One of the things I’ve long envied about Lung’s work situation has been that since he lives and works in San Francisco, he can bike commute pretty much every day if he wants. I used to be able to do this, some six years and change ago, when I worked downtown, and made the most of it, though back then, social occasions and other relationship-related stuff would happen after work here and there and I’d ride whatever other days that I could. Given the relatively short distance of that commute, I would sprint it and get the most out of it I could. After that, however, these recent years I’ve been commuting into Mill Valley from SF, which has been AWESOME. What a great way to get saddle time in throughout the week, riding through the city, the Presidio, over the bridge, and into Marin. Solid! Except, funny thing, attrition sets in. Stacking a full workday onto that ride meant that if I did it more than three days a week in the best case scenario, I’d be too exhausted to really enjoy it. As it was, the ride in would be great, the day would drag and I’d be tired from lack of sleep and whatever, and then sort of dread climbing out of Sausalito to get home. This commute was merely part of any usual weekend distance ride, but suddenly, when you have to do it just to drag your tired ass home in order to make dinner and such, it feels a little more like a chore on certain days. Particularly late summer when the wind and wet on the bridge and the climb to it were pretty brutal. But still, even though it could be a mixed-bag, it was still an awesome ride, and a great opportunity to get on the bike for two hours each ride day.

Then I moved to Mill Valley.

Suddenly my long ride opportunities disappeared. We have a baby at home, so i don’t have the luxury of before- or after-work climbs up Tam. I’m on duty all the time. So now my riding is limited to work commuting and the occasional lunch ride. I lost those miles, that saddle time, and the journey I loved. HOWEVER, loss and gain can go hand in hand. While I lost some ride time, what I gained was a return to the bike commuting schedule I used to have, where I can ride, like Lung, as many days of the week I want to, and this has been a boon. Where 6 years ago I had one bike and one bike only in my possession (the Bianchi Veloce dubbed Toro, was the ride at the time) now I have upwards of 7 of my own in various stages of rideability. So while I have been changing out bikes every few days on my longer commutes in months and years past, it’s always been a strategic decision: which bike to take? What’s the weather going to be like, what’s my cargo, how tired am I? I’m happy to say that over the last 18 months I got very comfortable riding even my big-gear fixed-gear on that commute. But I still had to think about it.

Now, I have a wonderful embarrassment of riches in the bikeBasement, as you may have seen in other posts: I have a series of hooks in a beam so that all the bikes can hang like, as Lung put it, a sweet bike wardrobe closet. So in the new digs, I go down there in the morning with the luxury of not knowing which bike I’m even going to take on any particular day. I’m using the same pedal system on each bike, so I can just drop down there in my shoes and pluck a bike off the rack and ride it, whatever strikes my fancy for the day. It’s great. As wee Z gets a little older and has a schedule that will allow me some longer rides, i’ll get the exercise back in, but in the meantime, at LEAST I get to start each day the right way: on two wheels!

Currently, only four bikes are rideable: wrongBike, Villain, roadLook and redBike. The fifth, Fix-e, is currently partially decommissioned as I sold Lung her wheels. Nothing’s more pathetic than a bike with no wheels. So that carcass hangs on a hook like that scene in Good Fellas with Jimmy Two-Time, waiting for another ressurection. The sixth, Ye Blacke Death, is way early in the project, and has a ways to go. The seventh, Ghostal, is very near road-ready, just waiting for a few final hours in the bikeBasement to finish up the wheels.

Good stuff!

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