I couldn’t fix it until today

I have always loved bikes. I love their engineering, design, and the freedom they give you.

There is an great bike store in the town of Fairfield where I went to high school. For months before the summer of my sophomore year of high school, I did research online to find the right bike from a company called Trek. I found something right in my price range – the Madone 1.1.

When I moved into my dorm for sophomore year of college, I brought my bike with me. The building I lived in at the time was built the year prior. So, it had a bike room! Excited, I brought my Madone to school with me and put it in one of the spots.

I go to University of Rochester in NY. If you know anything about Rochester, you know that it is not an “outdoors” city. You are lucky to have two weeks of good weather per year. I was not sure what I was thinking when I brought my bike with me.

On one of these nice weather days, I took the trails to Target. On the way, I had to get off the trails and get on the road. Of course, politicians in Rochester don’t care about cyclists. There are none! Therefore, there are no bike lanes.

My bike

On one of these roads, I found myself hitting a sewer grate every 25 yards. I couldn’t avoid them before of traffic in the left lane. I needed to use this road to get to my destination. After I left Target, something felt strange. My tire was broken.

It took me a while to figure out that I must have popped the tire on one of the sewer grates. The lack of bike lanes popped my tire.

Now, it’s 8 months later. The winter came, I wasn’t able to ride my bike. My father sent me a replacement inner-tube, but I could barely fix it. I thought I could replace a simple inner-tube tire on a road bike, but it proved more difficult than expected. When I got home from school, I told my father about it, and he thought he could fix it too. What happened? He couldn’t either.

A few days later (today), I took it back to the original Trek store to fix it. Now, it’s all repaired and ready for more rides.

Update: I am moving to San Francisco in a few days for the summer. Part of the reason I wanted to fix my bike was so that I could use it in SF. I am currently looking for the cheapest way to get it to the West Coast / rent a bike while I am there. Expect another post about it soon.