Like a new bike

The summer before I left for my first year in college, my parents bought me a new bike. It was the first bike I ever got from a bike shop, and it may have been the cheapest one in the store: a $300 GT hybrid made of the softest steel money can buy. I know the steel was soft because sometime during my sophomore year I broke the fork. Strange thing. I don't remember how or when I broke it; one day I got on my bike and it rode funny, so I stopped, got off, and looked at it closely and saw that the gentle curve of the fork was no longer gentle.

I loved that bike. I rode all over San Antonio my first year in school—downtown, midtown, uptown, the missions, and lots of trips to stores all over. I still think of that year of casual city riding—sans helmet, sans bike pump, sans stiff-soled bike shoes, cotton everything—to gain perspective on what a namby-pamby cyclist I am these days, with all my special gear and special clothing. And the helmet thing. I got my first bike helmet when I bought my first road bike—a LeMond Tourmalet—presumably because you need to wear a helmet to ride a real bike. A few years prior, during freshman year, I came within inches of leaving my brains spilled all over a sidewalk along W Sunset Rd when, cruising high speed down a small hill, I jumped the curb to avoid a car that had pulled out from a driveway, directly in front of me—this was before I broke the fork—narrowly missing a telephone pole that was smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk. That collision with either the car or telephone pole would have been a big mess, but no near-miss was going to make me wear a helmet back then.

Anyway, I still remember what my dad told me soon after we came home from the bike shop with that GT hybrid bicycle: A bicycle never rides as well as when it's new. I nodded in agreement at the time, for my shiny new bike rode a lot better than any of the old, rusty bikes in our garage. And for years afterward I continued to nod agreement, first as the condition of my GT steadily worsened, then later as my LeMond road bike suffered too from my negligent ownership. When I bought that road bike, I also bought my first pair of bike shoes, my first pair of bike shorts, my first on-the-road bike pump (a Zefal frame pump), and my first helmet, so I was equipped to deal with some on-the-road kinds of problems—namely sore feet, chafing, flat tires, and injurious impacts to the head. But I lived for two years in San Antonio and four years in Houston before I once oiled the chain or lubed anything else on that bike, and I never replaced the tires or did any other maintenance. Actually, that last sentence is a lie: I once oiled the chain in 2005 or 2006 with WD-40, which is worse than never oiling the chain.

But I have a point here. And that's that I no longer nod in agreement to my dad's wisdom about new bikes riding best. An old bike will ride as well as a new bike so long as you maintain it correctly. Carefully maintained (and crashes avoided), a bike will give you that new-out-the-store feel for many years. I would write more about this, but today I finished some maintenance on my bike and I'm eager to get to bed early to be able to wake up in time for the Friday Morning Ride tomorrow.