Entry Number 1

A History of Fatness
Or
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bike

I’m cruising along many of the nice and safe streets and paths of Madison (Madison Wisconsin that is) and the seat on the bicycle that I have been provided with will simply NOT stay in place. It seems to insist on slipping back and jamming up into me at every inopportune moment. Its poorly tuned, so called automatic shifting system is jerking around all willy-nilly in a clattering and frustrating exhibition of total senselessness. I could easily make these tortures go away, but I am many miles away from my home base and there are absolutely no tools at my disposal. My inner mechanic weeps for this deprived machine. This is a predicament I rarely find myself in. Not only because I am usually surrounded by bicycle tools and possess a vast knowledge regarding the fixing of bicycles and would normally never head out for a ride on a hastily assembled, un-inspected piece of machinery but also because I never, ever ride bicycles in the first place.

I’ve squeezed a one-size-too-small helmet onto my three-sizes-too-big lumberjack cranium and the helmet’s polystyrene contours are biting into my temples like a migraine and it isn’t even one of the colors I prefer nor does the thing match even one of the items that my ensemble is comprised of. In addition to all of these insults, the sky above has whole-heartedly opened up and a rainstorm of savage, almost biblical proportions has begun to fall down upon me. I can remember only one other instance in my personal cycling story that was more hardcore than this—the time that I was biking to work through this little, tucked away Tucson barrio when a tiny rain shower arrived and then quickly evolved into a full-blown monsoon. The next thing I knew, the bone dry street that I had been casually pedaling down had converted itself into a biggie-sized river and I found myself submerged beyond my cranks, battling a vicious brown current that expressed every intention of taking me down.

But the situation here in Wisconsin is only that every single article of my clothing is as wet as it would have been had I simply jumped with everything on right into Lake Monona, the dreary looking body of water to my right that glimmered so beautifully in the afternoon sunlight just yesterday. On top of all of this, I am positively certain that from behind as well as from up ahead I must look astonishingly similar to some pathetic, enslaved circus bear doing his thing on the reinforced tricycle. However . . . I think I might be having the time of my life! Up in my helmet-constricted skull the words are actually rattling around, “Is this the time of my life? No. I’m not that lame. Okay, but seriously this is definitely one of the times of my life. Yes? No? Okay, yes.” Maybe it has something to do with the always innocent, magical, depression curing machine that’s rolling on gleefully beneath me. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m unexpectedly revisiting a very old friend with whom I’ve fallen out of contact for a very long time. Or maybe it has something to do with my twelve hundred or so new friends, the ones spread out all up and down the route we’re traversing, the ones pedaling madly away, the ones experiencing all of this right along with me.

And now, very quietly, in the background of my brain, as my legs and lungs begin to burn hotly on what will turn out to be a measly one or two mile ride along a very flat course, my inner skinny person begins to weep for the memory of the rider that I used to be.


That whole thing up there above where we are now is an excerpt from an unfinished piece I started writing last August entitled The Man Who Saved the World: Fear and Loathing in Madison and the Birth of the American Dream. I don’t know what it was going to be—a magazine submission, something on our shop’s website, a mass email, something. I was inspired to write it after attending TREK WORLD, the big convention/symposium thing that the Trek Bicycle Corporation puts on every year for its dealers out in Wisconsin near their factory and base of operations. It was a destination I was originally only mildly excited to go to. I certainly didn’t mind getting paid to spend some time away from the shop and unlike a lot of people, I actually like flying on commercial airplanes and I also like being able to tell my friends that I won’t be around for the weekend because I’ll be on a business trip in another time zone. Such things make me feel important, but I also understood that there would be classes to attend at this thing, bike shop classes, bike shop classes full of other bike shop people. Three very long and very full days of bike shop classes full of other bike shop people. I’d been present at similar but shorter, smaller, more local events such as this in the past and I’m not the biggest fan of other bike shop dudes (for myriad reasons—some of which we’ll get to later and I’m sure on many more occasions over the course of this year) so my stomach gurgled a bit with apprehension as I headed out. Little did I know this trip would completely change my life . . . Alright I’m completely exaggerating; it hasn’t changed my life, not yet, but it did offer up an impetus to make some changes in my life. Yeah yeah it’s taken nearly a year for the required gears to get into motion, but we’ll get into all of that a little bit later.

