How I Remember It: A History of Dim Tim’s Almost Annual New Year’s Day Ride
Part I: Origins
As he finished the last bit of sausage at Clancy’s Place and prepared to head outside into the courtyard of Princeton Shopping Center for his after-breakfast smoke, Dim Tim paused for a moment of reflection. He was 33, woefully out of shape, in the throes of a pack-a-day nicotine habit and had spent most of the year alone. If asked, he would have said that he was happy and this was probably true. But he also felt somehow that something was missing and he had a strange sense of foreboding about the future. While this Saturday morning in December of 1990, hardly qualified as an epiphany, it turned out to be the earliest inspiration for Dim Tim’s Almost Annual New Year’s Day Ride.
On New Year’s Eve, he dined with his best friend in the world, who was on her way to a party in another town. He watched her taillights fade into the distance on Wiggins Street, took the last drag of a Dunhill and headed inside. The new calendar book sat on the table, each page a clean slate, every date-square a new possibility. He closed his eyes and thumbed the pages deciding that wherever he stopped would be the day he would make his first attempt at quitting the Dunhills. “May 25th it is,” he said to himself, preparing to kick the 15-year tobacco jones. He knew that setting a date was fine, but another key component had to be in place by that date: exercise. By now, he had given the matter some thought and had decided on cycling over running. When he was a kid, he reasoned, riding a bike was something he’d done for fun; running was something he’d done to get away from bullies.
The powder blue Ross 10-speed was in the shared basement of Nos. 59 and 57, as was his neighbor’s ancient floor pump. A few blocks away, there were fireworks at the Arts Council’s First Night celebration, but Dim Tim crossed into 1991 inflating the long-flat tires of a bike he had decided to ride the next day to display his good intentions. It was a bike he hadn’t ridden since 1983 and even then his efforts had been half-hearted, at best. A handful of rides around the flat farmland of deepest South Jersey hardly qualified as an exercise regimen, particularly since the rides were preceded and followed by the inhalation of some variety of smoke.
On the morning of New Year’s Day, 1991, he didn’t smoke at all, not even during his usual New Year’s Day tradition: Listening to the live broadcast of the Wiener Philharmoniker from the Musikverien in Vienna. As the announcer spoke with fondness about Claudio Abbado and invited listeners to tune into a tape-delay television broadcast on PBS that evening, Dim Tim stepped out into the 34-degree day, mounted the Ross and turned the squealing cranks for the first-ever New Year’s Day Ride. His route took him out to Rocky Hill and back (a whopping seven miles or so) and several of those roads have been included in every Almost Annual New Year’s Day Ride since. He returned to his apartment with frozen appendages but with a true sense of accomplishment. (The soreness wouldn’t come till later in the day.) His neighbor, an anglophile who would have stood in a blizzard to be the first to witness the latest Andrew Lloyd Weber atrocity, remarked that he was “daft” for riding on such a cold day. “I’m not daft, I’m Dim,” he replied and went inside to have another Dunhill.
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TEMPERATURE AT RIDE TIME
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DIM TiM’S ALMOST ANNUAL NEW YEAR’S DAY RIDE
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| 1991 |
34 degrees |
| 1992 |
38 degrees |
| 1993 |
50 degrees |
| 1994 |
38 degrees |
| 1995 |
15 degrees |
| 1996 |
34 degrees |
| 1997 |
22 degrees |
| 1998 |
29 degrees |
| 1999 |
25 degrees |
| 2000 |
42 degrees |
| 2001 |
27 degrees |
| 2002 |
32 degrees |
| 2003 |
42 degrees |
| 2004 |
47 degrees |
| 2005* |
34 degrees |
| * Held New Year’s Eve Day |