To love your bike is to maintain it

My boyfriend Zach has this idea of getting a bike that that never requires any maintenance is super light and also very cheap. It’s probably just an excuse for him to not have to buy a bike since what he wants doesn’t exist. However, with any machine, you should expect a small amount of work. For a bike that generally means cleaning chains, wiping gunk off the frame, wheels and gears and adding air to the tires.

I’m not a biggest fan of bike maintenance and like most things I procrastinate on doing the job. My chain doesn’t usually get cleaned until there are a couple of rust spot, and right as we speak the bottom dropouts are encrusted with black gunk. I’m a bad bike mother. However, I always like the way my bike feels after its had a good chain cleaning or tune up or anything else nice for the beast.

Case in point: I’ve been feeling pretty sluggish lately and I have been suspecting that my tires are low on air. I came to that conclusion because I’ve been riding a lot, but I haven’t put air in the tires since early November. It’s really not much of a surprise, is it? I meant to do it this weekend, but didn’t…then I ended up skipping a riding to work day on the excuse that I don’t like riding with a low tire. Very lame and self defeating.

Finally this morning I forced myself to go down 5 minutes early and put the stinking air in the stinking tire. I’m not the biggest fan of doing this on my road bike since it has presta valves and I lost the presta adaptor that came with my pump. So I have to use the little portable one that goes with a tire. I find it to be kind of a pain in the neck, but I don’t want to buy a new pump. Once I got everything adjusted and check the pressure I found that my tire was only at 40 psi. I actually can’t remember what it’s supposed to be, but I pumped it up to 80 psi.

It was amazing to be able to ride so much easier. I’m always amazed at how much of a different I feel after basic maintenance. It always makes me do an internal pledge to do it more….I probably won’t soon, but I can dream. Now I just need to get Zach to get a decent bike, even if it isn’t super light and might require maintenance. At least we’ll be able to do it together.