracing Being a Novice – Biking

I have no idea what I’m doing.

I’m going to ride until I fall over! Well… that was a fun 4 minutes.

I’ve fallen off my friend’s bicycle twice now, going less than 1 mile per hour, trying to unclip and trying to shift gears respectively.

Brian at FastSplits in Needham was super nice and showed me how to switch the gears… but I forgot. I get that one side does big changes, the other side does little changes, and you have to pedal while you switch gears. I can’t figure out how to upshift vs. downshift, and I still have very little mechanical understanding of when I should be in what gear. This isn’t such a huge problem right now, because I’m only riding up and down my street, but eventually I’m going to need to figure this out.

It’s going to be ok.

Probably I should be worried, and I am, a little bit. It’s a scary feeling when that bike starts going over sideways. I’m terrified that I’ll crash into another cyclist taking corners in July because I’m an amateur, and ruin their race experience. I’m worried about getting hit by a car.

I’m duly impressed by the task at hand.

But I’m also like “ok, great… the next steps are pretty obvious.”

I need to learn to shift a bike and understand the gear system. So I took out books on cycling from the library and I’m going to ask my neighbor for help.

I need to work on clipping in and out of the bike. I can do that once a day, ride up the street and back, and it’s less than a 10 minute time commitment.

I should check my bike shoes because the clipping process seems overly difficult: maybe that time they got stuck in the pedal at CycleBar was a warning sign that I should get the screws checked, that could be part of my clipping problem. I can look up youtube videos on adjusting bike clips, or take it to a local store or ask an instructor at CycleBar.

I need to learn to take corners. There’s a cul-de-sac in our neighborhood. That’s a good next step.

I’ve got this.

I’m just going to break it down and keep plugging away at it.

I have until July. Things will click. In the meantime, I’m having some good laughs at myself. It’s easy to laugh at where you are now when you have faith in where you’re going.

People learn to do this.

I will learn to do this.

It might take longer than I originally expected, but I am convinced that between now and July I will get to the point where I can finish the race safely with a smile.

After the race, I’ll walk away with the ability to swim freestyle and ride a road bike. Hello, awesome.

Thanks to this triathlon, I’m gaining two amazing life skills that will expand my horizons in terms of my ability to exercise out in nature.

And that’s enough to keep me clicking into that bike and riding up and down the street.