Haro Escape Rides Again

Somewhere around 1999 I decided I wanted a bike. I hadn't had a bike since before college and I thought it might be fun. I opted to buy a mountain bike because they seemed cooler than a road bike, I'd never had one before and I didn't want to ride "all bent over."



I remember when I tried to explain to the guy in the bike shop (who is now a good friend) what I was going to use the bike for and even told him I would ride on trails "a little." It's funny how different my perspective and my knowledge has changed over the years. Not that there's not a ton of stuff I don't know, but now I'm the person in my office people ask for advice when they want to get a new bike. I cringe now thinking about how silly it was for me to buy a mountain bike just for tooling around when it really wasn't the appropriate bike for what I wanted to do, but because I thought it looked cooler than a road bike. Now I have a road bike, a mountain bike, a cross bike and yes, even a cruiser.



At any rate, it was at this point that I bought a Haro Escape. (A couple months later I upgraded from a 7.0 to a 7.1 when the first one was stolen.) The Haro Escape wasn't the fastest or the lighest—it was entry level, but I ended up being really glad I bought it. During the summer of 2006 I finally upgraded my bike to a little higher end Haro. Of course with the years in between, each level now had more stuff, and by upgrading a little I really got an enormously better bike.



So that Escape has been sitting in the garage. Recently a pharmacy intern we had in our office asked my advice about a bike she was looking at online. She's getting ready to graduate from pharmacy school, get married and move to Traverse City and she told me she wanted to get into mountain biking. Now I'm not going to write a ton about pharmacy here because it's what I've been writing about all day every day for the past 7 1/2 years. I will say this, pharmacy school is expensive. After six years of school, you come out of it with a doctorate, a pretty much guaranteed high-paying job and usually about $100,000 in loans. Needless to say, I'm sure she didn't want to spend a lot of money on a bike for a sport she may or may not like.



The bike she was looking at was a department store bike and I felt I needed to save her from it. She was about my height and has about the same length of legs (although she is slender and beautiful and I am, well, me) so I offered her the Escape. She said she wanted to give me some money and I told her to wait until she rode it first to see if she thought it was worth anything. I cleaned off the mud, took off the SPD pedals so she could get some flat ones and brought the bike to my office where she could pick it up.



She e-mailed me the other day and was very excited. She had already gotten pedals and a helmet and had taken the bike out riding. She had a great time and already had plans to go out riding again. It made me feel good to know that she didn't buy a crappy department store bike that would fall apart and cost more to fix it than it was worth. It also made me feel good that she was having fun and that Haro Escape was getting some use after a lot of down time.



Now maybe next year, if the racing goes well, I'll need to upgrade again. Maybe.