So anyways, in the event that you’ve surfed over to this site via some other source and don’t already know me, I’m this big fat guy that works at a bicycle shop—The Madison Bicycle Shop to be exact and whenever I refer to myself as “fat” around other people these other people often cut me short and say something (in the same voice they normally reserve for young, saddened children) like, “You’re not fat you’re just uh . . . uhhh . . . you know . . . BIG!” Or they choose some other allegedly friendly/allegedly less derogatory word. Fine. Maybe “fat” is too harsh a term. Maybe they’re being more fair, more accurate than I’m being. After all, some parts of my person are nearly slender—my hands for the most part. Perhaps it’s all the work that I put them through at the shop that has prevented my fingers from morphing into those shocking bratwursts you see certain chubby dudes sporting from time to time—that Chef Tony guy who sells knives on TV—he’s a perfect example. When the camera pulls in for close-ups of his meat hooks as they’re chopping up parsley or hacking through a frozen tuna or whatever, it’s suddenly revealed that he’s got this whole, I don’t know, Vienna Sausage thing going on. Anywho, what I’m getting at is: other people are currently fatter than I am. I see many a gut larger than mine on a daily basis. I do not yet have to outsource my pants to master tailors for custom fabrication. Clothes in my size are still available for sale at regular brick and mortar outlets in my general area (Heck at Wal-Mart I’m kinda swimming in a medium). Airlines only make me pay for one seat per flight. I didn’t have to order that seatbelt extender thing when I ordered up my new and littler car. I can still fit through the door to my house and get outside and get to work. Really I don’t have to endure any of the hardships endured by the truly obese so maybe enthusiastically stocky is a better choice of diction for these already hostile times we’re living in, but, in any event, I prefer the word FAT. It’s the word I heard the most when I was growing up as a little fat kid and, as I’ve already established in this paragraph, I’ve grown up into a big fat guy. It’s a word I decided to turn into something that rolls off my back without hurting my feelings. It’s a word I’ve come to embrace. As you must have ascertained from the very title of this blog, it’s a word I’m going to as a source of inspiration. However, fatness wasn’t always an issue for me. For a few years of my life, I got to enjoy being a nonfat person—the few years I spent as a biker. A real true biker, not the bandana-clad leathery type but well, you know.

These days I lead a boring, sedentary lifestyle. If I’m not sleeping, watching television late into the night or looking at things on the internet that I simply cannot afford, I’m in a bar or a diner or someone’s dwelling complaining right along with my ragtag posse of friends about how nobody really parties anymore. It’s either that or I’m at work behind my bench done up in my trusty (greasy) Schwinn apron trying to figure out how to explain to the customer on the other side that the bike he or she is mondo sentimentally attached to is SHOT—much like I imagine night-shift veterinarians rehearse their lines when it’s just not right to keep trying to fix little old Scruffy anymore. So that’s it, but even though words like lethargy, atrophy, and even entropy are quite often found hanging out in my personal definition, there was a time when all three were simultaneously on sabbatical.

Going back most of the way, I got fat by the age of like, four or so because, well, I come from a very long line of very proud Hungarians who, if you were suddenly required to describe them to the FBI or something . . . let’s just say you wouldn’t grab at words like puny or svelte or ripped or what have you. As a family we ate all sorts of really tasty fun kinda stuff all the time and I was the happiest little ice-pop stained Buddha belly that there ever was, however, my brother (ten years my senior) wasn’t fat at all. In fact he was built like an Adonis. This was not the result of funny genetics or a switcheroo at the hospital (although personally I’ll never rule that one out 100%) it was rather the result of a fierce dedication to competitive swimming that he cultivated around the age of seven and kept up into his college years—a dedication that very nearly landed him in the Olympic trials. Supposedly at our local YMCA there still stands unbroken some record he set back in like freakin’ 1984—the fastest fourteen-year-old in North America or something along those lines. So as you can imagine, being the fat little brother of male physical perfection made me the unwitting recipient of much household hazing and landed me all sorts of awesome nicknames like “Pork” and “Chubby Butterman”. However, once he stopped swimming eight hours a day but kept eating as if he was, I eventually got my sweet sweet revenge when he slowly but surely got fat too. On a side-note, in recent years, he’s been working towards getting back in shape and showing me up left and right by doing all sorts of crazy things like becoming a near professional skier and a certified something-something degree black belt in karate. I can never win!

Now I played my sports too: T-ball, soccer, wrestling (for like a week—long enough to have already paid for the special shoes but short enough to have avoided wearing one of those leotards) and I even dabbled in karate myself, but I was never very serious about any of them. I did however find a deep love of ice hockey and stuck with it from the sixth grade until my junior year of high school. I shaped up a bit during my time on the ice but since I hadn’t been at it since toddlerdom and most of my teammates had, I wasn’t very good comparatively, couldn’t catch up to them, sat out a lot of games and pretty much became disenchanted with the whole thing.

The very first change in my life that led to some substantial weight loss wasn’t anything outwardly physical or even intentional. It was my first real job, at the mall, cooking up fast food of all things. I ended up slaving away so much time there, up to my neck in greasy gross slop that eventually I found myself incapable of ingesting anything that even slightly resembled what I prepared daily for other people. So I spited the place by never dining on its cuisine and unconsciously I began to eat more healthily (I punched out so many bins of handmade French fries in those days that I became completely repulsed by any recipe containing even a minute amount of potatoes and I remained in this state for a good four years after I finally quit). An even more influential factor at the time was that by working there I ended up with a much larger circle of friends than I’d had previously and I even managed to snag myself a girlfriend to boot (she worked at the cinnamon bun place on the other side of the wall from us—proximity . . . who knew?). Between trying to study enough to not fail my classes and having so many people to hang out with in my free time, I was simply too busy to sit around crackling Dorito after Dorito into my face.

