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Butterflies in my stomach

By InSearchofSvet

November 2^nd, 2018

Well, it´s official. It´s been a #newbikeday for couple of days already and only now I got my shit together to write something about it. Why do I feel like something as superficial as a new physical object in my life deserves a whole bunch of text to be written about it? Well.. The reason is even more melodramatic than that cover photo I have up there, sunset and all that stuff. It´s cause I think that as my life as a conscious cyclist evolves, and so do my bikes. I jumped all around with carbon bikes here and there, some sponsored, some not. But at certain point you realize that this whole thing with new bikes every year and that carbon being lighter than another carbon and blablabla is all kind of silly.

I feel like behind that constant race for better components and sexier looking bike I forgot what really made me love cycling in the first place. Like they do fulfill your consumerist needs for a while, but they never filled the gap inside me.

Here comes the dramatic part. Yeah, even more dramatic.

You know that time when you just downloaded Strava and had no idea how it works? When we didn´t have cycling computers, and only navigated around constantly stopping and looking at our phones? Back when it felt like a huge achievement when you made it back home without getting lost in the industrial zone on the outskirts.

I remember when I just bought my first road bike and decided that I am going to ride it every morning before work, I was young, heartbroken, it was cold as hell that winter in Madrid and I was so damn inspired by those rapha videos. I loved riding around the park, when everything was covered in frost, in my completely mismatched kit, with a frozen forehead. It made me so genuinely happy. It was a mixture of feeling free, happy, smug and also so strong. Which is weird, cause now I realize I definitely was not the latter.

So yeah, looking back at those times I realize I was way happier riding my bike back then.

But we all are humans and we all love new shiny things. And I am no different. So when the urge to get new bike came, I decided that it´s time to do something different. It´s time to go for something that will last forever or at least till I can give it to my kids. Beautiful, right?

I am not going to tell the long complicated story about how I ended up choosing this bike and how small choices and big people lead you to new amazing places and decisions. You know how life works anyway.

I never thought assembling a bike from zero could be so difficult, I mean don´t get me wrong, I wasn´t doing it myself, but like any dream client I sat at the bikeshop for 8 hours straight, annoying the hell out of the mechanics.

Here are some photos I took meanwhile.

This is the least I can do to honor the incredible job and patience of Sergi, Pablo and Charlie.

You know another thing, riding the bike these days, really slowly, cause knee hurts and I am hating on everything I came to think of this one metaphor. Later when I thought of it again it kinda seemed stupid, but hey, if you made it this far you can bear with me for a bit longer.

So I thought that the whole process of choosing a framebuilder, working on the geo, waiting for frame to be done, shipped, surviving aaaaaall the fuckups of postal service, pilling up all the parts together and realizing that you are missing half of the needed ones, and the ones you have don´t fit. It all seems like a wedding preparation. Not that I ever had a wedding, or planned one. But I feel like the feelings would have been the same. You constantly run around with butterflies in your stomach, plan everything to be just perfect and theeeen... uncle gets drunk, they mixed up the words on the cake and dress rips in the worst place possible. But in the end, it all happens the way it´s supposed to be. Same happened to my bike. So many things went wrong, and for days I thought it was lost by the shipping company. The fork I ordered was a complete mistake, none of existing headsets would ever fit and you can´t imagine what kind of hand-made craziness Pablo had to make to make things work together. And I am not even going to talk about all the little but necessary things which I forgot about and had to search for around the whole town on a borrowed e-bike.