On Being A Mover & Changing Times

 In celebration of the twentieth year of this blog, I have a few tales to tell. This post is one of them. This series will occur off and on throughout this anniversary year, I hope to illuminate some behind-the-scenes stories and highlights from the blog during this time. Enjoy!

The last post in this series touched upon a time that was a bit of a tough stretch for me personally. This post will also have a bit of that as well, but this time I am going to cover a few things that have really stretched me and have totally affected my riding and writing here on the blog as well.

Image of Guitar Ted on Quarry Road by Ben Morris

The biggest change to my cycling life which happened recently was when Andy's Bike Shop went out of business at the end on 2021. I got a call from Andy letting me know what was happening in December that year. 

Of course, I had no idea what would come next for me as far as work would go. The bike shop opportunities in Waterloo/Cedar Falls are few and far between due to the paucity of shops here. Add in the fact that I had strong feelings against working in two of those shops and a third needed no one, and you can see that I was looking at opportunities outside of cycling for work.

I knew that whatever happened it would likely mean an end to the nearly twenty years of my being able to take a day and 'just ride' wherever and whenever I wanted to. 

Adding into this was the fact my son was using my truck as his vehicle to get back and forth to a job he had, and to go to college, and I was not only looking at big change in vocation, but in my riding time and schedule. 

"Felix The Cat", decided that I was 'his person', further complicating things.

When we decided to add another rescue cat from the local shelter in December of 2021 we ended up with a male black cat I named "Felix The Cat". (The older amongst you readers may understand why I chose that name) 

Well, Felix decided I was to be 'his person', which, if you are a pet owner and have experienced a pet 'attaching' to you, I think you'll understand how this was yet another big change for me. It affected my riding time. If you haven't experienced this effect, it may be harder for you to understand,but one just does not leave for extended periods of time if a pet seems to hang on to your existence for its "reason to be". 

Felix The Cat in 2024. The big goof weighs 14+ lbs now!

Another thing I did not talk much about at the time was my experience filling in at a moving company which started right before Christmas of 2021 and lasted until mid-January of 2022. 

This was a professional company that used big box van trucks and has government contracts to move military families and the whole nine yards. So this was quite the experience! 

I'd never experienced 20ft high wooden moving crates, packing a moving truck for travel, or the various ways that one can contort their bodies while trying to hold on to a sectional couch while navigating a steep stairwell all the while trying not to scratch the paint off the walls! 

Mover folk are a whole sub-culture of society which I had no knowledge of prior to this experience. Let me tell ya- It was eye-opening. They all smoked, a LOT, they were young men, and I was almost 60 years old at the time, and there is a music genre that is hard-core rap country music melded together with nasty lyrics. Yeah...... Wow! 

I did this gig for just shy of a month and this time was all it took for me to understand my body was not going to hold up doing moving at the level we were doing it. With all the heavy lifting, awkward body positioning, and what that does to knees and joints, I was degrading my fitness and cycling capabilities in a hurry. I made it through the month and more than held up my end of things (no pun intended), but was I ever glad that something else came through to get me out of doing moving for some pocket change. 

John Deere volunteers working a tear-down day at the Collective.

That something was the Cedar Valley Bicycle Collective. While it was only a three-day a week commitment, the times I had to be there radically changed my cycling life. Monday and Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings were when I was expected to work at first. Both Saturday mornings and Wednesdays were my prime riding times and now I would be relegated to only getting in rides on an early part of Wednesday due to the job and "cat duties". 

So, as a new job and new stewardship responsibilities kicked in, my riding times changed and my opportunities to go to other places were restricted. In turn, this also affected what I was writing about here. Most of all, I was limited in being able to do one of my favorite things: Long distance, all-day gravel rides. Anything like a long all-day ride just is really, really hard to find the time for these days. So, if you've noted a lack of bigger rides here, now you might understand why. 

I'm still struggling with the shorter ride times and at the time of this posting, I still do not have a vehicle. This is probably how things are going to be until another 'big" change hits. When that will be, who knows?