I lift my leg over the bike and start the computer to record my ride. I click into my pedals and roll down the driveway to the street. I turn right out of the driveway, head up a short hill and make my first turn, a right. I am off on my favorite ride, a 17-mile spin on mostly quiet winding and rolling roads in my Connecticut town. The ride will take me about 90 minutes. I am 67 years old and learned to ride a bike more than six decades ago. I can call up a vague memory of being upright and coasting on a bike for the first time, but can’t picture any details such as what the bike was like, my exact age at the time, or who was holding me up and pushing—probably my father—just before I was rolling along by myself. Who knows when my last ride will be?
After I make my first turn, I ride along for a couple of miles on a quiet road with homes separated by green woodland and settle into my rhythm and cadence and get a sense of how I feel. Even on days when I am dragging a bit and am ambivalent about riding, I usually only have to spin along for a few minutes to wake up completely and be glad to be on the road. This day is a bluebird summer one, warm but not stifling hot. I am warmed up, and pleased to be riding, immediately. The road ends at a stop sign. I stop and click out of my pedal here as I have arrived at a crossroad with traffic going at 50 mph and I have to turn left. Depending on the time of day, I might not have to wait at all at this spot or I might have to allow a number of cars to go by. I am retired now and have the luxury of taking my rides when the roads are at their quietest. This time, I have to wait for just a single car to whiz by, and then I push off, turn left, and head up a gentle hill on the shoulder of the road, my wheel a couple of inches to the right of the white line marking the right margin of the lane. There is only one other road on my ride that will have a shoulder. The rest of the roads have no shoulder and no curb and most don’t have a center line. Much of the route brings me along woods and fields, sometimes with the tree canopy stretching over the road. Most of the miles on my ride are over chip sealed roads rather than smoother asphalt. I’m used to the surface and to riding over the loose collections of chips that cars push to the side of the road. After a short stretch, I turn right and am back on a narrow, quiet road that goes past a couple of small ponds. The road levels, and I shift to the big chainring for the first time on the ride.
I am riding a Specialized carbon road bike that I bought about eight years ago. It was my first all-carbon bike. I walked into my local bike shop one weekday afternoon after leaving work early, saw that the bike was on sale at a good price, spoke with the salesman about it, took it for a short ride around the parking lot, and bought it. It took two hours. The salesman was a bit surprised at the speed of the sale. “I guess you’ve done a bit of research,” he said. Not really. I was familiar with the brand and the model, but it was the only bike I tried. It fit me well and felt great. Somehow it was agile and comfortable at the same time. Previously, I had a nice aluminum Trek road bike that I rode for about eight years. That was my first road bike with shifters on the handlebars that were integrated with the brake levers. Before that I had a bike I rode for 15 years. It was a Trek with a carbon triangle, and, as with most road bikes back then, had shifters on the down tube. I bought that bike in my mid-30s when I lived in upstate New York. I had a couple of friends who rode, and decided to get a bike myself. It was also around this time that the first Tour de Trump bike race was held. The start was in Albany and I was working for New York Governor Mario Cuomo as a press aide. I was with the governor at the start of the race and I met Donald Trump, who was there for the start and chatted with the governor. Greg LeMond, Andy Hampsten, and Davis Phinney were among the field of riders for the race. I’m sure that experience, seeing all the bronzed and lithe riders at the start of the tour in colorful jerseys and astride beautiful, gleaming bikes also contributed to my desire to get back on a bike. I saw a favorable review of the Trek bike in an outdoor magazine, and went to the local shop and bought it. It was the first bike I had purchased since high school. It was also my first bike with clipless pedals, which had only been around for several years. Like just about everyone else getting used to clipless pedals, I fell a couple of times when I didn’t unclip in time at a stop, mimicking Artie Johnson falling over on his tricycle in slow motion on Laugh In. It was also the first time I had a bike with a computer, and I began to go on what for me were long rides of 20 miles or more. I was pleasantly surprised at the distance you could cover in a relatively short time on a light modern bike. I even got a light for the bike and rode on summer nights after work on a big oval that surrounded, and provided access to, a complex of state office buildings. I thought it was a great training spot because it was empty in the evening, and I could zoom around the oval in the drops as if I were on a closed course, but one night a state trooper patrolling the complex pulled me over and said I needed to find another place to ride. This was also the time I went on my first organized social rides. My friends were doing a 50-mile ride in Saratoga and I decided to join them. There were scores of riders who showed up for the ride and we were provided with a turn-by-turn printed cue sheet. It was all new to me. I would look at the cue sheet and see how far it was to the next turn and then check the distance on my computer so I wouldn’t ride past it. I stopped often to check the sheet so I would not miss a turn. Other riders seemed quite familiar with the route and navigated intersections without ever stopping to check their cue sheets. One of them finally pointed out to me the bright turn arrows painted on the pavement for the ride. Eureka!
