I had a bike fitting and (later) sucked helium

Never Done: I got an official bike fitting
Never Done: I sucked helium

My friend Kara is trying really really hard to lend me her Bianchi Eros for the triathlon. She measured her bike, she got her husband to measure her bike, she brought her bike to a bike store to get it measured again, and still we weren't sure if the bike would be the right size for me. (The bike is in Oregon, and I am not.)

I've been needing to get a real bike fitting to see if it would fit me, but I've been striking out in New York. I asked one bike shop, and they just eyeballed me and said I should ride a 46 cm frame. I wrote to the bike guy with Team in Training, and asked if I could pay him to give me a fitting, and he never wrote back. I asked another guy in another bike store if I could pay him to do a fitting, and he told me to go online and do my own, so Josh and I did it, and it came out ridiculously wrong -- even I could tell that I was not supposed to be on a 51 cm frame. (That's too big for little old 5 foot 3 me.) So when I came up to Massachusetts, I took the opportunity to go to Pedal Power -- a bike store that's been around for 30 years, and really prides itself on customer service.

I told him my situation -- that Kara has a bike she is completely willing to lend me, but that it's in Oregon and I am here, and we need to measure me to get our best possible sense if it will be a good fit. I told him that I love to ride, but that no matter how interested he is in gear, that I am not, and that after the tri, I'll go back to riding an upright bike. And then for good measure, I reminded him again that I am not a gear head.

We looked up Kara's bike online, and he immediately told me everything he hates about it. He hates the 650 wheels, he hates something about the shifters. He hates that it has a threaded something, and he hates some other things. I reminded him that I am not interested in the gear, and that this is a bike that I can get into for about $250, whereas it would cost me at least $1300 to get a bike any other way, and all we are looking to see is if we can get me comfortably fit on this bike, and if not, then what bike would work.

My mini lecture could have backfired, but instead it brought him right over to my side, and he took me to his fitting wall and started to measure me with a cool laser measure system that then fed into a computer program that then calculated not just the height of the bike, but also the length, which turned out to be the much more significant number for me. Turns out I have especially long legs for my height, and an especially short torso. I mean, I knew that already from how I look in high-wasted pants, but I didn't know what the ramifications were in the world of bike fittings. He set up a bike to my dimensions, and it was still three inches too long for me. He put a new stem on a Trek 47, and he got it to the point where I was fairly comfortable, and where I had a paper with the essential numbers on it.

All the while, I just kept thinking to myself, "This is so different from New York." Here was this guy who knew I was not going to buy a bike from him, who took over an hour with me, in order to help me borrow someone else's bike. It's also true that I told him I was honest with him from the start, and that I wanted to pay him for the fitting. But it's also true that I had done the same in New York, and look how far that got me. There's just more time and space in New England, and also I think that businesses need to function in a way that will keep customers over generations, so they have more incentive to work with people outside of the hard-sell mindset. Either that, or this is all just my own justification for how much I love my New England home.

I did a couple other things I'd never done as well, along with a lot of tshuve, return. Josh and I are staying with our dear friends and my old neighbors, the Durrants, where we cooked together, and herded sheep into their pens, and I was going to be here while one was shorn, but went to the bike fitting instead. Last year I helped David dock and castrate the lambs (apparently not to 100% effectiveness, because they had a couple miraculous conceptions.) In the afternoon, while I fell asleep on the couch with Pamela, something neither of us does often, and we'd never done together.

The actual reason I came up here was for my old friend Emily's 40th birthday party. Emily is the youngest sibling in the family that lived across the street from me while I was growing up. She was born with cerebral palsy, and she got brain damage when she was still a baby, from a series of seizures. Her three older siblings and her mom decided to throw her a party, and I really wanted to come to it, to see her and the whole family. This post is getting long, so I am just going to choose one element of the party to write about. There was a helium tank for balloons, and the kids were blowing them up and sucking the helium and talking funny. When I was little, I was extremely willful, and used to say "I know" a lot. Once when I was four, I got into a match of wills with my father, who was frustrated that I said "I know" when he suspected (or knew) I didn't. When he got frustrated, he said to me, "If you're so smart, what's the atomic weight of helium?" I looked him in the eye, and said, "I know; I just don't want to tell you." He tried to cajole me and get me to admit I didn't know, but I held out, apparently for days. Finally he gave in, and he said to me, "The atomic weight of helium is four." To which I replied, of course, "I know." He never let me forget this story, and I always knew the atomic weight of helium. I guess I've come a long way in learning Humility: Seek wisdom from others.

But I had never sucked it before, because I tend to be a little freaked out by putting noble gasses (or other chemicals) in my body. So when Peter looked me in the eye and told me it was my turn, I knew I couldn't duck it any longer. I sucked in the helium, slowly like he told me, and when I had inhaled it all, I recited the Shehekhianu, high on helium. Omeyn.