Falling back in love with cycling

Okay this may sound weird for anyone who knows me well, because all of you will say “when did he ever love cycling?”. And you’d be very much on point, however if you don’t know me that well you would be easier convinced to think that a person who uses his bike pretty much every day must be a cycling enthusiast. Obviously I used my bike on a daily basis since it was the preferred mode of transportation if it was too far to walk there or in case of rain.
Many times during my stay in Asia I have looked with envy as people rode their bikes in the city as a healthy and fun way to get from point A to point B. Taipei is also one of these places where I sometimes envied the cyclists but was too lazy to act upon it.
Recently I was reminded of the brilliant “youbike” system in Taipei.

Youbike is a citywide service that has bikes for rent at most of the mrt (metro) stations. You can rent one of these bikes by using your public transportation card at the very fair price of 25 euro cent per half hour (with the first 30 minutes for free). You simply walk up to the bike and swipe your card over a card reader and the bike stall unlocks and you can take the bike for a spin. They're simple yet very complete bikes, they have three gears, working lights and there’s an integrated locking system. Now I have had a fair amount of bikes throughout my years but I can say these bikes would probably be amongst the best I’ve had the pleasure of cycling on.
When you’re done with your bike you find the nearest bike stall, put it back, swipe the card again and hop on the subway to go back home again or enjoy your destination before heading back home.

So why then have I not been doing this more often? It comes down to that nasty character trade of being a lazy bastard. As previously told the bikes are found at almost all mrt station but unfortunately not at mine. So now instead of walking 2 minutes to my station I would have to walk for at least 10 minutes to the closest youbike stall with the risk of finding no bikes there. This obstacle has proven too big in the beginning and shortly thereafter I forgot about the youbikes altogether.

In a failed attempt to try and teach a dear friend to ride a bike I came across a new rental point more conveniently located. I apologise to my friend for being such in inadequate teacher, but I guess I’m just not a teacher through and through. I always admired my brother for his patients whenever he was trying to teach my mom something on the tennis court, I would tell her twice and then get angry and give up, he would be patient and keep on instructing until she got it. As bad as I felt for not teaching my friend how to ride a bike, I was strangely drawn to the idea of cycling again.
It had been on the to-do-list in Taipei but I hadn’t acted upon it yet.

The next available opportunity I had I got myself a bike and continued my exploration of the city I keep on losing my heart to more and more. Very content with the bike’s performance and the perfect condition of all the bike lanes I immediately “fell back” in love with cycling again.
Now I try to get on a bike at least for an hour in the weekends to explore a new part of Taipei or to have a new form of exercising, The funny thing when exercising is that all these Taiwanese cyclist have these spiffy bikes with matching race clothing and are just cruising and then there’s this idiot foreigner (yours truly) that blasts by them on a stupid city rental bike. It’s not that I go out there to compete with them but I am also incapable of cycling on a leisurely pace.
So far there were only three guys on their spiffy bikes that managed to overtake me and stay in front, all three gave me thumbs up with big smiles which I reciprocated with a bigger smile.
Anyways, long story short, it’s good to be cycling again.