In life, keeping your balance is a hard thing to do. We can take a few lessons on the subject from cycling.

The only way to keep your balance on a bike is to move forward. Once you stop you are no longer balancing. I am a very amateur cyclist and the sport both scares me and excites me. I have all the cycling garb that makes me look like I know what I am doing until we start riding and then the real truth is displayed.

One of the things I needed to do when I started riding was to get the petal clips on my shoes. Instead of the normal bike petal there is a round shaft with a clip on it. The other end of the clip is on the bottom of your shoes. Having your shoes clipped in helps you to pull up on the petal as well as push down thereby helping you to increase your cycling strength.

The only way you can get out of the clips is to pivot your ankles and it releases your shoes. I found out the hard way what happens when you pull up to a stop and you don’t unclip your shoes. You basically just fall over to the ground because your shoes are fixed to the bike. I remember very vividly the first time I rode with a group with the petal clips. I looked like a total goob because our group pulled up to a stop sign and I forgot to unclip. When I stopped, I expected to just put my feet down like you would normally do on a bike but I forgot I was clipped in. All 200 lbs. of me fell sideways to the ground. Let me tell you, it was embarrassing and very painful. Ha Thank goodness there was not another bike beside me or it could have been bad. Want to know what the second most embarrassing thing I did was? I did the same thing again on the same group ride about 15 minutes later. When I picked myself up that second time, I had a PHD degree on what I would not do again. Ha

When you clip in on a cycle, you had better be moving forward. Just like in life, you need to be moving forward in order to keep your balance. KT