Then came my two years in community college: no more girlfriend (a long and harrowing tale for another day and really an entirely different medium) a lot less regular friends since many had shoved off to four year schools, a much more laid back academic schedule and a much cushier job driving delivery trucks for a hospital. I had no early classes at all (entirely my choosing) plenty of neat stuff on TV (Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, Maury Povich—ahh . . . magnifique!) and lots of late and lazy nights chilling out in the den. Before I could say calzone I was huge again. But it’s not like I was happy about this.

Then came the time for me to pick out the school where I would finish up my education. I thought long and hard about it and decided to apply to one that, the way I saw it, would force me to get into better shape. Somewhere really far away so I’d have difficulty falling back into my comfortable yet negative routines, somewhere really hot (my least favorite temperature) where just walking from class to class is a sweaty workout on its own so I’d be forced to wear shorts and T shirts (my least favorite kind of clothes). All in all the kind of place where just how beautiful everyone everywhere looks is unbearable for the local fat people and said fat people are forced to conform and become beautiful people themselves, but most importantly it was my college career that we were talking about so I needed at least some semblance of a scholarly reason for attending.

Towards the end of high school and all throughout community college I reveled in a love for creative writing. Every elective I chose had something to do with it and I’d decided early on that I’d definitely make it my major so therefore I could only go to a school that offered it as a concentration. So one night I came strolling downstairs after many months of flipping through that big book o’ colleges that they republish every year and very affirmatively I announced to Mom and Dad that I’d finally made my decision and was proud to let them be the first to know that I would be setting my sails for beautiful LAS VEGAS NEVADA- HOME OF THE ILLUSTRIOUS UNLV! Woo yeah! Go Rebels uhhh Mom? Dad?

My parent’s heads remained bowed. They were doing this deep breathing kind of thing.

Then their faces (dumbfounded and enraged) simultaneously flipped back up at me as they both proceeded to lambaste your humble narrator with all kinds of guarantees that I’d gamble away my student loans within the first week and spend the next week chasing after showgirls and the like. So completely shot down out of the deep and azure desert sky I was like, “Okay how about Southern California?” And they were like, “No way that’s way too far.” And I was like, “Really? No? But I mean like Pepperdine or something.” All they did was let out a big unified Pfffffft! and a little unified giggle. So then I was like, “Well what about the University of Arizona in uh, Tucson?” But this time for some reason they were like, “Uhhhm, well yeah that’ll be alright I guess.” And so yeah, that’s how that happened.

Earlier that same year, due to a never properly diagnosed case of some kind of co-dependent mania about becoming really badass dudes, my brother and I had developed an acute obsession with the U.S. Navy SEALs (no that is the proper capitalization). We read all the Richard Marcinko Rogue Warrior books, all the books by all the others, watched every Military Channel documentary, went to every website, did all sorts of independent research, and reported back on our findings further fostering each other’s obsession. When he was awarded his Master’s Degree I gifted him with a full size Navy SEALs flag and for being his best man when he got married he gave me the awesome Luminox Navy SEALs wristwatch that I have famously worn ever since. Regardless of the fact that it would clash atrociously with the “post modern country” motif going on in his otherwise unassuming suburban home, I’m still disappointed to this day that his flag is just folded up somewhere rather than prominently displayed on a main wall but alas, some wives feet just don’t ever come back up again after being put down.

Anyway, at some point this SEAL zeal I had going for me turned serious. Perhaps after hearing one too many repetitions of my brother’s lament about how he had been such a great swimmer and could have actually become a SEAL had he gone for it when he was my age I decided hey, since I AM my age why don’t I join the Navy and become a SEAL and, you know, he can live vicariously through my tales of covert overseas missions and whatnot, like a little gesture of kindness or something.

So that was it. I’m being totally serious. I started wearing real deal military issue cargo pants all the time. I acquired one of those U.S.S. something-something baseball hats with the “scrambled eggs” on top of the visor and I even sent out for the little SEALs recruiting VHS tape and everything. There was still the whole issue of my college application though. Alright, I thought, hopefully I’ll get rejected and then I’ll head straight to the Navy offices in the next town over and what could my parents possibly have to say about it? What alternatives could they possibly offer up? If I get accepted, they’ll make me go and I guess I’ll comply I mean really why not but when I get there I’ll head straight for the Officer’s Candidate School or whatever, graduate after two years and immediately set sail with all sorts of seniority over the regular enlisted guys.