I am several miles into my ride now. I come to a monastery that is home to contemplative Dominican nuns. I turn left and ride between the monastery and a small green space with the Stations of the Cross along a path. I ride past the large open fields of the monastery property as the landscape turns less residential and more rural and agricultural. The road is named Race Hill and I race up and down its rolling hills to its end. I make a left turn and a quick right and start a steady climb, passing a house that often has small bundles of firewood for sale at the end of the driveway. After a few of my rides, I have driven back in my car to pick up a bundle of wood and put five dollars in the slit opening of a metal box. I next turn left and head up a hill. There is a farm with big hayfields on my right and there is a row of large round hay bales lined up next to the road.
The bales remind me of a guided bike trip I took with my wife, Jan, and our son, Matt, in Tuscany in 2007. I have a photo of my son standing on a hay bale and holding up his bike. We pedaled around for a week through beautiful scenery, ate sumptuous meals, and stayed in luxurious accommodations. Each day the guides would set out a picnic lunch at a lovely spot along our route. A table would be laden with cheese, bread, fruit, cured meats, salads, and wine. We would feast and chat and then get back on our bikes for an afternoon ride. It was wonderful to ride into Tuscan villages, lean your bike against a wall and just take in the sights on foot. On our last day of riding we had a choice between a modest ride and a longer one. My son was going to do the longer one. The rest of the group opted for the shorter ride. Soon after the start, we passed the turn for the longer route and I decided I would accompany my son, who had not yet started to ride. I made the turn and stopped after a short distance and waited for him. He rode up by himself, made the turn, and broke into a big smile when he saw me. We had a fantastic ride on a beautiful day on empty roads through woods and fields of grape and olive. At one point one of the guides appeared in the tour van. The other riders had assumed that I had made a last-second decision to ride with my son, but I had not had a chance to tell anyone, so the guide had gone to find us and make sure. It was one of the best days I ever had on a bike.
My family also did the same kind of trip in Provence a couple of years earlier. My wife and I also did a guided trip in the Canadian Rockies a number of years later. That was also a great trip, but Tuscany and Provence were more memorable. Having legendary Mt. Ventoux, which my son climbed the first day of the Provence trip, framed in the window of your room is hard to beat. The bike culture in France and Italy adds immensely to the charm of riding in those countries. And, of course, you can’t beat the food and wine.
I climb past the the bales of hay on this ride in bright sunshine and crest the hill at a church with a cemetery. I get in the drops as I descend the other side of the hill. I take a right turn at the bottom of the hill, pointing my knee into the turn and leaning the bike. I am a mediocre bike handler with no training, but I try to use the proper technique when I think about it. My main goal is to stay upright. I never ride “no hands“ anymore. Fortunately, I have never been hit by a car or had a really bad fall. My road rash has been minimal. I am now nearly five miles into my ride and am starting a beautiful four-mile stretch of empty lane past a lot of woods and farm fields on both sides of the pavement. I sometimes ride this section without encountering a car in either direction. One summer there was a cicada emergence along here in the thick woods. I don’t recall if it was cicadas with a 13-year cycle or 17 years, but their collective “singing” in the trees was quite loud, especially along such a quite stretch of road. I often see deer and turkeys cross the road here, and sometimes I flush grouse along the shoulder.
