Birthday Unpresent

I did enjoy my birthday. People did nice things for me (you know who you are – thank you). If you’re not sure if you are going to have a good day, start with the pancake at Mitzi’s. Yum.
The part that I didn’t enjoy (understatement) was some fuckwad stealing my bike. (I’ve been trying to figure how to use the phrase “some fuckwad” in a post for some time now. So pleased I could finally make it happen). It wasn’t even a very good bike anymore. It was a 2003 (I bought it in 2004) and I put about a bazillion kilometers on it. The fork barely worked anymore and ha! I never did fix the slow leak in that back tube. Deal with that, fuckwad.
Getting your bike stolen is part of committing to riding them everyone. I seriously don’t know that many people who ride all the time that hadn’t had one stolen or some close. I just wrote about this! Next time I will knock on wood harder. Or more. Does that work? Now I can confirm from personal experience that getting your bike stolen DOES feel pretty shitty (shocking, I know), and I think it pissed me off all the more that it was on my birthday. As I was saying though, the alternative to getting your bike stolen is never riding it, or only “selectively” riding it. Fuck that. I think it’s the best, most enjoyable, environmentally friendly, best exercise-y way to get around. While that bike will be worth next to nothing (in terms of resale/drug money), let me tell you where I had ridden it.
First of all, I should properly introduce you: my bike’s name was _____ Gumption. This was determined on some trail back in the day. I think I had friends with Gumption as part of their bike’s names, so my friend Gindl suggested I go with it as half the name. We chatted on the ride about Gumption being it’s (unlike my old car, by bike didn’t have a gender) surname. I never did come up with _____ Gumption’s given name.
Blank Gumption and I have been on too many sweet singletrack rides to count in Canmore, Banff & Golden (to name a few places). I commuted on it daily from Bowness to downtown Calgary for a year and a half. It’s been to California (the ride I thought I might get eaten by a Rottweiler) and Oregon. Two mountain bike camps (Fernie and Blue River BC) – it even rode the chainlift, my only experience downhilling. Two off seasons riding a few times a week on my trainer. The Black Forest in Germany. Slickrock and Porcupine Ridge in Moab. Fruita, Colorado. The dentist, the doctor, practice, the grocery store, and my parents house etc: hundreds of rides in the city. And road rides! Black Gumption masqueraded as a road bike. Karlsruhe to Spock (that o needs an umlaute) in Germany. Calgary to Bragg Creek (Alberta). Waterloo to Stratford in Ontario. And Thursday, Toronto to Oakville.
The obvious question is if it mean that much to me, why would I ever lock in downtown Toronto, right? It didn’t. It’s just a bike. I still have all those rides, and I’ll have more on some other bike. Maybe I’ll even give the newbie a first name. (when it happens). Bikes are meant to be ridden. Really Blank Gumption was barely the bike for some of those rides. I certainly could have made use of a road bike for all the road riding, a full suspension for Moab and Fernie and a cruiser for the dentist and the grocery store. Blank Gumption was forced to be a generalist because the road bike is a still a plan/dream/theory on a blog, the cruiser bike is beside me in pieces until I can figure out how to fix a bottom bracket (and I once had another one with no seat so I had to stand the whole time) and a full suspension just never found a way into my budget.
RIP Blank Gumption. 2003-2010.