Then there was the day that the envelope arrived. They say that if it’s thick you’re accepted and if it’s thin it’s the other thing. It was thin—and they were right. Just like in all those scenes in a million doofy commercials and a million 80’s movies I opened the letter right there in front of the mailbox as tense Jawsesque cello music started playing and there was a close up of the bead of sweat that trickled down my temple and the sound of my finger tearing open the flap and unfolding the paper inside was more like the sound of a whole tree ripping in half and I’m pretty sure they actually used the word REJECTED and in the very first sentence too. I turned my face towards the clouds and yelled out a good Hollywood “NOOOOO!” and the camera guy on the crane above me pulled up into the sky and captured it all in a nice smooth and twirling long shot. I didn’t want to join the Navy! I never did! I don’t know why I had been fooling myself all that time and telling other people about goals I’d never reach or even want to! The SEALs would never have accepted me on account of my shabby eyesight let alone the rest of my complete physical ineptitude. The depth of that particular period of unprecedented denial that I had been going through for so many months will always mystify me till the end of my days.

So I picked up the rejection letter that I had dramatically dropped on the ground moments before and went running into the house and got right on the horn with the U of A to find out why, WHY had I been rejected? It said something about my transcripts not meeting their requirements and yadda yadda but this I did not understand. I’d done everything everyone had ever told me to do. I had adequate SAT scores; I’d passed high school with flying (alright hovering) colors. All I really needed to take my senior year was English and Gym. I could have been one of those cool kids that got to go back home at 9am and do nothing the rest of the day but at the behest of my engineer father I took Physics and Algebra and all sorts of other horrible things that only served to bring my grade point average way waaaaaay down but not THAT far down, and then at community college I’d made the Dean’s list my first three semesters and the fourth was looking good too so what was it? What crime had I committed that made me ineligible to attend one of the most good old American, welcoming, spirited colleges in the country? Its colors are red white and blue! Its mascot is the wildcat! The Felis Silvestris! A species that thrives not only in all of North America but every other habitable continent too! The U of A is the college where “Revenge of the Nerds” was filmed! Even those guys were accepted and what happened? They prevailed! They got revenge! Why was I not even being given the chance to try?

The lady on the other end of the phone was eating something sticky sounding. A candy bar I guessed. I could hear her messing with her gums and teeth a lot and choking out some of her own words with more bites of whatever it was while she clicked around on her computer.

“You want to know why you weren’t accepted?” Chomp, gulp. “Lemme see. Well you don’t have any lab science classes on your transcripts. You have to have at least two years of lab science on your transcripts to get in and uh, yeah you shouldn’t have even been admitted to the college you’re going to now without them.”

I paused and thought about the little skinny guy with the glasses who taught Earth Science and gave me a low grade on the thing I made for him while staying up all night gluing down the numerous yet somehow insufficient little fossils I’d pulled out of some shale pile in the middle of Pennsylvania. I thought about the tall skinny guy with the glasses who taught Physics and was nice enough but would have failed me on absolutely everything had I not offered up my total lab-time servitude to a smart kid that I’d played hockey with in exchange for his promise to write up and turn in all of our lab reports and pass them off as a joint effort. I thought about the short chubby guy with the glasses who would have failed me on everything I turned in had it not been for his lingering fandom of my brother who he’d taught a decade before I came along and reinvigorated his swimmer worship. I thought about the tall chubby guy with the glasses who actually did fail me on absolutely everything I turned in but kept making sure that nothing but C’s showed up on my report card because he thought I was really cool and funny. (Which I was . . .) (and still am . . . is . . . am? Skip it.) So I thought about all those guys and here was this lady who wanted two years of lab science. Well I had four.

“You do? Well I don’t see them anywhere on here, oh wait, yeah no there they are. I didn’t realize I had to scroll down. Alright well you’re admitted then. We’ll send out the acceptance letter today.”

And so yeah, that’s how THAT happened.

Now I realize I’ve been going on and on here about all sorts of nonsense on a blog that’s supposed to be about losing weight while working at a bicycle store, but do not lose faith in your humble narrator, I have and will always have what is known in some circles as a point. What I’m getting at is that I’m a strong believer in the notion that the big changes of course in all of our personal timelines are heavily dependant on very little, almost accidental things. Had I not gone to Wisconsin last year, Sal and I would not have come up with and presented our “Fit Kids Smile More” program to the Madison Junior School and had we not done that I wouldn’t be writing this here blog. Had I not quit playing hockey to go work at the mall I would have never met my good friend Jeff. Had I not gone to my friend Lee’s ice skating birthday party in the 4th grade I would have never gotten the bug to play hockey. Had either my mother or father decided to stay home rather than go to some obscure Hungarian picnic in Garfield they would have never met and I would have never come into existence, but in the spirit of relevance, ladies and gentlemen had I not made that phone call to the candy bar lady I would simply not be the friendly neighborhood bicycle mechanic that I am today. I’d be something else . . . and here is my literary impersonation of someone who can resist the temptation to endlessly go off on tangents:

Had I simply accepted my fate and acted like the quitter that I usually am I would have not gone to the University of Arizona and rediscovered bikes and biking and eventually turn them into the main thing that surrounds and permeates my entire world these days—except for the whole “actually riding them” thing of course, but that’s what we’re getting to now. Almost there, stick with me, I promise most of my other blog entries are gonna be these breezy one paragraph deals filled with worthless pap that you can just skip but this one, this one right here is the one that’s gonna be on the test (by the way I had my fingers crossed under the computer while I typed that whole thing about “pap” a second ago so that doesn’t count).

