On Wednesday, February 14, 2007, I took my first bike ride in 20 years.

That long ago, in college, I bought a purple mountain bike and rode it once. Five years later I moved to an apartment in Oakland, where someone stole it out of my garage, and I collected $150 on my renter’s insurance policy. And I was happy.

So, how did this happen? What am I doing on a bike? Note in picture, the lovely spare helmet that Husband Scott had been keeping in our swampy garage. It’s really too bad that the web doesn’t offer smell-o-vision.

The bike (also in picture) is a loaner from my hairdresser Maggie (offered to me when she heard of my hair-brained scheme).

The handle grips are a little sticky, she’d said, apologetically. (Note, in photo the oversized yellow gardening gloves. Also note in photo the lovely pink Puma faux biking shoes (which came un-velcroed each time I pedaled).

But me actuallly pedaling is getting ahead of the story.

So, here goes:

I am a habitually sedentary woman, married to a man who used to ride 40-80 miles at a go on the weekends before he met me, and became increasingly sedentary after (no guilt here).

Recently, I started editing for a parenting blog, and one of the writers, who had not lost her baby weight over two pregnancies, mentioned that she was going to get in shape by doing the Team in Training program for a century ride in June in Lake Tahoe.

I looked up the info in order to fact check her blog post, and decided: Me Too.

And that, was that.

People say, “It’s just like riding a bike,” meaning once you learn, you never forget. And this is what I have to say: Ummm… nope!

Getting on that bike, trying to figure out how to get on and not fall over, pedal and not fall over, stop and not fall over. Reprogramming my brain to picture staying up instead of picturing falling over (power of positive thinking)…

It’s about 3/4 of a mile from our house to the world’s greatest bike store, and most of that is downhill, so that was a good thing.

WGBS because the people who worked there were really nice and not in any way condescending and not at all surprised that I was out for my first bike ride at age 37.

Okay, not my first, or second. There was that childhood bike, pink with a flower print vinyl banana seat and the kind of brakes where you just pedal backwards to stop and my sister and I would ride our pink bikes in small circles around the top of our driveway, rolling down the steep part occasionally — which was fun, and then walking the bike back up again.

The bike store guy checked out Maggie’s, gave it the thumbs up, and put on a new pair of handle grips — necessary, as well as my gift to her as a thank you for lending it, and then Scott bought me the world’s greatest helmet (so comfortable!) for Valentine’s Day.

The ride back was mostly uphill. A long, steep, slow climb. I shifted down and down until I was at the ultimate “granny gear,”spinning my way home. My legs felt like giant inflated waterballoons. And this is how happy I felt at the end of it:

So, on Saturday, Scott and I and my new helmet will go to Dublin for our first T-n-T event. A 20-mile ride. They claim I don’t have to do the whole thing. We’ll see.