Cycles of Life

So how did I find myself before the sun came up last Saturday morning, sitting on a hard, painfully narrow bicycle seat, waiting with my wife and thousands of other cyclists for the start of a 50-plus mile “fun ride” through the Santa Inez Valley, in 38-degree, fog-laden air with nothing more than a micro-thin layer of stretchy polyester fabric between the near-freezing morning air and my pasty white, goose-bumpy skin? Glad you asked.

It began with the first bike I can remember owning – a beautiful, candy apple metal-flake green Schwinn Stingray with a white faux leather banana seat and sissy bar in the back and often-waxed, chrome “ape hanger” handle bars up front. My radical, 60s-vintage ride had a smaller front wheel to make it look more dragster-like and big, fat, “cheater slick” tire on the rear wheel. My other grade school biker buds and I would ride our bikes as fast as we could down the street, then stand hard on the pedals to lock up the coaster brake and see who could leave the longest skid mark.

Granted, riding a bike in the Crescenta Valley is no easy task at any age. Our unavoidable hillsides quickly build up one’s leg muscles and fondness for a good set of brakes. Nevertheless, my childhood home was within a few pedal strokes of Two-Strike Park with its racetrack-like layout of smooth, mostly flat concrete sidewalks, quick turns and endless loops of bike-riding fun. When someone (I won’t say who and you can’t make me) would scoop piles of sand from the swing set area up onto the sidewalk, the resulting skid pad effect made for hours and hours of thrills, spills and skinned up appendages. Good times, indeed – and we didn’t even have to wear helmets in those wild frontier days. Imagine that. 

Until I learned that it would ultimately loosen my spokes, I would clothespin stiff playing cards to the forks of my Stingray to get that cool “revving motor” noise. The faster I rode, the louder and more motor-like the cards slapping against the spokes would sound. I was a Harley rider wannabe even then, I guess. And as it so happened, from my early teenage years until well into middle age, I temporarily traded my love of bikes for motorcycles of all different kinds, including torquey off-road 4-strokers, snarly 2-stroke motocross-racers and eventually a massive, rumbling V-twin cruiser that I rode like Dennis Hopper for many years.

Then, some ten years ago, a good friend from church introduced me to the wonderful world of road biking and I was hopelessly hooked on pedal power once again.

There are some things you have to get used to when taking up the sport of road biking; like the seemingly silly and oh-so-stretchy clothing that serious cyclists wear. Or the “ram’s horns” handlebars and bent over, low-center-of-gravity position you assume in order to achieve optimal wind-resistance. Or feeling like a kid learning to ride all over again as you learn to use the bizarre clipless pedals (or “scary pedals” as I heard one cyclist call them) that lock your feet to the pedal and make you fall over at stop lights. I did say this was great fun, right?

It’s all been more than worth it, however, as my wife and I have enjoyed unforgettable rides together from Azusa to Seal Beach and back, or on a deserted stretch of blacktop skirting Crowley Lake in the Sierras where it’s hard to tell if it’s the altitude or the views that so quickly take your breath away. Or on the annual Solvang Prelude ride (our third time riding this 50-plus-mile event) last weekend.

Yes, it was freezing cold. Yes, it was one of our most exhausting rides ever. And yes, it was as much fun as sticking playing cards in your spokes or laying a big honkin’ skid mark down the middle of Harmony Place.

I’ll see you ‘round town.

Note: This is a post of my column first published yesterday, 11.10.11, in the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper (cvweekly.com).

© 2011 WordChaser, Inc.

Riders On The Storm

Looking back two Sunday mornings ago, I’m not sure I rode my bike the entire 26-plus mile length of the 2011 Pasadena Marathon Bike Tour. I seem to remember doing more swimming than riding.

When I registered to ride the annual event it was an unseasonably warm, early March day. When my wife and I went to the Pasadena Civic Center the Friday afternoon before the event to pick up our swag bags and numbered participant bibs – the sun was out and the temperatures were typically pre-Southern-California-summer-like. However, when my wife, youngest son and I loaded up our bikes and drove east on the 210 Freeway in the pre-dawn darkness May 15, it was not only cold, it was also wet. As in cloudy and drizzling. Sigh.

I should have known. Although this was my first time riding the Pasadena Marathon, a good friend and cycling mentor of mine has ridden it several times now. It has rained every time. Maybe it’s some sort of reverse karma for NOT raining on so many New Year’s Day Rose Parades.  

No matter. To my way of thinking – and to hijack a familiar cliché – even a bad day cycling is better than a good day at work. Or something like that. My wife and I had both had fallen in love with cycling sometime in 2005 and had made one of the best investments ever in our 25 years of marriage by purchasing serious, high-end road bikes (who knew a bicycle could cost more than my first car?!?) At one point, we’d ride well over a hundred miles in any given week and often entered cycling events of 50 miles or more. Over the years, however, having let other time commitments, weight gain (mine, not my wife’s!) and family commitments get in the way, we eventually let our three-to-four-per-week rides dwindle down to none at all.

Thankfully, we both had recommitted to healthier, lighter living at the beginning of this year. Along with that came concentrated efforts to exercise as many days out of the week as we could. We already had the bikes and the funny looking bike clothes and strange plastic shoes – all we needed was the motivation to get back on our saddles (or seats, in this case) and start putting in the miles to strengthen our cycling muscles and build our endurance back up. The Pasadena Marathon Bike Tour was just what we needed.

As we’ve trained the past few months, we’ve ridden hundreds of miles over the streets of Pasadena, including many of the very same roads covered by the 2011 Marathon route. But riding on a weekday afternoon and dodging rush hour traffic is a far cry from the experience of an unobstructed, pre-dawn ride down the middle of Colorado Boulevard past Pottery Barn and the Apple store, blowing through red lights without a care while Pasadena Police and CHP officers keep all motorized traffic out of your way. To say the least, it was a uniquely exciting ride. Helicopters hovering low overhead in the wet, gray skies only added to the strangeness of the experience. In my cold, sleep-deprived thoughts, I could almost imagine what Armstrong, LeMond or Merckx must have felt like riding the Tour. Almost.  

We missed the main 5:45 a.m. start of cyclists by almost 20 minutes, having had to make a frantic round trip dash back home to snag our son’s forgotten helmet (are you kidding me?!) and found ourselves riding the first several miles of wet streets almost entirely alone. Then we began to catch up with and pass the more “interesting” of riders that one always finds bringing up the rear at these types of events – the weekend warriors riding rusty bikes with equally rusty muscles and endurance levels, the riders in fleece animal costumes (don’t ask), those cyclists seemingly more interested in leisurely riding three or four abreast and chatting with each other than in actually completing the course in a respectable amount of time. We even passed several stragglers obliviously texting away while riding. Seriously?

Somewhere between the two and three mile markers, we blew past a rider we affectionately came to call “Butt-Crack Guy.” This rather rotund fellow was not so much riding his bicycle as he was torturing it. He was barely dressed in a way-too-tight tank top, a windbreaker flapping in the breeze and a pair of saggy, soggy gym shorts being dragged off the back of his tookus by the combined forces of rain and gravity. The poor bike squeaked and creaked with every pedal stroke as he strained up a slight incline past some beautifully restored Craftsman-era homes in South Pasadena. Try as I might, it was several more miles before I could get that image out of my mind.

Thankfully, I will never forget the wonderful experience of riding all those miles through a cold, wet Pasadena this month with my wife and son.

I’ll see you ‘round town.

Note: This is a slightly modified version of my column first published yesterday, 5.26.11 in the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper (cvweekly.com).

© 2011 WordChaser, Inc.