Riding a Bike - When Did You Learn?
 

On a run yesterday, I saw the oldest kid on training wheels I've ever seen. He had to be 12 or so. He was riding and his dad was running behind him holding the seat (even with training wheels?) so he was obviously just learning to ride a bike.

Hey, you gotta learn sometime, so good luck to the kid, but it made me wonder about bike riding. When did you first come off the training wheels and the seat-stabilizing parent to ride on your own?

And as a followup, how good are you now? Do you ride a lot? A little? If you don't ride at all, at what age did you last ride?

And no, I still haven't recovered my bike, but I look for it every day.

I learned at age 6, by the way. I had a red bike of unknown brand, and I remember that it had solid rubber tires for some reason. I first soloed by convincing myself that a fictional kid had stolen 50 cents from me and I had to catch him, and I generated enough fictional anger that I rode the bike fast and blocked out my fear of falling.

I currently don't ride at all, and figure that my lack of coordination will prohibit me from biking at a speed that is fast enough to be relevant. I'll just run, thank you.

(Looking around.) Hey, this doesn't look like the lounge.

Would a mod mind moving this to the lounge, please?

I learned when I was 6 or 7 on a giant girl's single speed bike while on vacation. My uncle taught me on the streets of the trailer park he owned and once I learned, I spent the rest of that vacation riding all over that park.

When I was about 12, I got my first brand new (as opposed to hand-me-down) bike for Christmas. It was a yellow 3-speed Statostreak bike from the Sears catalog. It looked so cool in the pictures, but it turned out to be kind of crappy and too heavy. It was my second most disappointing Christmas present behind the wooden toy train I got when I asked for an electric train.

A 3-speed would still seem cool, though. Did you have a banana seat and a sissy bar?

My first new bike was a red, white, and blue single speed Huffy Free Spirit, which I later retrofitted with a mirror and a speedometer/odometer. It looked a little like this, but more red and the handlebars weren't as dorky.

https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/i...mO5P2DQ-gNprow

I was mortified a couple of years after I got it when Playtex came out with the Free Spirit bra, but none of the kids in the neighborhood ever made the connection.



http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4135/4...3a189a0e_z.jpg

Here's a picture of mine. It doesn't look as cool to me now as it did when I was a kid. I remember thinking the spring-looking things on the front end looked cool, but they were just cosmetic as it turned out.

http://www.nemusclebikes.com/images/pics/Strat1.JPG

My main problem with it was the weight. I lived in the country and rode a lot in pastures and creek beds. It just wasn't the right bike for that kind of thing. Later, I got a hand-me-down single speed girl's Schwinn that was really light. I replaced the seat with a sort of banana seat (more boxy than typical banana seats), replaced the tires with some real knobby ones, and replaced the handlebars/handgrips to make my own pre-BMX off road bike and it worked a lot better. That bike was a lot like the one you had except that it was a girl's style, which didn't bother me.