So wherever we’re at here—January, February, something like that, I have the realization that come August I’m not going to be in New Jersey anymore. I’m going to be in a completely alien land, displayed for the scrutiny of millions of strangers and I should probably do something about being a big fat guy. And that’s how the SEALs tie back in. At some point in my SEAL studies, I’d come across their official calisthenics chart and memorized it. So my basic plan to lose weight was to completely starve myself and workout as much as possible the way the SEALs do, because if I’m really going to do this, I’ve got to do it in a cool way right? And so that’s how I started out, on the floor of my parent’s living room boppin’ and jiving around for like an hour everyday. I decided soon after though that my routine didn’t cater too well to the cardio needs of a human body so to remedy this I hooked up my dad’s old Fuji ten speed to a fluid trainer he’d purchased on a whim some years before and away I went. Ten minutes a day on the trainer, going pretty hard, that oughta do it. Yes. I said ten whole minutes. It was a longer period of time than I’d ever agree to jog for so I figured it was all good.

So skipping ahead all the way to August and my departure from the mighty East, I’d been working out for many many moons. Progress had been made. I don’t remember how much weight I’d lost but it was a fair amount. I remember sticking to this uninformed and self invented crash diet of two Power Bars a day and a little measly dinner at night. I remember my brother’s friend asking me to lift up my shirt to show him my stomach and I remember not being embarrassed to do so because evidence of actual abdominal muscles was starting to arrive down there. I had been stalking out total strangers on America Online who had “University of Arizona” in their profiles and asking them everything I could think of since I’d never even been near the state before deciding to live there for at least two years. They were all very friendly and the one thing every one of them kept telling me was to make sure that I brought a bike with me. And I had a bike to bring. I’d had all sorts of bikes.

There was the first one that my dad had essentially made for my brother, an old Schwinn Stingray imposter banana seat thing that was considered cool in the seventies but very silly looking once real BMX bikes became available. Rather than buy him a new bike, my renaissance-man of a father welded said Stingray into a BMX style bike and spray painted the whole thing a murdered-out flat black and I must say he did a pretty good job. But then my brother did eventually end up with his beautiful chromed up Mongoose Super Goose with a number plate on the handlebars and a whole big gang of cool stickers on it and I inherited the murdered-out Frankenstein bike, which the bad kids up the street promptly stole from my yard much to my chagrin. Then I got the Sears Roebuck special, a chrome Columbia that I thought was very cool because the grips kind of felt like gun triggers thus I could pretend to shoot things while biking to a greater degree of satisfaction. Then that thing got to be too small for me and the chain had been snagging my pant cuffs and yanking me down to the street anyway so after my brother abandoned bicycles for cars I rightly ended up with the legendary Super Goose and rode that for many a year. Finally, the summer before the sixth grade, after showing much interest in the relatively new sport of mountain biking, I broke the piggybank and my father and I went halfsies on this $600.00 black chrome Giant (an ATX 760 if I remember correctly, oh and by the way every real bike shop guy should be able to recite his own personal history of bikes like I’m doing here at the drop of a hat if called upon to do so). At last I had gears! Twenty one of them! Big wheels! I could go anywhere I wanted and I did. My friend Stephen also got a new bike that summer and we explored our whole town together (at least our side of Route 10). Our bikes inspired daydreams and we discussed all kinds of ambitious mountain bike prospects like crossing the Rockies or the Himalayas or riding around the whole world, you know like once we turned 18 and were finally free of all the oppressive shackles of youth.

I remember picking up a copy of the awesome 1980’s edition of The Basic Essentials of Mountain Biking by Michael A. Strassman (which you too can currently purchase and own for only $0.01 on Amazon.com) and reading it cover to cover in one day and I actually learned a great deal from it, all kinds of advice I still offer up to my customers to this day. That book, the illustrations, my new bike, how well it performed, the tire smell of the shop where I’d gotten it, the look of all the other products they had there . . . all these things conspired together and set off in me this bicycle madness that I couldn’t be torn away from . . . until school started again and it was back to the bus and homework at night and hockey every weekend. The bike remained my friend though but only for about two more years until high school started and then me and bikes became estranged for what would seem like forever.

In high school, rather than riding bicycles, it was deemed way cooler to walk everywhere or have your mom drive you around as long as nobody ever saw either act taking place. When on foot, we’d cut through the woods or people’s backyards to get around town and when chauffeured by Mama we’d make sure that she dropped us off way far away from wherever we had to get to and walk the rest of the way. For whatever murky teenage reason, bicycles were declared socially illegal at my school and especially within my clique. The penalty for being caught on one remained unspecified but it probably would have been some kind of irreversible sanction ranging from total destruction of the bike by a jury of your peers or excommunication from your precious group all together. Had you asked me then what I thought about bicycles I would have told you that I didn’t think of them at all and it would have been an honest answer. I never thought about bikes ever, until my junior year of college that is.

