The Half-Baked Plans Of Bikes & Men

I suppose I’ll take it more seriously when I get to ride No. 10 and up, but for now with ride No. 2 behind me I’m not fully vested in my late-breaking “Ride Every Day In October” challenge — an idea that my brain spat out yesterday at some point during yesterday’s ride the first day of the month.

As someone who biked a 30-plus-mile roundtrip between Silver Lake and Westchester an average of 200 work days a year for almost three years, I’ve spent the last 16 months since that routine ended regularly verifying the truth of how easy it is not to ride when you don’t have ride. Frankly I’m a tad pleasantly surprised I’ve surpassed 500 miles so far this calendar year. And disgusted.

So I’m going to try to spend a little bit of each day this month less disgusted while disproving that theorem. But the one thing I don’t want to do is feel obligated to get on the bike and ride around the block, so if it ever comes to that: streak over.

Of course, the streak almost died before it was born. Yesterday I busied myself being lazy in front of the TV with football. Watching the Raiders battle the Patriots into the late afternoon, I’d hoped that the Lions’ outrageous comeback over the Cowboys and the Bengals’ improbable defeat of the Bills were foreshadowings that Oakland might prevail over its New England nemesis, but alas it was proven pretty early that was not going to be.  Yet instead of stepping away from the television I waited until well into the fourth quarter — when Oakland’s loss was a fully foregone conclusion — before setting down the remote, extracting myself from the mire of any of several excuses and setting out for a roughly 11-mile circumference with the Edendale area of Echo Park as the route’s centerpoint.

We’ll see if (and if so, where) ride No. 3 takes me.