I go up a little rise and turn right at about the seven-mile mark of the ride. For the next couple of miles the road is almost totally lined with woods on both sides, and, on this warm summer day, I pedal through a lane of solid greenery, with the canopy sometimes closing above me, providing welcome shade. This stretch of road is slightly downhill at the beginning, so I get in the drops and the big chainring and see how fast I can go. This is probably the best part of the ride. It seems like I am alone on a trail through the woods that had been paved. At the end of this woodsy stretch I turn left and go up a long straight hill. It’s not steep, but it’s steady, and sometimes I use the technique of only looking a few yards in front of my wheel, so I don’t see how far I have to go to crest the hill. As I head up the hill, I see a lone rider coming downhill toward me. It is L’Orange! L’Orange is a rider I have seen in town ever since I moved here 25 years ago. I call him L’Orange because he always wears a simple orange jersey, and I think of him as a former French professional bike racer. He is thin and looks very fit. He never wears a helmet. His long black hair is in a ponytail. He does not wear gloves. And he is always in the drops. Always. Because I am riding more than usual due to retirement, I see him more often on the road when I am riding. I have never spoken with him. He has passed me once or twice, but I usually encounter him going in the opposite direction than me. I give him a little wave, and he acknowledges it by extending his left hand toward me palm down and pointing to me with his index finger. I take it as a, “You and I, we are true road cyclists!” gesture. I sometimes wonder who he is and what his story is, but in the end I prefer not to know. He is just L’Orange, my roll model. Most of the other riders I see on my regular ride are older, slightly overweight guys like me. We know how to ride, but we do not go as fast or look as smooth as L’Orange, although we think we do. To the drivers and pedestrians we approach on our rides, I’m sure we have a pained look on our faces that indicates a level of effort that doesn’t compute with how slow we are going. I wonder how many miles L’Orange rides every year. This year I am well past 1,000 miles on the bike. I think it is only the second or third time I have ever hit that distance in a year. If I make to 600-700 miles in a year, I feel pretty good.
I have only ridden one century. About 15 years ago there was a charity ride in my area with a century option, and I signed up for it with Matt and my brother-in-law, Bob, whose mountain biking led him to the roadie ranks. Matt had a secret plan to do an Ironman triathlon and had purchased a sweet Cannondale road bike for the project. Before getting his 62-cm Cannondale, Matt had been using my too-small 56-cm Trek to train. The Ironman bike distance is 112 miles, and Matt wanted to ride a century as part of his preparation. We took off on the ride and at one point got to a pit stop where the ride routes for the century and a metric century diverged. The ride staff told us it was too late in the day to complete the century and that we should settle for the metric. Matt was unhappy, but we took the road for the metric. We completed the metric and were back at our car. It was about 20 miles to home. I told Matt we could ride home and then do what was then my local ride from our driveway of 18 miles and get our century. He agreed and we rode home, filled our water bottles and headed out for the last hour or so of riding. We finished and collapsed on the lawn after Jan took a photo of us rolling into the driveway. It was unorthodox, but it was a century. Matt ended up completing two Ironmans on the bike, one in Madison, Wisconsin (very wet and windy weather) and one in Louisville (brutally hot weather). He has done other triathlons as well, including Escape from Alcatraz. It was on a flight from England to San Francisco to compete in the Escape that he spoke with a seat mate who was an executive for one of the world’s biggest and most successful tech companies. That encounter led him to his current job with that company.
I got my first real road bike when I was in high school. I was spending a lot of time in Rockaway in Queens at my aunt and uncle’s house near the beach. A kid I knew came riding up one day on a beautiful canary yellow Schwinn 10 speed with chrome shifters (called “Twin-Stik”) up by the stem rather than on the down tube. I don’t know where I got the bike or how I paid for it or how much it cost (probably around $200), but soon after seeing it I had my own bright yellow ride. I have looked at Schwinn catalogues from the era to try to identify the bike, and my best guess is that it was a Super Sport. I rode the bike once from Long Beach, New York to Rockaway to see a girl I had a crush on. I think it was about a 15-mile ride, but it seemed to me like an audacious journey. I remember getting lost on the way and asking a woman which way to go to get to Rockaway. She looked at me quizzically and declared, “You can’t get there from here.” I could, of course, and I did. I stayed at my aunt and uncle’s house for the weekend and saw the girl, who wasn’t as impressed by my epic bike journey as I had hoped. Everyone else was surprised at what I had done. Bikes were just for riding around town, not for any kind of trip. I rode home on Monday morning back to Long Beach amid the now heavy car traffic of commuters. I never got a driver’s license when I was in high school. I used the bike regularly to see another girlfriend in a town away from mine. I would ride to her house, hang out with her for a while, and then ride home in the dark. Of course, I had no lights on the bike, and I was wearing cut-off jeans and Converse sneakers. No helmet. I remember that there was a long hill on the way home and I would sprint as fast as I could and then be able to coast a long way on the descent, the only sound the whirring in my spokes. It was a lot of fun. One summer when I was in college, I lived on Martha’s Vineyard with some friends. The old yellow Schwinn was my means of transportation. I rode it every day from the house we were renting to my job at the harbor unloading fishing boats. I would sometimes ride home after work with flounder or lobster for dinner dangling from my handlebars. The last time I remember using the bike was on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard with friends when we were in our mid-20s. We rode our bikes to a nude beach, got sunburned, and rode home. I had to pedal out of the saddle the whole way to protect my tender behind.
