Midaregami

• My bike (recently rechristened “Buster the Wonder Bike”) was nearly stolen yesterday. I was making a delivery to an industrial section of town, and there wasn’t a convenient post to lock ol’ Buster to. I locked the bike to itself and ran upstairs to make the drop, then ran back down—30, 45 seconds, at the most. When I came down, a scraggly-looking fellow was dragging my bike away, and it looked like he was about to try and ride it off. I yelled at him—something incisive and indicting like “Whoah, hey, hey!” whereupon he handed the bike back to me and shuffled off. For a minute I thought perhaps he was just trying to move the bike because it was in the way of something, but no—the gentlemen was clearly attempting to abscond with it. I say, that was dashed rude of him! Fortunately the encounter did not degenerate into fisticuffs.

• There’s a hill on my old commute to school. I say “old” because now that we’ve moved, my commute route has changed, and I no longer have occasion to ride up that particular hill, though there are others. But as serendipity would have it, yesterday I had a delivery that took me up it anyway. Now, this hill once had the unique property of matching exactly my ability to push up it—I could climb it with some strength, but I would be temporarily exhausted right at the crest, and whatever speed I had managed to carry through the climb was all I would have in the subsequent flat, because my legs were completely tapped out. But yesterday I hammered up that same incline using a significantly bigger gear than I used to use, and still had sufficient anima to accelerate to a respectible cruse upon cresting the hill. I may not be as fast as the other messengers (as the alleycat unequivocally showed) but I’m a lot faster than I used to be. Onward and upward!

This report is late; the event in question happened on July 4. I refer, of course, to the K-VIBE (Kalihi Valley Instructional Bike Exchange) Independence Day Alleycat race.

An alleycat is essentially a glorified scavenger hunt on bicycles. Participants tear through traffic to track down a variety of goals. It’s associated with messenger and single-speed culture, but all kinds of people on all kinds of bikes showed up for this one. Given the participation of local messenger speed demons like Kendall and Rice, I knew I wouldn’t be in the running for the top places, but hey—a real live bike race! Count me in.