This blog mocks me. Healthy Biker is a cursed moniker that has rendered me neither healthy nor a biker. Now, I am The Car-Dependent Invalid.
Okay, okay, perhaps that's overstating the point. Nevertheless, it seems like every time I vow to get back on the bike something happens to interfere with those plans. For instance:
Despite still suffering remnants of a mysterious illness that no x-ray, ultrasound, or blood test has yet found a name for, I vowed to get back to bike-commuting after the Christmas holidays. I was out of town for two weeks and - as per tradition - put on about 10 lbs of holiday cheer. As such, I felt pretty motivated to get back to eating like a human being and exercising regularly in January. This is something I haven't done for a while, actually, because of the aforementioned Mystery Illness. So, for my first day back to work on January 10th, I was all ready to hop on the bike and go.
AND THEN . . .
Photo by John Lucas, edmontonjournal.com
Snowmaggedon. Snowpocalypse. Whatever you call it, it was quite the snowrdeal. 30 cm of snow fell the weekend of January 8-10. I didn't leave my house at all except to shovel for three days. When I did try to take the bike out on Tuesday to see if I could get through the accumulation, I couldn't get farther than two blocks without getting off my bike THREE TIMES to walk it through impassable snow drifts. FINE! I'll have to delay bike-commuting for another week or so while I let the city clear this up a bit. So maybe I can get back on the bike on January 17th.
AND THEN . . .
Ed Kaiser for The Edmonton Journal
More snow!!
This past weekend we saw another 20 cm or snow. For you metrically-challenged out there, the 50 cm accumulation that we've seen over the past two weeks means we've had about 20 inches of snow. That means I've been spending most of my free time either shovelling, staying indoors and going stir-crazy with my daughter, or enlisting the help of neighbours to help me push my car out of wherever it's stuck. The roof of my house is collecting ice dams that are causing major ceiling leaks. I can't bike because even the main roads are so icy, snowy, and laden with snowbanks that there is no safe way to get to work. There might not be for quite some time. My car just spent 30 hours of the past weekend stuck in deep snow because I fish-tailed into a part of the road that hadn't been cleared, and that's how long it took for me to wait for a tow truck to arrive. All this had led me to the same question I ask myself every winter, but now more than ever:
My ceiling leak - the first one.
WHY THE F%&* DO I LIVE HERE?????
As soon as I'm actually able to ride again, I will post more. Until then, I'll wait impatiently for the city to clear the roads and people to clear their sidewalks so that maybe, just maybe, I'll actually get a chance to ride this winter.
