Challenge Accepted
Ten rides, no waiting
Some bigwig told me not to ride my bike. Park it. Garage it. Lawyer up, metaphorically. Gather evidence. Build a case. Let the grownups handle it. Bigwigs always talk like that, confident, loud, allergic to listening. They hear a problem and immediately want to own it, steer it, freeze everything in place like that is control.
I tried to explain that I thought the problem was somewhere else. Not the motor. Not the thing everyone was staring at. The other end of the bike. A theory. A risky one. That landed about as well as you would expect. No way. Do not touch it. Drop the letter. Start the process. Wait.
Waiting is the part I cannot do. Sitting still with a theoretical ending feels like slowly losing my mind. I need to try things. I need to turn wrenches. I need to know, not speculate. I woke up from a dream with that awful mix of hope and dread, the kind where you think you figured it out and also know it might crush you.
So Mo, aka Snuggles, and I ignored the advice. We took the bike apart. Everything. Laid it all out. Put it back together carefully, deliberately, hoping we were not about to prove the bigwig right. The first ride was terrifying. I half expected it to die twenty feet up the trail. It did not. I rode away.
I called the bigwig. Ride one done. Silence, then the voice. Give it thirty days. You are lying to yourself. It is not fixed. It will never be fixed. Let us draft the response anyway. I asked what it would take. Thirty days. Ten rides.
I laughed. Not politely. Not quietly. Do you even know who you are talking to.
Last night I sent another email. Ride two in the books. No garage. No waiting. Just snow, motion, and a bike that, so far, refuses to break.