Tour de Regret

Where the rubber meets the “what was I thinking?”

My partner—my spouse, my better half, my sometimes half-baked other half—decided yesterday was the perfect day to ride a bike. Not just any ride. A triumphant return after three years of not so much as leaning on one.

In his head, he’d glide through town like Lance Armstrong without the scandal. In reality? It was going to be traffic dodgeball—only he was the ball and the rules were being rewritten every thirty seconds.

He rolls out the bike in the ever-popular padded riding shorts, which are flattering on exactly zero humans. On a man in his sixties? Let’s just say the neighborhood learned things they didn’t want to know.

Our neighbor’s pulling his SUV from the garage. He stops, gets out, and stares— “Didn’t know you rode a bike.”

“It’s been a while, but you never forget!”

True. You never forget. But your legs, lungs, and lower back are petty little archivists—happy to pull up every year you’ve been alive and slap you with it in real time.

Before he even hit the street, tires wobbling, he had a gear-shift crisis. He’s clicking levers like he’s trying to stop a bomb from detonating, wearing the same puzzled expression he wore trying to program a VCR in 1987.

Then came the first stop sign. “Which brake’s the front again? Or do I just squeeze both?” Watching from the upstairs window, I waited for him to catapult over the handlebars.

But, off he went—straight into a neighborhood full of potholes, honking drivers, and somebody’s uncle riding a lawnmower to the corner store. I watched him vanish, impressed and concerned. Mostly concerned.

An hour later, the same neighbor spots him on a side street pushing the bike uphill, face stop sign red and gasping hard enough to make the man stop his car and punch 911 into his phone—just in case.

“You okay?” the neighbor asks.

“Yes,’ my partner wheezes, ‘though that’s questionable.”

He was right though, riding a bike is still like riding a bike. The mechanics never change. But at sixty-plus, recovery takes longer than Atlanta traffic on a Friday. You start to wonder why you left the porch.

Next time, we’re trying a safer hobby. Chess. Waving from the porch. Competitive napping. Or maybe rewriting that old Melanie song:

“I’ve got a brand new shiny bicycle… You’ve got a hill from hell.”

💬 If this gave you a laugh (or made you rethink your next bike ride), hit the ❤️, leave a comment, and share it with a friend who’s convinced they’re still twenty-five. That’s a classic symptom of ‘The Condition’.