So I pulled the horribly dusty ATX 760 out of the basement, made sure its totally dry-rotted gumwall tires still held air, bought myself a U-Lock at my local yet now defunct bike shop, loaded the thing into my Blazer (along with everything else I owned in the world) and together we rolled west. Now I have ten million Arizona stories in my head and all those who know me personally are wholly nauseated by them at this point but I’m still tempted to go on and on here and set up all sorts of prologue kind of stuff but in the name of brevity I’ll cut directly to the bike related bits.

So I’m in my weird smelling little 1970’s era college apartment and I’ve been there for about ten days, my first day of school begins at nine the next morning and all I’ve pretty much accomplished so far is having put on my own little rendition of Martin Sheen’s intro performance in Apocalypse Now (Saigon . . . I’m still only in Saigon . . .) because I was completely alone, I didn’t know a soul west of Pennsylvania, had nothing to do and Tucson had managed to terrify me with its weird traffic grid system, its “suicide lanes” instead of jug handles, its million cars zipping by everywhere, and my Cholo controlled neighborhood where the shaved headed, goteed, baggy clothed thug types would stop wrenching on their cars only to stare you down real slow and squinty-like as you passed by. I had been fearfully uninspired to do any exploration of the city other than to figure out where the campus was located and when I did so I realized that all the America Online people had been right--bringing the bike along was a good decision because there was absolutely nowhere to park a car down there without it getting towed away promptly or having to pay a million dollars a day for the right to do so, but there sure were tons of available bike racks. So I decided to get outside on this day before school and get into my car and map out for myself a bikeable route to class. After a few passes and loops around the fast paced and creepy desert streets I settled on a set of directions that I figured my New Jersey pampered self could handle (when it comes to cars and driving them everywhere we’re all a lot like Los Angeleans in that respect). I wasn’t at all worried about my physical ability to pedal the whole two miles because I had been working out with gusto all summer long; I was just concerned about crossing all the seemingly major intersections without getting hit by a car.

So the next morning I awoke and showered and ate some cereal and strapped on the backpack and rolled my pant leg up, the whole Rad/Quicksilver routine, and I headed out the door with my bike on my shoulder looking pretty pro, but before I even got down the first street of my route, I realized that something was wrong with my bike. It seemed like it was too small or something. I decided to move my seat post up because I knew how to work a quick-release clamp and I felt really cool because of that knowledge. A second after I began twisting the thing up out of the frame, it popped out all together. There was like, no more seat post to come up! There were even little hash marks etched all around it about three quarters of the way down and a little message engraved on there that said MINIMUM INSERTION. The post had been set with those hash marks sticking out by like two inches. Apparently I had grown a bit since the 8th grade. I shrugged off the warning, put my seat post back to where it had been and pedaled away.

Now the not getting hit by a car thing proved to be pretty easy. I kept telling myself, “Just do what a car does, you have the same rights as them. Just make sure they see you doing it.” And that technique worked like a charm through all sorts of crazy intersections and dangerous turns, but then I encountered something that I hadn’t ever come across during all those ten minute sessions on my dad’s trainer—a hill. A hill I didn’t notice when driving this route the day before. Hills always seem to elude car drivers but are very well acquainted with every biker they come across. So I changed gears and started pushing and pushing and panting and sweating SWEATING? I was quickly making the shower I’d taken that morning completely obsolete. Then real fatigue settled in. My knees started wobbling around with every pedal stroke and my arms and elbows got all jittery and keeping a secure grip on the handlebars was about to become a real issue. It began to feel like the simple act of breathing was this crazy new fad I was trying out for the first time. I just couldn’t get it right. I couldn’t believe it, all those months of working out, all the starving, all the weight lost, and in the end I had no real fitness at all. All of a sudden it turned out that actually riding a bicycle out on the street where they were originally intended to be ridden and as a way of getting from place to place (an act now reserved for poor people who don’t have cars, little kids who don’t know any better, and students like me forced into the situation) was apparently the hardest thing in the world.

The next part of this memory is more like the memory of some cloudy and confused dream someone else dreamt long ago. After finally cresting the hill, I just held on for dear life and tried with all my might to keep a steady line and not veer off into traffic as I rolled down to the campus bike racks. I remember staggering around in the gravel bike lot and wheezing loudly as I haphazardly locked up my bike, fumbling with the keys. I zombie-walked over to an unoccupied bench and just fell back onto it not caring if anyone noted my embarrassing level of distress. I remember thinking, “I’m going to have to do this everyday? Wait I’m going to have to do it in reverse just to get back home later!”

I foolishly hadn’t brought any water with me but I did have a can of soda that I’d packed up in my little schoolboy lunch bag for later. I sat up, cracked it open and guzzled it down. It got to meet my breakfast cereal down there that I’d forgotten about so the two of them decided to join forces and immediately rush back up and out to remind me.

