First step

The Anna Karenina standard of biking is this: Everyone who erudite how to journey a bicycle did so in roughly the same boring way; anyone who made it to adulthood without education required a unique series of roadblocks, failures, inattention, and procrastination. If you fall into the last group, congratulations! Your inability to do something most children have mastered makes a great conversation-starter. But your invented story of finally having tamed the wild, geared stallion will make an even better one. There’s no sexy disturbance in my past that kept me from learning: no 10-speed mowing down my parents in facade of my eyes, no bike-mounted bullies menacing me for my lunch money. It just never happened for me. I grew up in an apartment with a lack of storage space space in a bike-unfriendly neighborhood in a bike-unfriendly city, so tottering on training wheels down my block wasn’t an option. My parents know how to ride, but rarely did, and they either never got around to teaching me or gave up on me when I was too young to remember. In college, where my deficiency made me an object of inquisitiveness, attempts by friends to teach me were made under less-than-ideal situation, i.e. while we were all very drunk. Those attempts went poorly. By the time I reached my mid-twenties, I just kind of unspoken that if it hadn’t happened, it wasn’t going to. Even when I turned 31 earlier this year, I couldn’t ride a bike with any level of confidence, couldn’t stay on that bastard for more than a few feet without wobbling, with visions of veering into oncoming traffic flashing before my eyes. “Killed Trying to Learn to Bicycle,” the headlines would read, “Like a Pathetic bungling Baby.” I was ashamed of my inadequacy, but you shouldn’t be. It’s just a non-vital skill that most people have learned but others haven’t. Just because the alternative is a above all small one doesn’t make it a failure of quality.