About

I first discovered cycling in 1971 when I was four years old. A neighbor gave me a small 16" fixed gear bike one Saturday morning, and by evening I was riding it like a pro. I would say that since that day, I have been on a bicycle more days than not.

This blog is primarily cycling related, although occasionally some baseball or home project content might creep in. Hopefully this blog provides some insight into riding and racing in the early days, and what it's like to still be riding 40 years later in a new world.

When I discovered that I could choose any date for a post, I started documenting my early racing career. Races are backdated to when they actually occurred, and content is added via memory and other mementos. My packrat tendencies came in handy here. I have race numbers, results sheets, magazines, handwritten notes and sometimes pictures from races going back to 1985. I probably entered well over 100 races in my life. I have now completed all the cyclocross racing posts from the early 2000s, but I have barely scratched the surface documenting all the mountain bike and road races.

I had many e-mail conversations with my friend Steve during the very dawn of the Internet in the early '90s. He was at the University of Colorado and I was a student assistant with the State of California. Although my office (supposedly) only had internal e-mail (MSMail), I figured out how to e-mail externally via the mainframe. I also discovered the Gopher protocol, which pre-dated HTTP, and surfed the web before anyone really knew it was a thing. There was little to no Internet security back then, so you can imagine the places I visited and the trouble I got into. I never told anyone what I was doing for fear of being fired.

The ability to communicate electronically was so very new and exciting to me that I printed every one of those messages and filed them in folders that I still have today. These messages are the basis of many old posts about my solo rides, our rides together and trips we took to many cool places. This is also a work in progress.