So that was my first day of classes in Arizona and my first rendezvous with the bicycle in at least six years. I don’t remember how I got home that day but I do remember that it wasn’t long before I found myself riding the whole way to and from campus several times a day without even sitting down on my bike’s saddle so the seat height issue became negligible. I got really good at weaving around traffic and pedestrians all bike messenger style. I plotted out more and more circuitous routes to and from class because my original shortcut wasn't long enough or fun enough. After getting a flat tire that I didn’t know how to fix—the reason I was entirely absent for an important exam, I started learning about do it yourself repairs and I even got myself a brand new bike after taking a nice modern one out for a test ride and noting how the differences in weight and size and functionality were totally ridiculous compared to my old junker. I started skipping my less important classes to go mountain biking all around the Sonoran desert like some ocean-deprived surfer dude. I got myself some clipless pedals and clomped loudly up the stairs and down the hallways to my classrooms in my ATB shoes completely disregarding social mores. I think I even took a few quick Scantron tests without bothering to remove my fingerless gloves. My helmet was either on my head or clipped to my backpack at all times. I started wearing the same pair of expensive mountain biking shorts all day every day, hand washing them in my bathtub at night and air drying them on the little railing outside my front door (wet stuff dries up in Arizona in like BANG ZOOM two seconds—it’s awesome). Whenever I’d cross paths with some other dude out there on a bike doing the same kind of thing I was doing we’d always nod to each other in this cool, secretive, knowing way--lips tight, eyes expressionless behind our dark sunglasses.

Very quickly I started to look like those guys too. All my remaining chubs just disappeared. My chest flab melted away and I started wearing appropriately sized T-shirts everywhere I went and without shame. My legs began to take on this sculpted look that seemed to acquire more and more detail with each day that passed, each ride I rode. I would hold them flexed and locked up straight in my bed at night and in the dimness of my room I’d ponder their shadowy new contours. I know it sounds horribly, creepily narcissistic but if you too have spent most of your life as a sorrowful fat person then you can understand how amazing it would be to suddenly see actual muscle appear in places where previously there has only been shapelessness.

It didn’t matter what I ate. I never felt completely full anymore. I presume my metabolism had increased so much that I was actually using what I ingested as fuel instead of storing it away. My day to day performance became an instant gauge for the quality of my diet. I had good days and bad days—days of raging energy and days of miserable sluggishness depending on whether or not I’d gotten the right ratio of vitamins and nutrients. And all of these amazing changes took place in my first semester alone. Fifteen weeks or so. That’s all it really takes.

There are all sorts of neat byproducts of a cycling lifestyle too. In between flights home for Christmas break, I had very little time to get from one plane to another at the Houston Airport, which if you’ve never been there before is HUGE. I was a very inexperienced air traveler at the time, the gates were as far apart as possible and I thought those moving sidewalks and little trolley cars were reserved for handicapped people and the monorail things outside took you to like the parking lot or a train station far far away or something. So I just started running. This was also back in the day when you could pretty much carry on anything you wanted to without reprimand and I was definitely at the limit if there even was one. I had a big backpack and a big duffel bag stuffed to the point of splitting with clothes and presents weighing me down. But I kept running and FAST. I kept checking my SEALs watch to see if I was going to make it or not and after a while it dawned on me that I wasn’t out of breath yet, not at all, and I had literally been jogging for about ten whole minutes completely encumbered with luggage. The gleeful realization burst in my mind that I was effortlessly performing a feat that would have definitely sent me to the hospital had I attempted it only a year before. I was so happy about this when I finally got to my gate that it didn’t faze me in the least when the lady at the counter informed me that my plane had already taken off.

When I finally made it back to New Jersey and was reunited with my family and friends, it was like a hero’s welcome over and over. Nobody could believe how much I had trimmed down. The airline had misplaced my bags (I ended up having to check them) so for a few days I had to wear the now very ill fitting fat guy clothes I had left behind, but I didn’t mind too much though because everyone who saw me kept marveling at just how roomy those clothes had become on me.

On my last night in Jersey before going back to the desert, a major snowstorm hit and dumped like two feet on us in the blink of an eye. A friend of mine called up to inform me that pretty much everyone I knew was up at this school about a mile away trying to recapture their youth by sledding down a huge and famous hill on the property. He’d completely forgotten that my lean and mean 4x4 Blazer was parked in the bright and shining sun across the country and I was totally stranded at home with nothing at my disposal other than my parent’s useless rear wheel drive sedans so I declined his offer to meet up. But a little while later I decided to give it a go anyway. I marched out into the thick, knee-high drifts and started walking. Not a single street had been plowed nor would they be until the middle of the next day. I tried kicking my feet up above the snow and leaping along like Michael Flatley or something but that proved to be a pretty fruitless method. Then I just dug in and started jogging, plowing through it all, charging into the occasionally waist-high snow mounds as if they were waves in the ocean. I got this crazed linebacker momentum going and before I knew it I was really running, clearing a wake of snow behind me and I managed to keep this up the whole way.

