A Two-Wheeled Lesson in Humility

Humility. It’s a lesson everyone must learn at some point in life. I had the privilege of learning it while re-acclimating myself to bicycling. After loving encouragement from my fiancé, I took up road biking as an adult. Sounded easy enough. After all, I knew how to ride a bike. Duh. And I’d watched the Tour de France every year. It didn’t look that hard.

He bought me a gorgeous Motobecane SprinTour bike for my birthday so that we could ride together. So sweet. A great way to have fun and keep in shape all year long. I’d just hop on and start riding, right? Wrong. Road biking is hard and frustrating and intense. I learned—literally—to fall flat on my face, then get up and try again. As an adult, this is not only embarrassing, but necessary. It reminds us that despite how good we think we are at everything, we are not. There’s so much in this world that we don’t know.

In order to really embrace road biking, I got clipless pedals. Contrary to what you might think from the name “clipless,” this means I clipped my cycling shoes into the pedals, attaching my feet firmly to the bike. It looked so easy when I saw my fiancé do it, or when I saw Lance Armstrong do it. Naturally, I assumed it would be easy for me, too. Wrong again—so very, very wrong. When I wanted to take my foot off the pedal, my leg’s natural instinct was to pull up. This is not the way to “clip out” of a bike. The foot has to move to the side in a flat, sweeping motion. I learned this as I fell to the ground, still connected to my bike. Luckily, the only thing I hurt was my pride. The worst part about my first fall is that it was in public. My sweet guy and I were out on the street, starting off on the inaugural ride. So there I was, in my bike shorts, my pretty pink jersey, my bike helmet, gloves—the whole ensemble—snot and tears running down my face. I kept falling and he kept yelling “Clip out! Clip out!” and manically trying to protect me from falling into traffic. Then, everything fell apart. I started crying out of frustration and embarrassment. He started yelling out of frustration and concern. After two more teary attempts at riding down the street and unclipping, I was ready to heave the beautiful orange bike into the nearest dumpster. Clearly, this was not going to happen.

We gave up for the day.