A long time ago I used to bicycle a lot! For quite a while I would commute 12 miles to school, then 10 or so to work at the swim school, and then another 7 or so miles home. It was a great workout and great fun! I know this will sound bad, but I always get a feeling of superiority to people driving cars whenever I am on my bike. You are not using gas, it takes more effort, you look cool!<\/p>\n
I used to ride as far as 100 miles at a stretch. One of my greatest adventures was a ride from Sun Valley (the not so fancy part of L.A. where I grew up, not the shi shi ski resort in Idahoe), to Filmore, which was 100 miles round trip. Filmore is between Ojai and Magic Mountain. I did it on a school day. I went alone. Nobody even knew I did it.<\/p>\n
When I got to the midway point, I stopped at a Carl’s junior, had a sandwich of some sort, and then rolled home. It took all day, and was a fantastic adventure.<\/p>\n
I had two great friends, John Cook and Larry Demula, who were fantastic cyclers. I trained for years to be able to keep up with them but never could. In fact Larry and I did a half Iron Man in Baja California about a year after the first Iron Man in Hawaii. Larry was such a better cycler than me, that he actually rode in circles around me, looping over and over just to rub in how slow I was, whenever we were going up steep hills.<\/p>\n
By the way, my finish time was right around 12 hours. The race had ended, they had handed out the awards, had a party, with rumors of a black kid who was still on the course (me, but I am not black :), and everyone had left by the time I rolled across the finish. My friends went and found someone from the race who was still at the Rosorito Beach hotel so they could record my finish.<\/p>\n
The last 15 years I really have not been riding. I realized I stopped after I bought a bike with some funky handlebars on it that made me lean over too far and was uncomfortable, with my flexibility. It hurt too much to ride, so I gave up. I bought a new Cannondale mountain bike which was mid priced around $600 at REI. I am super happy with it. It is better than my $1500 bike from 20 years ago. The technology improvements are amazing. I got some crank brothers pedals, Shimano mountain bike shoes. I also got a gel seat because my butt hurt so bad riding. All of my biking buddies and patients think I am a girlie man for that one!<\/p>\n
I have been having tons of fun on it, and had a few improvements made by my buddy Richie at Adams Ave. Cycles.<\/p>\n
I have dreams of riding it to work and back, but for the moment can only go around 3 miles round trip before my knee hurts. I better not overtrain, and ease into it over the next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A long time ago I used to bicycle a lot! For quite a while I would commute 12 miles to school, then 10 or so to work at the swim school, and then another 7 or so miles home. It was a great workout and great fun! I know this will sound bad, but I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bodyabcs.com\/bwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bodyabcs.com\/bwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bodyabcs.com\/bwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bodyabcs.com\/bwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bodyabcs.com\/bwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bodyabcs.com\/bwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bodyabcs.com\/bwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bodyabcs.com\/bwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bodyabcs.com\/bwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}