First Road Bike

Back in the 80’s my dad bought two Schwinn Sprint 10-speeds.  One was for him and the other was for me.  They were heavy beasts by today’s standards.

I found a picture of one online at OTSG:

Both bikes were identical so we were never really sure which one we were riding.  We lived in the very hilly city of Roanoke, Virginia at the time.  My father loved riding around the city to take pictures of downtown scenes and homeless people.  I loved just taking off in whatever direction to explore.

Not too long after we got them I left one of the bikes on the front porch overnight and it got stolen.  We lived in a pretty bad neighborhood so it was a stupid mistake. I just forgot it was still out there.  My dad was pretty upset and just let me have the one that was left.  To this day I feel bad about it.  But I still loved the bike he gave me.

I can’t even guess how many miles I put on that bike.  I owned it for years and I rode it consistently.  School was boring, but the classes would fly by as I looked out the window and daydreamed about riding when I got home.  When I would get upset or stressed I would jump on the bike and pedal as fast as I could until the stress melted away.  There was something about burning legs, wind in my face and the landscape zipping by that would make my junior high school stresses seem trivial.

Spending time on my bike got me in touch with the changing seasons and gave me an intimate relationship with the city around me.  In Roanoke I climbed Mill Mountain many times to look at the star and the view and, more importantly, to come hauling ass back down the mountain.  I took countless spills, got good at fixing flats and probably had the hardest calves of anyone my age.  At the end of junior high school I moved to Maryland.  Finding friends at first was pretty hard so I spent a lot of time riding the B&A trail.

My bike met its end when I was in high school.  I mortally wounded it by putting pegs on the back axle.  At the time it seemed like a great idea.  The bike was significantly faster than anyone’s BMX bike, so adding pegs meant that me and a friend could ride forever, taking turns either standing or pedaling.  However, the axle ends weren’t long enough to support the pegs.  The pegs kept falling off under our weight and ended up stripping the axle ends down to rounded nubs.  While this alone wasn’t the bike’s undoing, it was the start of ever-worsening issues with the bike.

The rear derailleur was kept in place by tightening the bolt on the axle (probably not the best design).  After damaging the axle I eventually had to change a flat rear tire.  Normally I just held the derailleur in place while I tightened the bolt on to the axle.  But with the axle damaged, the derailleur would eventually slip out of place by the time I got the bolt tightened enough.  I would work at it until I got it all tightened down, but it was tougher every time.  Once it was really out of position so, to compensate, I made the huge mistake of blindly adjusting some of the screws on the rear derailleur and it was never quite right again.

At the time we had very little money so taking the bike to the shop was never even considered as an option.  So I would sit in front of our apartment building with a pair of vice grips and a screw driver trying to keep this thing from falling apart.  Eventually the axle got so stripped that I couldn’t get it back together.  That was when I realized that I had lost the battle.

I kept the bike when we moved and put its dismembered carcass in the basement with hopes of one day having the means to fix it.  A year or so later it was sitting by the curb.  I don’t know if someone rescued it or if it got picked up by the garbage truck, but I like to imagine that someone found it and had the money to get it back up and running.

As I get back in to road biking I think about this bike fondly.  I’m sure it weighed 5 times what my current bike weighs, but I doubt I will ever have as much fun riding my new bike as I did riding my Schwinn Sprint.