There's always a back story

 Sixteen years doesn't mean much to a rock, but on a human time scale, it is a fair chunk of time.  Think about where you were sixteen years ago, how your life was different, even how YOU were different.  For me, back then, I was getting ready to start my last season as a bike racer, having embarked another sixteen years before that on what would became a career racing mountain bikes.  I was also hungry.

Hungry is something that happens when racing bikes, so living in privilege in a first world country, I would go to the supermarket and buy food.  There was, however, one thing I would do a little differently than most: I would go to the supermarket on a bike.  It wasn't a big deal, I was commuting by bike as well, and my route took me right past a store, so a stop every couple days meant I never had to carry too much in one go.  It was easy.  It was obvious.  It also, apparently, didn't go unnoticed, so as I was checking out that day sixteen years ago, the clerk helping me at the register gave me a warm hello, and told me she and a coworker had just been commenting, it had been awhile since they'd seen, "The Guy on the Bike."

Now, at the time, I was living in a fairly large suburb of Hartford in central Connecticut, the kind of place with as many students in the school system as my current town has people total.  There are a lot of SUVs and sometimes even more than one person in them, so individuals tend to blend into the throng, but there I was, in the Super Supermarket, learning that I stood out, not because I was a bike racer, not even because I was about to win my tenth New England pro championship, but because in that sea of humanity, I was unique.  I was "The Guy on the Bike" and that title immediately meant more to me than any other I'd won.

Let's go back even further, although this time I can't say how many years.  A friend recounted a story about a bike ride when he met an old timer working in his yard.  The elder gentleman had started peppering him with questions about his equipment, like what gear ratios he had on his bike.  From the questions, my friend sensed this fellow had more than a casual relationship with bikes, and soon he was hearing stories from this friendly roadside acquaintance (I'll call him Bob so I can stop trying to figure out unique ways of saying "this guy") about racing bicycles in the 1920s.  Bob had been a competitor during one of the heydays of American bicycle racing, when it was a betting sport and racers would ride from event to event, often at fairgrounds, to entertain large crowds of spectators.  It was a big deal when the bike race came to town, but the part I particularly loved was HOW the bike race came to town.  They rode their bikes.

How beautiful, how elemental, how pure, the sport that was based on the most efficient form of transportation ever invented was making use of that form of transit to get where it needed to go.  In my seventeen years of racing, I only rode to a single race, one ten miles from where I was living.  It wasn't a big deal to ride an extra 20 miles round trip, but the thought required to pare my racing equipment down to what I could carry on my back presented a new challenge of deciding what I really needed with me.  I'm extraordinarily proud to report I won that race, in some tiny way, linking me to those stalwart competitors who came a hundred years before, on bikes.

So, I started racing when I was 16, stopped when I was 32.  This year, I'll turn 48, and those of you quick at arithmetic might notice a pattern.  For the last 16 years, I've very much been "The Guy on the Bike" (the G.O.T.bike--get it?) having sold my car the year after I stopped racing because I simply wasn't using it.  Also, I was pretty sure I was no longer a bike racer.  I'd tell people that, magically, I managed to pull off my retirement perfectly: I'd enjoyed the racing as much as possible while I was in it, but found I didn't miss at all once I was gone.  Hard to beat that.  But now it's 2022, I'm coming off a 16 year rest cycle, and I'm going to try racing once again, but in a new way for me: the old way.  The way of showing (hopefully) that bike racers can exist without the motor vehicle.  I hope you'll come along with me for the ride.