Running for Your Life: My People, Part One

So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.
Blackboard sign at our go-to patisserie:
“Do you like granola? Then you’ll love our new granola scone!”

In early June (six weeks ago), on the first day of our staycation (R4YrLife: Finding the Groove), M and I go to Dixon’s Bicycle Shop. I can’t say for sure, but Dixon’s has the look of a place that hasn’t changed too much since it opened (vintage signage: Est. 1966). M and I are planning to go on a bike ride sometime during our staycay, so we stop in to buy one for me. The last one – purchased a decade ago at Dixon’s – had been stolen in the past year. A rental outfit wanted a third of the price for a new one for a single day, so Dixon’s it is. M says she has an errand or two of her own and says she will meet me later.
“I want to buy a bike,” I tell Eddy, the sales clerk and cycle guy. We are standing in the middle of the cement floor. Above us, arrayed like sides of ham in Parma are what look like new and used wheels.
“What price are you thinking?” Eddy says.
“I don’t know. But I think I want a new one.”
“We don’t have any for sale.”
“Huh?” I say.
“We sold out over the Memorial Day weekend. Really busy. . . . I can order you one, though.”
“Great, let’s do that.”
I ask Eddy what kind of bike he could see me on, and he says a Citizen.
I nod, thinking, yeah. If I am to get a bike it wouldn’t be a Racer, or Pacer, or Athlete, or Transformer, or Tiger, or Iron Horse, or Trickster, or Prancer, or Vixen. Citizen. That sounds about right.
“Black or Red?”
“Red,” I didn’t hesitate. Red Citizen. In Park Slope, the spiritual home of the Red Diaper Baby, what could be better?
“OK, how long before it arrives?” I say, excited. We are at the counter and he writes down my name and cellphone number in a lined notebook.
“I’d say two or three weeks.”
“THREE WEEKS!” a man, who I assume is Eddy’s superior, calls from the customer free zone in the back.
“We’ll call you,” Eddy says.
Above the counter and about a foot above Eddy’s head is a seen-better-days racer with various attachments: a “Peugeot” paper tag, a dark-wood toilet seat, bicycle rights editorial cartoons, a 60s-era thermos bottle, totems of all sorts.
M is surprised when I come out of the store bikeless.
“What are we going to do? We were going to go riding up the Hudson – ”
“I know,” I say. “That’s the best we can do. Three weeks. If we are really determined to go biking, we can always borrow one from a neighbor.”
M gives me a resigned look. “Yeah, I guess so.”

As luck would have it, the heat rises and our staycay bike trip goes by the boards. I continue to run, of course (See R4YrLife: Staying Cool). In fact, am maintaining my pre-marathon training schedule, following the half-Murakami regime, at least a one-hour run every other day, with hamstring- and calf-strengthening exercises on most off-days.
I’ve never been an avid biker, see it as purely recreational, maybe something to stay loose when I ramp up my miles in the fall, pre-Boston. This time I’m going to be ready, I tell myself. I haven’t run a marathon since October 2010. Monday, April 16, 2012, the next running of the Boston Marathon, will mark eighteen months between races.
After the staycay M is off to Italy for a trip. Me, I’m at home, watching the Bruins win the Stanley Cup! Running, working out and off to The Post, where I edit for a living. From time to time I think of Dixon’s and my Red Citizen, with a shiver of delight.

Next: Running for Your Life: My People, Part Two