What Goes Around
Hi. My name is Nancy, and my husband is a serious cyclist.
Hi, Nancy.
It’s been great to find this support group for bike spouses – people who, like me, can discuss the merits of various chamois designs in minimizing butt chafe, who come when called to cradle a component carefully while our mates gingerly perform surgery on their precious rigs, who understand that there will be no travel in July for fear of missing the live broadcast of a key stage of the Tour de France.
I’m speaking up today because I’ve recently taken my relationship with my husband’s bike to a new level, and I thought it might help some of you newbies to hear it.
Maybe I should start with a little history.
When we met in graduate school, my husband was strictly a transportational cyclist and a lukewarm one at that — when his mountain bike was stolen, he was mostly baffled about how someone could cut the lock and chain that tethered it to his apartment balcony without waking him up.
Once we were married he began the slow drift into road biking, and I was an unwitting accelerant. When he took me to see my first professional road race, I was captivated by the spectacle of these graceful athletes and their gleaming cycles. Every birthday and Christmas, I got him subscriptions to bike magazines that he read voraciously, once even tossing aside the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition in favor of the annual Velo News Buyer’s Guide. He and biking were heating up, but slowly. Like an aging domestique on a stationary trainer.
It was when we moved to the Bay Area eighteen years ago that shit got real. With temperate year-round weather and access to some of the country’s best bike routes right out our front door, he indulged in biking with new fervor. He joined a group of like-minded cyclists who ply the roads of the East Bay during crack-of-dawn rides. They’re a competitive, smooth-shaved bunch, merciless when it comes to the flab they call Winter Bacon, or poor bike handling skills. I would say they are the meanest men I’ve ever met, except that when I see them in street clothes, they are as sweet as podium girls. And they’d never abandon a brother biker on the road. Unless he’s got Winter Bacon, in which case that guy totally had it coming.
In this support group, I can confess that when our two daughters were small, I resented the bike. Especially a French one he had, a Look 585. I referred to her as “Mademoiselle Look, the French mistress,” and visualized running her down with the family car so many times that I sometimes thought maybe I actually had. There I was with two toddlers and a blurry post-pregnancy body, panicked that motherhood would swallow me whole and horck me out like a biker does a snot rocket on a stretch of desolated road. And there was Mademoiselle Look, silver and black and weighing only 16 pounds, built for speed in a way I might never be again. Between the time my husband spent with her and the amount of money it took to maintain her good looks, was it any wonder I loathed his two-wheeled companion?
One sunny weekend I decided to show him how I felt, the only way I believed he’d understand. As soon as my husband pulled up from his extra long Saturday ride, I grabbed the car keys and walked past him toward the driveway. “I’m going to buy myself a bike, back in an hour, the girls are playing inside,” I said through clenched teeth, and gunned the car onto the street.
I drove to his favorite bike shop and uttered words every sporting goods salesperson working on commission longs to hear: “I want a bike, shoes, helmet and riding kit, and money is no object.” My credit card aflame, I had them load the bike onto the car top carrier I had no idea how to use. My husband’s jaw dropped when I pulled into the driveway and began unloading. “I didn’t think they were even selling that helmet until next year,” he said.
But then I had to ride the damned thing. The last time I’d sat on a bike with any regularity was 15 years earlier when I lived in Germany, tooling around Munich’s wide, flat bike paths on a rickety three-speed I’d bought at a drug store, which probably explains why parts fell off at regular intervals. My idea of a biking challenge back then was to ride all the way from one Biergarten to the next without sliding drunkenly off the seat.
Where we live in Oakland, a simple bike ride out the front door involves either a harrowing drop or a thigh-busting grind uphill. After a few months, I’d progressed enough to take a one-hour ride and come back exhilarated — not from the fun I’d had, because I hadn’t had any, but from the adrenaline thrill of surviving roads that were the biking equivalent of bunny hills at a ski resort. I greeted the winter rain with particular joy that year. July came and the bike was still sitting in the garage, coated with cobwebs. I had to face facts. I would never fall for Mr. Giant the way my husband had fallen for Mademoiselle Look.
Time passed, as it does, and the children got older, as they do, and by about eight years ago, any jealousy I’d harbored over Mademoiselle Look and her successor bikes had evaporated. The girls and I had our own weekend morning routines while my husband rode – they took ballet, I sat at a coffee shop and wrote. When it rained and he stayed home, everything felt off kilter. On those days we were meaner than his bike club friends: “It’s just misting! That’s why you have arm warmers! Your friends are all going to go without you!”
Which brings me to where we are now. Given the hours my husband spends gently washing and rubbing down her sleek, sexy frame, his current bike, Signorina Pinarello, provides a LOT of the stress release in my house. By keeping my husband busy for big chunks of time, Signorina Pinarello has made thousands of pages of writing possible for me. My husband recently had an accident involving a barbed wire pileup on a steep descent and my second question – I’m not that awful of a wife – was “Is the bike also okay?” (As an aside, the barbed wire altercation earned him a new nickname from his ever-compassionate bike buddies: Barbie.) On their long rides together, Signorina Pinarello keeps my husband fit, and, except for the crashes, healthy.
So to all of you newcomers to this bike spouse support group, I want to say: don’t think of it as losing a husband.
Think of it as gaining a sister-wife.
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This is what I read at The Basement Series last week, a fundraiser for scholarships for the LitCamp Writer’s Conference. Applications for the 2016 conference open now – writers, start your engines!
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