Comparison and contrast of two sports, pets, places, and bands

Biking and Jogging

I love exercise but only if its getting me somewhere. No wonder then that my two favorite sports are both open air, on the go activities and involved with moving from spot A to spot B.

I am an inveterate cyclist. Put me on a bike and I feel more at home on the saddle than on my car seat or on my revolving chair in front of the computer. I, sometimes, compare my bike to Mohammad's horse, aptly called Barak, swift like lightening. When on the bike with music in my ears, I zoom down the road, or huff up the creek straining and daring myself to make it to the top. My favorite treks are sprints in the fall with the leaves cracking under the wheels and the wheels splashing thoguh puddles with my cheeks feeling robust with the wind. I then feel like Mohammed on his steed flying with bike through the clouds, my feet planted on pedals, my hands gripping handles my head humped over frame. Mohammed made it in a tizzy to Jerusalem. I feel, in the best of moods, that my steed and I can make it in a tizzy down the next lane.

I have been biking for years and as many bikes that I have acquired have I lost or had stolen from me. Most of the others were second hand and cheap. This one is new and a Raleigh, bought in California and costing the world. It is black and silver with an arrow racing through it. It is my dearest friend since it and I have traveled through various states and cities together and if an inanimate object had a heart, I would swear that my bike had one. At time, I feel, as thoguh it were my favorite horse who, given care and affection, would dedicate her to fulfilling my every need. They say that plants are sensitive and reciprocal to human love and indulgence. Plants are almost inanimate. Why shouldn't bikes be too? Sometimes, I feel as thoguh my bike were a Pinocchio. I muse: I stroke its frame, caress its saddle and suddenly -- gee wily! -- The bike comes alive as in some Disney movie feature of, let's say, the ending scenes of Beauty and the Beast. Then off we race, my speaking bike and I to jump across the world as Aladdin on a magic carpet.

As child I was never taught to bike. I first learned it as an adolescent when I 'pegged' a man's bike for fun, it was parked outside a store, and feet barely touching the pedals raced down a hill smack on my principals' bonnet. Talk about love at first sight! I never dismounted a saddle after that.

Ice and snow, when all are indoors, sees me on my bike. I have learned how to maneuver it over ice -- simple: you skim across the ice as thoguh you were ice-skating. And have taught myself how to bike without holding the handles. I feel like an acrobat then. I can also bike wearing high heels. Very high heels. I simply place the pedals in between sole and heels and maneuver the bike thusly.

I have ridden on bikes that have had weak-functioning brakes -- or dysfunctional altogether. An incident that comes to mind is of doing so in one European town, on the main road with spinning, swerving tumbling roads as steep and devious as those in San Francisco. I could not stop the bike. It carried me round past the cemetery, round again past a factory, round once more past hills and farms and railways, straight on until the ground leveled out - and plunk, my bike and I hit a fence. I loved that trip. I was superwoman with cape flung out and Mohammed on his steed.

Jogging is a more staid event. I jog too, much less nowadays, admittedly then I used to and jogging, compared with biking, is stale -- slower speed and nothing to carry me, but it has its own delights. There is the same thrill of the air rushing past my cheek and -- unlike biking -- the immediate and intimate thud of my sneakers against the ground. I get tired far easier with jogging than I do with biking, and, consequently, find myself more often berating myself at my fatness, awkwardness, and heavy gait. Admittedly, I compare myself to others and see my tendency of almost immediate fatigueness as indicating ominous bodily heaviness.

Jogging with music in the early morning hours is bliss, particularly so when I do it through the alleys finding some deserted 'treasure' outside an apartment or house such as an antique chair that simply needed a polish to give it glamour, or a talking-horse that lost its tail but -- hey -- that was no problem: the kids whom I gave it to stuffed it with cotton wool instead. Jogging, on these trips, gets aborted when the find is discovered, and then I limp home dragging some unwieldy object in one hand and possibly another in the other. This is how jogging is more invaluable than biking since biking -- thoguh I have tried it -- leaves me no space to wrap items around it. I have tried -- with a backpack on my back. That works. Although not with a horse or a chair.