Forwards and backwards

I was planning on writing today's post about sharing some more of my knowledge of health and fitness I've acquired slowly over many years, but instead I find myself needing to write about a topic which I've quickly gained some firsthand knowledge: bike theft. Last Friday night my commuter/touring bicycle was stolen.

The story is a typical one. I left my locked up for (some amount less than) six hours on a Friday night in a public place—a transit station parking lot—and upon returning to the site, I found no evidence that my bicycle had ever been there. Gone. Vanished.

People are immediately sympathetic when they hear this story. Laura is taking it especially hard. She liked that bike a lot. I guess she had developed a certain familiarity with it. She also liked the orange handlebar tape.

I myself am not too distraught over it. Though the bike was worth a tidy sum and has me feeling embarrassed for leaving it susceptible to such easy theft, the bike was far from the perfect bike for me. I'm more into biking than I am into any specific bike, and I can rationalize that over the year-and-a-half I had it, I got in enough miles on it to have driven down the cost of ownership to about 30 or so cents per mile, which is about the same cost as a modest car. Also, I've been thinking these last few months that a road-only touring bike doesn't match my lifestyle optimally. There are a lot of great off-road trails here in Arizona and other states, and I've been facing the reality that my life isn't likely to make grand road touring a frequent event like how I hoped when I bought the bike. Maybe I can get something that fits me better.

Whatever that happens to be, the big lesson learned here is not to leave a good bike in a public place. Around-town bikes should be around-town bikes and nothing more—something so minimal and cheap that replacing it is no big deal. I already knew of such a bike; Saturday, the day after the theft, I called Coworker Nick and got him to sell me back my old flip-flop Schwinn, which never quite suited him. He brought it in to work this morning, and after inflating the tires and turning the rear wheel to the fixed-gear, I rode it home this afternoon. I never really liked the Schwinn either, and hopefully neither do thieves.