Bicycles and Couple-Friends

Since I moved to Athens a bit over a year ago, I've followed my best couple-friends into half a dozen hobbies. These couple-friends are two guys my partner has been friends with for years. They've been together about 9 months longer than we have, but we have some adorable parallels. My partner Earth is remarkably similar to Gala, making Gala a fantastic person to get advice from and to process with. Gala's partner Kiwi has similar emotional patterns to me, especially being fantastic at worrying. All four of us are crafty, and the three of them have some interest in video games (which have never interested me). Kiwi and I like having projects going all the time, and I've followed him into amigurumi crochet, sewing, house decorating, and other random things.

This summer, the new hobby is bicycling. Earth likes bikes, but we live just at the bottom of a giant hill that leads to pretty much the entire rest of our town. When Gala started diving into bikes, it didn't take long for Earth to trade his odd-repairs-needed vintage cruiser in for a normal-repairs-needed vintage cruiser. Gala and I are similar heights with disproportionally short legs, so when he found a bike that fit better than the one he bought the week before, I was happy to buy it from him for exactly what he'd paid.  Our bikes are almost identical, with his being older and more definitively vintage and mine being from the year I was born. They're Peugeots -- mine is red, his is white. Mine is named Penny Peugeot.

I love riding my bike. It's crazy fun, and it's not as exhausting as it used to be. I think I've gotten smarter about doing what I can and not doing what I can't -- and not beating myself up for it either way. I'm wary of even slight upward inclines because I don't want anything to turn me off of biking. Gala and Kiwi both research a lot when they start getting interested in something, so Gala has been spending a bit of time on biking forums. One is a women's biking forum that he enjoys because it lacks the bravado of macho forums with hardcore bike messengers and whatnot. Another is for fat folks. He told me earlier that the moderator of the latter has started a self-deprecating blog where he can be humiliated into losing weight.

It seems there is no place for people, especially fat people, to talk about being active without talking about weight loss. Places without weight loss talk aren't places where we can talk about things like worrying about looking funny or getting looks from people. Places for fat people turn out like the above. We're toying with the idea of making t-shirts -- possibly biking jerseys -- that say Team Fatty in pink. Perhaps with a clydesdale theme, because apparently people who are tall or otherwise big and ride bikes are called clydesdales.

In any case, there are at least four of us who identify as fat folks and who are riding bikes with no concern for our weight.



*I've decided that first initials are kinda boring, so I'm going to use a word that starts with the appropriate letter instead.