The ride I am on now should be taking place during the Tour de France, which I usually follow, but it has been postponed because of the COVID pandemic. Like a lot of American cyclists, I began following the Tour closely when Lance Armstrong was on his streak of winning seven straight tours. While I wasn’t a big cycling fan, I knew who Lance Armstrong was before his post-cancer fame. I knew he won the World Championship in 1993 and was a rising American star in a European-dominated sport. I remember reading a newspaper article in 1996 reporting his cancer diagnosis — testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and brain. I figured he was a dead man. Several months later, I received my own serious cancer diagnosis. We both survived, and I was among his ardent fans, watching him win his tours. I had the cycling kit of his Livestrong foundation and wore the yellow bracelet. I was as surprised as anyone when he turned out to be a stunning and cunning cheat. But he hadn’t gotten me on the bike.
At about the nine-mile mark of my ride I go past a big open barn with barn swallows flitting in and out of the wide doors. Sometimes the wire on the poles along the road here are the perch for scores of swallows, all lined up facing me on the road and apparently waiting for the flying insects they prey on to get active. Just past the barn are two swooping downhills where I really crank it in the drops. The top speed on my ride is invariably 32 or 33 mph, and usually occurs along this stretch. The fastest I ever went on a bike was just below 50 mph. I hit close to 50 mph once when I was doing a long steep descent in the Adirondacks with a friend. It was white knuckle time and I felt every pebble on the shoulder of the road that my tires went over. The other time I went that fast was in Provence when I was lost on a ride. I showed my ride map to a passing French cyclist and he motioned for me to follow him. I did, and soon after there was, for me, a terrifying descent on which I tried to keep my fearless guide in sight. I was greatly relieved when the road began to level off. We reached a crossroads, he pointed me in the right direction and sped off in the other. I was glad I didn’t have to follow him any farther.
After the fun descents on my ride, I do a short climb to a stretch of woods preserved as a watershed. The wide trunks of large trees lean over the road on both sides and cover it in shade. I call it the cathedral, because it is as if I climbed the stairs to a massive church and walked inside below a high vaulted ceiling. After the cathedral, there is one more climb up to open fields and long views. The top of the climb is the highest point on the ride, but I’ve come up less than 400 feet from my driveway. I now make a long descent to an intersection that marks the 11-mile mark of the ride. The descent includes a steep serpentine section where I usually cross the center line a couple of times to straighten the sharp turns a bit. It’s the one little tricky part of the ride because I have to keep my eyes peeled for a car climbing toward me so I can get back in the right-hand lane, and I also have a tendency at this spot to hit the brakes too much. I’ve gotten better on this descent of braking before the turn and then easing off until I am straight again.
At the bottom of the hill I turn right on a main road with cars going 50 mph. I go only about a quarter mile and then take a left and punch up a short, steep hill. I am always out of the saddle and in the lowest gear on this climb, and breathing hard at the top. I am five miles from home now and ride along a quiet road with a small lake on my right that I have canoed in countless times. I pass a home that has a large garden full of dozens of varieties of daylilies in bloom. Jan and I once stopped here on a ride, as the garden was open to the public that day and the owner showed us around. Farther on I come to a small dam at the outlet of the lake. I roll past the little waterfall over the dam, and follow the narrow road through fields of corn and cows grazing. I reach the monastery and am now overlapping my route out from home. I reach the busy road that I was on for a short time early in my ride, turn left and enjoy the last downhill stretch of the ride. I turn right at the bottom of the hill onto my street. I get in the drops and the big chainring for the last mile to my house. I cruise along, get out of the saddle for the little hill before my house, and then turn into the driveway. I roll almost to the garage and click out of the pedals, turn off the computer with my ride saved, and lean the bike against the garage door. I have some water left in my bottle, and I take a swig, and then pour the rest into a small planter of flowers by the garage. I shuffle in my cleated shoes to the front deck and sit down on the warm steps in the sunshine. I take off my helmet, gloves, sunglasses, and shoes and leave them strewn about to dry in the sun. Sweaty, grimy, and happy, I walk into the house in my socks, and look for a snack.
Smugmug Gallery for the Rider: