Recreation for Young Lawyers

Since you have been working very hard at the office, you feel a need to take a day off. But since law practice takes 180 percent of your time, it may be difficult to leave your desk even for a day. Hint: Use a hacksaw on the leg iron that shackles you to your desk. Then sneak out the back door.

The sport of preference for young professionals is currently mountain biking. However, it is an expensive and even hazardous activity, and therefore you definitely need some advice before doing it.


First, you will need to buy a mountain bike. This may be a challenge, since they are priced at about the same level as Japanese luxury sedans. They are so expensive partly because they are made of extremely lightweight metals. These metals were not even on the periodic table when you studied chemistry- metals with names like Fluffairium. Some of these metals are so light that they permit a mountain bike to actually be lighter than air.

Mountain bikes have as many as twenty-one speeds. (However, some people claim that eighteen of the speeds are duplicates, so they're really only three-speed bikes.) Fancier mountain bikes also have "speed-shifters." These buttons permit you to shift in a single nanosecond from the very highest to the very lowest gear. You are gliding along in the highest gear, with your pedals making approximately one revolution in a twenty-four-hour period. You accidently hit the speed-shifter, and in an instant your feet have the same r.p.m. as an electric fan. This is supposed to be good for your heart.

Of course, all of this modern technology does not come cheaply. Young professionals with money to burn will spend several thousand dollars on a mountain bike. If you show up on the trail with a cheap imitation costing, say, a paltry $500, brace yourself for the consequences. These young professional adults will make you feel just like you did in the seventh grade, when everyone was wearing name-brand clothing except you. "Look," they will say, in their very responsible adult voices. "Higgins has cooties."

The bikes aren't the only equipment that these "gear heads" buy. They also buy expensive accessories, like water bottles in Day-Glo colors that do not appear anywhere on the spectrum of natural light. The bottles look like they were fished out of a toxic waste dump.

To look like an authentic mountain biker, you will need to buy some skintight clothing made of a material called spandex. Unfortunately, this clothing looks much better on other people than on you. It makes other people look very athletic. It makes you look like a hippopotamus wrapped in Saran Wrap.

You will also need to buy a helmet. Bicycle helmets are made of Styrofoam, a material with about the same protective qualities as a bag of marshmallows. However, the label assures you that the helmet works well most of the time, except that it doesn't protect against sharp objects. Fortunately, you'll encounter only a few sharp objects as you ride-sticks, rocks, and almost all of the parts of your bicycle.

Some helmets have a protective plastic coating. This prevents the helmet from bursting into flames from the friction as you skid down the road on your head. The helmet makes you look like a complete duffs, just in case the skintight clothing didn't do the trick.

When you mount the bicycle, you notice that the seat has approximately the same size-and comfort-as a nine iron. It's so small that even mosquitoes that land on it worry about falling off the edge. Place a large pillow, or maybe the mattress from your chaise lounge, over the seat.

Now start riding. The first thing you discover is that the fact that nobody has ever ridden bicycles on mountains in the entire history of the world is not exactly a complete coincidence. It's not that cyclists simply forgot that mountains existed, and now feel like total idiots, because they could have been riding on mountains instead of on paved roads without boulders and rivers and sharp rocks and cliffs and poison oak and sixty-degree grades up and down.

You are surrounded by beautiful mountain scenery, but you can't see any of it, because your eyes are glued to the four square feet of road directly in front of your bike. The vi-vi-vi-vibrations loosen every filling in your mouth.

Seeing that you are a beginner, the other cyclists will give you helpful advice. As you begin your descent down a vertical cliff, they helpfully advise you NOT to brake. "It will cause you to skid," they explain. Right now, however, skidding looks a LOT more attractive than what is about to happen, which is a free fall at thirty-two feet per second, accompanied by a loud noise bearing an uncanny resemblance to screaming. Followed by a crash.

The other riders will say, "Okay. That was a pretty good descent. Now we want you to try it while wearing the toe clips, so that you don't get tempted to put your feet down." However, you WANT to be able to put your feet down. It's not that you're chicken. It's just that your idea of a really fun time is not spending the next three weeks nursing an abrasion the size of Nebraska. So you get off the bike and go home.

You have discovered why most mountain bikes end up being resold in the secondary market-i.e., garage sales presided over by smirking spouses. Bicycling was simply not designed for the mountains.

Still, a few diehards insist on riding bikes in the mountains anyway. These people can be easily identified by their thighs as thick as tree stumps and their comparatively puny little arms. They look remarkably similar to a Tyrannosaurus Rex wearing a goofy helmet and skintight clothes. Except, of course, they no longer have any teeth.

So take my advice. Get your exercise by speed-shifting the channels with your TV remote-control. And use the money from selling your bike to buy a new mattress for your chaise lounge.