Riding a bike with plastic bags full of groceries dangling from each handlebar can be dangerous, since turning and stopping can sway the balance of the bike. A wipeout at an intersection is surely hilarious to people in their cars, and I have provided that laugh a few times.
In America, cars equal freedom. For the first time I had lost the privilege to drive. This proved a humbling experience having to ride my bike to the grocery store, to recovery meetings, and to appointments. I needed to arrange rides to events and ask for help more often than I liked. On work trips, I had to explain away why I didn’t have a rental car. By pedal I propelled my way around the city, using the bike lanes and trails. Having witnessed many cyclists ignore the rules of the road, I tried my best to obey proper traffic behavior, but I will admit running a few stop signs when no cars are around. Stopping and starting a bike again by pedaling takes a lot more energy than pressing a foot on a car’s brake pedal. Now I know why bicyclists don’t stop unless they must.
Initially I found commuting by bike to be an embarrassment, as my neighbors all knew what had happened. But within a few weeks I discovered that I could bike fifteen miles a day and not feel sore afterward. This startled me since I had generally avoided riding a bike since childhood. My old Wal-Mart bike needed a tune-up, but for a few months I squeaked along, not really understanding what a quality bike felt like, but then I didn’t much care as the enjoyment increased, all thanks to this loss of my freedom to drive.
To get to AA meetings, I needed to ride about seven miles each way and in the summer heat I would show up dripping with perspiration. The fatigue and sweat reduced my ability to pay attention in the meetings, but my goal (another goal) was to attend 90 meetings in 90 days, a staple prescription for those starting or resuming AA, since regular attendance forms a solid habit and forces a person to get to know people in the program. With family and work obligations, I biked frantically to and from the meetings, determined to commit to the change and strike drinking from my life completely, once and for all.
Occasionally I frequented an evening meeting, meaning I had to cycle back at dusk. As summer days shortened, I found myself on a paved trail in the dark as the chill of night settled into the trees around me. These night rides became exciting as I hoped no sticks or surprises lay on the trail waiting to flip my bike over. On several nights, thousands of fireflies lit up the trail with natural fireworks that I never knew existed in the city. It was glorious.
I began to enjoy the bike rides more than the meetings and started to yearn for longer rides. Suddenly I could understand why cyclists, in their strange spandex attire, became committed to their hobby. Getting out of a car and onto a bike actually allowed you to be in the world. A car wrapped me like an envelope and I experienced very little. Traveling by bike through the city made me much happier than driving, likely because of the exercise but I also suspect because of the lack of media. No radio, no phones, no touchscreen: just the open air and whatever the weather brought that day.
As my legs began to get in shape, I wondered about distances and my ability to ride nonstop for thirty miles, and soon forty miles. Likewise, I started to run, realizing that my body felt better than ever, like it once did in high school before I started drinking. In my late thirties, I realized that I had wasted twenty years thinking that my knees were shot due to surgeries, when in reality I had let them rot and get weak by lack of usage. Instead of coddling them, I improved them by applying pressure to the joints and bones via exercise. I started to do squats with weight.
The truth became readily apparent that alcohol had not only been a crutch for me but had also been the thing that had crippled me from the start. In reviewing my history, most of what I had held as important faded once drinking became a part of my life and my sense of depression started then as well, around the age of sixteen. My sense of right and wrong dwindled into a vague sense of truth over the drinking years because my vice required a loose allowance toward mistakes. I could forgive others for their mistakes somewhat easily because I needed to allow my own errors to happen and be excused. This morass of circular logic permitted anything and celebrated my errors, making me the decider of all that was good or bad in the world. The main rule I adhered to could be summed up as a philosophy of “Leave me alone, I have my own rules.”
Of course, the rules could change whenever I wanted them to be different. That was how I liked it. Being powerless bothered me most of all. To be told what to do disturbed me, and even enraged me. Yet I had just experienced a loss of power where I began to appreciate biking more by having lost the right to drive. At the time I didn’t recognize this as significant. Instead I seized upon the point that I was able to exercise more and my will and ego enjoyed that a great deal. No longer did I cry the blues about my bad knees, but rather I heard the call of endurance sports. Fitness became a moral good by itself and I began signing up for longer distance races.
I recall the day when I realized that I no longer had to stop on the bike. Energy surged in me, as it was almost a spiritual experience, when I knew that I could bike for hours and hours now and my legs felt like pistons. On another occasion I decided to go for an eleven mile run across the Golden Gate bridge while in San Francisco on a work trip. The weather was foggy and misty that day. The red towers peeked out of the fog as I ran beneath them and the runner’s high struck me so profoundly that tears came to my eyes and again I felt as if I never needed to stop running.
The notion arrived of running a half-marathon. Three months after my arrest I completed that half-marathon. This seemed an impossibility for over twenty years and by simply removing alcohol and my driver’s license from my life, I discovered something amazing about myself. I would say that the scales fell from my eyes, but I had more than one set of scales to go through. As I embraced fitness, I began to back away from AA once again. Like the first time, I reached the 9th step of recovery, then retreated again and said goodbye to my sponsor. My new sponsor was my bike, my gym, and my running shoes. I kept a small space for a Higher Power, for God in my mind and heart, but the goal had shifted toward feats of fitness, and once again, goals willed to fruition.
