Like many children growing up in the Midwest, my first bike was a big deal. It was a hot pink vision, its shiny, white wheels ready and able to chase the pavement for hours on end. But I outgrew it pretty quickly, and with it, biking in general.
Joel Johnson, 25, has a similar story. He had not owned a bicycle since he was 15, but the coronavirus pandemic changed that. He bought one right before the shutdown began as a form of transportation — he wanted to avoid San Francisco’s crowded trains and large crowds, and biking to and fro allowed him to do that. But now, it’s become a source of pleasure, he told the Detroit News.
Thousands of other people have similarly rediscovered biking as a means of exercise or simply because they want to leave their homes. And, as a result, bike sales have increased significantly across the country.
“We have a three-day sale once a year literally called ‘the madness sale.’ This just feels like two straight months of madness sales,” said Dale Ollison, a bike mechanic at Hank and Frank Bicycles, which is located in Northern California.
Meanwhile, Generation Z is giving life to yet another childhood trend: rollerblading. Over the past year, Bauer, a skate purveyor owned by Nike, has experienced a 723% increase in customers searching for rollerblades, or in-line skates. This growth seems to be the result of a social media phenomenon: videos featuring teenagers on skates have garnered millions of views on TikTok, which has translated into Google searches and actual sales, according to Buzzfeed News.
But in-line skates are also in demand from professional athletes, particularly hockey players, for whom they were originally invented. Very few NHL players have access to ice rinks, according to ESPN, and rollerblading is the next best alternative. Bauer arranged shipments to more than 100 top NHL athletes toward the beginning of the shutdown, according to Inside Hook, and clips of NHL stars using them to practice stick work have regularly surfaced since then.
For many, both of these activities, biking and rollerblading, represent times past, and the simple pleasures that we used to fill our days with as youngsters.
“Biking was a big joy when we were children and kind of the first freedom we all felt,” said Louie Correa, a Santa Clarita, California, father who has made bike rides with his four children a key part of his family’s daily routine throughout the shutdown. “This whole isolation thing is really starting to spark that back into a lot of folks.”
