It's like riding a bike. (literally)

Listen to Roland read the piece:

I’m not trying to make excuses but I had a wicked serious back injury in 2013. Like serious enough that the EMTs took me out of my apartment building on a stretcher.

Wait. That’s not right. Not a stretcher. It wasn’t Saigon.

A gurney. They carried me out on a gurney.

I remember yelling back over my shoulder to the doormen as we rolled through the lobby onto 12th Street and the waiting ambulance:

“I didn’t think you’d be seeing this particular scene for at least another 20 years!”

After taking some terrible advice from the first doctor ('“Spend the next 6 weeks flat on your back on your living room floor”) and then amplifying the injury under the over-confident jolly hands of a chiropractor who could not see past his outsized ego, me and the gym lost our groove.

It wouldn’t be until another two months had passed that I found myself sitting across the desk from the Head of Spinal Surgery at Hospital for Special Surgery as he explained that the body needs to move in order to heal. And by spending a month flat on my back teaching via Zoom with laptop propped to my knees I had not done my body any favors.

But I’m not trying to make excuses. Really. (Really, Roland?)

Then what with the pandemic, my daily step tally (I am told there is such a thing) really suffered a hit. You see, no one tells you that it takes much fewer steps to get from the sofa to the refrigerator than it does from your apartment to . . . say, anything else the world might have to offer.

Long story short. I acquired a new gut. A second gut. On top of the old one.

And I named it Self Pity.

Last week on a particularly gorgeous sunny breezy day, the kind of sky my late producing partner and friend John Tilley used to honor by tilting his head skyward, smiling his biggest South Carolina smile and proclaiming “Well look at that, it’s another 9/11 day.” On that bright spring day I glanced up at the maple tree overhead and decided this would be the year I finally bought a bike.

Not a Pelaton.

Like a real one.

With wheels that connect with the ground.

If I’m going to spend the next year living in this house I grew up in, it would serve me to access some of those muscle memories from childhood.

As I took a couple bikes out for a test ride in the lot behind Cycle Dynamics in Westport, CT (yes I’m plugging them because they’re great), it suddenly hit me that riding the stationary bike at the gym or at Soul Cycle or in my bedroom is only vaguely like riding a bicycle.

And you know what they say. (Only sometimes it isn’t quite.)

So much is in the balance, the way the hips and the thighs communicate to keep the spine upright and the wheels facing forward. This morning in my driveway at 7:30AM, I was grateful no one was up and out to witness my spastic attempts to right this thing on my way out into the hood.

I was 7 yrs old when I lost 1/4 of my front right tooth to the unforgiving pavement of Rockyfield Road. So, we have history, this road and I. I had been attempting a very tight U-turn in front of the house of Howard Munce a commercial artist who had used me as a model for one of his advertising drawings. And it was right in front of Mr. Munce’s house that I lost part of my oh-so-saleable smile.

How long has it been since I took off down the road on a bike? One that would fall if I stopped pedaling. I’m not sure. But it certainly had been more than 25 years.

As I whipped around the loop that is formed by Rockyfield Road, Warnock Drive and Wysteria Lane, I thanked Heaven for gentle downhill slopes. For though it is certainly true that for little boys everywhere coasting downhill on a bike is a singular joy, for a man closer to 60 than 50 every opportunity to coast arrives like a gift from God.

Looping around and around this almost unrecognizable cousin of the neighborhood I grew up in, I decided to make bike riding a very big part of my enjoyment of the Summer of 2026.

Of course there is still the matter of one lingering question I neglected to ask in the bike store.

Which makes it easier to pedal uphill: a low gear or a high one?

Perhaps you can answer this question in the comments. Yes, I know I could probably Google it. But it would be so much lovelier to get my answer from each of you. And I know you know the answer. (Yes, you. You know who I’m talking to.)

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