Cycle Tales-1

I love cycling. The last cycle I owned was stolen nearly 8 years back. For that matter, I had 3 of my cycles stolen. Those stories will have to wait. The only time I had a substantial time cycling after than was at Ooty during college tour in 2004.

Fast forward.

Hedonistic lifestyle that includes lots of beef and beer. Work that chains me to a chair for most part of the day and parts of the night. Leisure that means sitting on a chair at the computer or lying on the bed reading. End result: Adequate adipose deposit in the middle. In plain words, starting to get a noticeable paunch. Paunch and noticeable paunch are different. Paunch becomes noticeable once you cannot hold it in! Jogging is not my cup of tea. Swimming is something I don't know. After start-stop jogging I decided to buy a cycle and do something that I truly love.

After due research in cycling forums, I decided to buy a Hercules Ryder 110plus. Cost a pretty penny. Over half of what I had to put in for the car. On Saturday, the only trip I took has from the shop at Ulsoor to my home at Indira Nagar. I reached a good 15 minutes before my friends who left around the same time in our car. The bike rode like a dream. Only issue I faced was in shifting gears. I had never owned a geared bicycle and this one had 24 gears with trigger shift.

On Sunday, Kattabuji insisted on going for Paintball. I was game. We managed to force everyone else. Now the issue was that the 6 of us won't fit in the car. Not to mention the fact that all of us are "healthy" like our moms would say! Hogan and Kattabuji insisted on taking the bicycles. Neo already had a Hero Hawk which he repaired once I took my bike. Since the place sounded very near to Koramangala, we supposed it would be alright. We couldn't be more wrong.

We kept on calling the guy who runs the place and he would take farther from Koramangala each time. Eventually, we reached the place which was near Sarjapur. Nearly 15 KM from home. Hogan and Kattabuji declined our offer to take the car back and swap places. After some quality time playing paintball in heavy rain, and getting sore (I never knew paintball could hurt!), we decided to head back. This time me and Neo decided to take the cycles. The road was very wet with lot of mud. We had never quite gone through this area.

Exhilarating and adrenaline pumping experience. Riding through the slippery Outer Ring Road. On one side deep open drains and on the other side screaming SUVs and buses. We were confused at some turns, but never tired. Eventually, we reached Koramangala and decided to have a cup of coffee from the shop next to Barista, mostly due to the gnawing hunger thanks to a skipped lunch.

By this time our friends had reached home. They told us to join them at Stones for some cold ones. Stones would mean another 1.5KM ahead of our home. It was getting quite dark. I had left the detachable headlamp at home. But both of us had the red rear light which became truly priceless in this trip. We had to go through inner ring road where cars and bike fly on the roads.

Riding through inner ring road at night was a total joy. It is probably the only road in Bangalore connecting two lavish commercial areas but totally barren all through the way. The red led backlights probably saved us from being hit by fast cars and BMTC buses. When we reached Domlur flyover we were forced to have a halt to cross the impossibly vehicle infested roads to reach 100ft road.

100 ft road was even more dangerous than the ring roads. Extremely slippery mud with jam packed traffic. One slip and you would probably go under a bus or a car. I rode the pavements when it was devoid of people and boy was it great! Constant and smooth ups and down. Only problem was that there was a chance of hitting the road too hard when you got off the pavement. I reached CMH signal first and took a breather while waiting for Neo. Stones was a stones throw away and both of us were quite elated. Respite from pedalling for close to an hour and the thought of a cold mug of draught.