With vicissitudes like these, who needs sloppy weather?

I signed up for this five months ago, and I never expected it to entail a one-mile jaunt down Central Ave on a dandy horse.

I've thought quite a lot about expanding my fleet. The reason I don't acquire another two bicycles is that I don't have the space in my apartment to store the both of them comfortably. And the reason I don't compromise and acquire just a one is that I can't decide on what kind: touring, high-end road, cyclo-cross, or even one of those highly practical bikes like a Xtracycle. Never once did I think about going with the dandy horse option.

Let's start over.

You can love the bike, but the bike won't always love you in return. The very day after posting about my around-towner, while riding it home from work, I was thrown from the bike. It bucked wildly and never gave me a chance to regain control before slamming me onto sidewalk and turf before itself landing on top of me. This all happened in a sequence of events I still don't fully understand. But I do understand that fixed-gear bikes have a tendency to do this sort of thing when, even for only a moment, you forget to pedal. I wish I had a video of it to share. Alas, the laughs were reserved for the passers-by who happened to be watching. I'm still sporting some ugly scabs on my knee and shin.

Yesterday morning my front tube's valve stem broke as I disconnected the pump. This event follows from a physical law of the universe, the conservation of bicycle inner tubes. I gained a tube the previous weekend by digging through some trash -- yes, post comments below -- and taking the tube home and applying a patch. Then the valve stem thing happened on an existing tube. Gain a tube, lose a tube. Broken valve stems are like brain death for a tube. Nearly any flat can be patched to some degree of success, but a broken valve stem is the sad and final end, the one that signals that it's time to stop all further resuscitation attempts.

I'm past taking flats personally. Of all the junk, all the annoyances and inconveniences that one faces, getting over flat tires is the biggest step one can make in becoming an everyday cyclist. Flats are like income taxes to Republicans. They happen to everyone yet it seems that given the right trick or hack that they are somehow escapable. But they aren't. They're part of life. I recommend three general guidelines for dealing with flats, which is three more than I have for dealing with Republicans.

1. Always ride on good tires. Don't squeeze those last few miles out of an old one.
2. Become reliable at patching and replacing tubes. Being fast at it is a bonus.
3. Accept that flats happen. Forgive the tube; forgive the bike; even, if you can, forgive the negligent homeowners who have puncture vine growing in their yards.
   

So the flat wasn't it. I think what it was was that I was still harboring resentment for the body slam the other week. Because what happened yesterday on my way home from work, what happened following my smooth and skillful track stand at a red light before it changed to green, what happened in a display of sheer herculean lower body strength, what happened was that I snapped my chainring into two pieces. Yes, take that, bike.

Admittedly it wasn't a high-quality chainring. It was a rather thin strip of aluminum, and it had been making some disturbing creaking sounds for a few weeks. But snap it I did. Some cyclists say you should carry all the tools with you on a ride: a spare tire, spare spokes and a spoke wrench, a chain tool. I can understand this advice for when touring and you're more than a hundred miles away from civilization, by which I mean any town with a bike shop, but I figure the mentality to be the result of reading too many bike-parts-pushing magazines and from a general manly obsession with tool ownership. Regardless, a broken chainring ends any ride.

So I unclipped and slid off the saddle and prepared to walk the remaining one and a half miles to the bike shop, which ironically was my planned destination. My original intention was to exchange a rear light I purchased a few days prior. I began walking and acted like this sort of thing happened all the time as another cyclist still at the intersection pointed out that I had left behind some broken pieces of bicycle at the crosswalk line.

Cycling shoes are terrible for walking. Really terrible. They're like those gimmicky shoes with the platforms underneath the balls of the feet that are suppose to work the calf muscle. I don't understand cyclists who walk their bikes up hills rather than pedal up them. You know who you are. Half a mile later my calves were indeed burning with fatigue and I decided a different plan was needed. So I ditched the walking and rode it in with no chainring, like it was the 1820s and the pedal had yet to be invented. I sat atop the saddle and kicked the ground with my feet to propel me and the bike forward. At first I tried the both-legs-at-a-time method and soon after found the alternating-leg method to work much better. I even got going kind of fast, too, and this undoubtedly made me look all the sillier. Once again I hope the passers-by were watching and getting some entertainment.

I arrived safely at the bike shop and had installed a new chainring but not after determining that they didn't have one to match my right crank and that I needed a new crank, too. And a bike like mine has so many kind-of, not-really problems that I had to spend some extra time weighing the mechanics' advice and deciding what was needing replacement and what was serving as a valuable theft-deterrence feature. I finally left in time to be late for Book Club, which was a pot luck get together. In the last two months I've been, in order, too sick, too busy, and too freakishly strong to be on time enough to a bring-your-own-food event to bring my own food. At this point it's quite an impressive streak of mooching.

My new chainring is a 46-tooth, not a 42, so I've moved up a few gears, from 42-16 to 46-16. I'm still unsure about this. The new ratio makes the bike much faster. Whereas the old ratio was geared for a slight incline, it's now geared for the flats and my fast-spin cadence has me doing low to mid 20s, which is really pushing it on an around-towner. And stopping is harder in a high gear. But most of all that someday fixed-gear trip up South Mountain is nixed. Unless I again muster that herculean strength.