Definition of an OLD CYCLIST

An old cyclist is someone who can maintain a 90 RPM spin for hours on end, but they're knees crunch everytime they try to walk up a flight of stairs!

Old guy cycling

Like so many of my kind, I used to be pretty athletic. A saturday morning ride wasn't worth getting out of bed for if it wasn't at least 50 miles. Well......about 2 months ago, my Jeep broke down. Well, it didn't actually break down, became incontinant is more like it. One morning it decided to empty is liquid contents all over the drive way! Being late for work, I grabbed my bike and enjoyed the one mile, 261 foot downhill (elevation) run to the office! The trip home was a little more eventfull. Halfway up the hill my legs exploded and my lungs left my chest and headed for air somewhere in front of the handlebars! If my beloved wife were home when I finally arrived she would have called the ambulance.....no questions asked!

Now on further eval by a qualified auto mechanic it seems the water pump was the problem......NOT!!! The problem was the water pump was going to cost $640 bucks to replace!!!

$40 for the pump and $600 labor! (I'm in the wrong profession!)

Ultimately, it took me almost 6 weeks to get around to replacing it myself, at the cost of $40 and 4 hours of my own labor time ($125 an hour aint bad)

In the meantime, the old guy was comitted to biking to work.......smiling and gasping all the way as gas crested the $4.00 a gallon mark!

Some might say it was criminal living a mile from work and driving everyday, and many of the reasons I gave myself sound pretty silly in retrospect!

So that's how I rediscovered cycling after a 15 year hiatus.

BTW......the Jeep is now up and running........but I'm still riding.

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