Zooming!

The bike fully assembled and the brakes adjusted by my capable 14 YO daughter while I was cooking dinnner - no wait, there is a story here.
"Mom can I ride your bike?"
"No, the brakes don't work yet."
"Can you fix them?"
"No, I am cooking."
"If I fix them, then can I ride the bike?"
Think...think...this better not be like the time she borrowed my Dolce Gabana kitten-heeled black snake shoes for a choir concert because her foot grew and she had nothing else.
"Yes, you may." Sigh. The sacrifice of motherhood: a virgin bike ride for dinner on the table.

It took two days before I got to ride my new bike. Yesterday I hopped on, the brakes worked, so I figured I'd just cruise on the flat parts of our neighborhood and put the bike through its paces. It was...different. Much different than my mountain bike. First it felt less stable - but wait! The lack of stability is also called *responsiveness*. I can make the bike turn with subtle shifts in my body alone. I can zigzag down the street by doing this little belly-dancing move. How cool is that? I can avoid roadkill without slowing down. Whole thirty minutes of fun before the brakes started to weaken and then give out. I even had my crash zones to our house all mapped out, just in case. A rabbit hopped out of my way, a neighbor sat on the stoop with her new baby. I stopped by for a chat, not willing to go down that big steep hill with breaks feeling tired.

According to Suzanna who imports these bikes with her husband, there is no need to take the bike to a shop, if I am willing to think a bit and get intimate with bike grease. She suggested http:\\roadbikeoutlet.com/assembly.html for a good place to start, and I will. I will also get tools other than a Leatherman Multitool. Her import company is www.roadbikeoutlet.com - the www.icatchdeals.com includes cool stuff other than bikes on it, but here I am riding a bike, not a portable fireplace, so... time to get some tools and park everything on the glass coffee table right next to my laptop, and put a TARP DOWN before I take things apart. This is what happens when your WIFI doesn't make it to the basement.

A thirty-minute cruise on a new bike shouldn't count as a workout, but it did. My back was pretty sore. My knee caps felt like I was running down a long hill. Obviously, doing a comfortable 20km in an upright position does not translate into crouching on a roadbike where you butt sticks in the air. Muscles are engaged differently and now I understand why all those triathlon books stress the importance of core workouts. One good thing about this butt waving in the air is that it's easier to climb standing in the pedals. Gravity helps and the circular action is *much* smoother. Me being chicken little, though, I might put another set of brake levers on top of the handlebars ... just in case. My old Railegh had that - my first good road bike. Too bad it rusted, and too bad there was play in it's super-modern chromoly frame (am I dating myself?).

Now it's off to the beach for a week, where I will be riding somebody else's bike. The helmet is already packed.