I silently snuck up behind my crowd of sledding friends and freaked them all out. They had been hanging out at a house right around the corner so getting there for them was no great shakes but they couldn’t believe that I’d made it on foot all the way from my house. They cracked up when they noticed the deep path I’d made that ran all the way back out to the street. And what they really couldn’t believe was that again, I was fine, I was totally not out of breath.

This whole health and biking thing kept up for the remainder of my college days. I’d moved much farther away from campus before the beginning of my second year but I kept biking to and from class and to and from my assortment of weird, extremely far away part-time jobs at all hours of the night and day. I barely used my car. Life was a struggle but it was a rewarding one. New and cool and unforeseen developments took place as a result of my dealings with the bicycle. For example, I became much more confident than I had ever been in my life. People were always complimenting my assumed dedication to bettering the environment and my bravery as far as being able to deal with the perceived deadliness of Tucson’s traffic. Outside of class, the uninformed would compliment my totally average bicycle and refer to it in very high-end pro level terms and I’d totally let them. My professors would use my punctuality as an example when upbraiding my peers for their tardiness or absenteeism by informing the entire class of my lengthy two-wheeled travels and everyone would look at me with a combination of admiration, jealousy, disgust—whatever it was it was all pride-fuel in my book. Even the truly sinister looking dudes that I worked graveyard shifts with at a nightclub and at UPS and in the back of this café—dudes who looked a lot like the really threatening characters from my old neighborhood—dudes with teardrop face tattoos who’s usual discourse centered around the most recent barroom brawl they’d been engaged in—somehow these guys became some of my best friends at the time. I evolved into this sort of comedic caucasian college-boy mascot within each of my different work crews but I found that my heart was constantly getting all warmed up thanks to the many invites to low-rider club gatherings, picnics, children’s birthday parties and christenings that were extended to me frequently and with the utmost of sincerity. As far as I could tell I was awarded this honorary vato guero status (at least that’s what this one guy always called me) based on only a few of my merits:

a) They couldn’t believe that I rode the bike I always had locked up out back all the way from where I lived to where we worked.

b) They couldn’t believe that I rode it through the particular neighborhoods that I did and somehow consistently emerged from them unscathed and

c) They thought it was really awesome that I was born and bred only 45 minutes away from New York City and had actually been there many many times.

My time in Arizona came to an unexpected end. As graduation neared I found myself involved in another bloody break-up with a live-in girlfriend. During our final week together (conveniently enough the same week as my final exams) I went out on a particularly angry afternoon mountain bike ride on a very technical trail that I’d recently discovered in the foothills near our apartment to work off some of my flustered emotions. While speeding down a really nasty section of this trail, far too treacherous for my wimpy bike and way beyond my skill level, I got my front wheel stuck in this rocky rut and flipped over my handlebars. I put my hands out all Superman style to brace myself and in slow motion I saw my fingers crunch into the crusty desert floor. Then my chest and chin came crashing down onto this perfectly round little boulder and I heard a sound that I was sure was my sternum cracking apart. My feet stayed locked into my pedals until my legs flipped far enough forward to completely wrench my back. Then the bike released itself from both my feet and the rut and from what I could tell most of it landed on my head—but none of this hurt me at all. I didn’t feel anything other than fear and shock. I lay there trying to breathe and discovered that I couldn’t. All attempts at inhaling and exhaling felt completely blocked off. It felt like the boulder was inside my ribs, my lungs. I couldn’t shout out or even make a sound as far as I could tell because I couldn’t hear anything either aside from a ringing in my ears, and what was even more frightening than any of this was that I found myself to be absolutely incapable of moving. I knew I was paralyzed. Instantly I had visions of myself laying there all through the rapidly approaching night. My girlfriend wouldn’t look for me or call anyone, she would assume I’d ran off somewhere to avoid her, I would be trapped there for who knows how long with all the dreadful crawling, slithering desert things that come out in the dark.

And then slowly it arrived: the pain. The real and true and aching, gnawing, widespread pain. At first I welcomed it with happiness and an actual grin broke across my face. I wiggled my toes inside my shoes and was overjoyed to feel the normalcy of that little movement. Then I tried to wiggle my fingers but lightening shot through my hands and arms and all the relief from the realization that I was much more intact than once thought just rushed away from me. It was then that I discovered that my lungs and ears were also apparently still in working order because it was quickly revealed that I could SCREAM and hear myself do so just fine.

I remember carefully backing myself up off the boulder by using only the heels of my hands. My chest felt completely caved in. I feared I’d see my guts stuck all over the rock as I peeled myself from it but only my shirt was torn up and there wasn’t even any blood. After much unsteadiness I got to my feet and gingerly patted my chest with my gloved palms. It sang out in searing pain. Then there was blood! All over my shirt as if I’d been stabbed a million times by some crazed murderer. I looked at my hands and realized they were the culprit. They were stained completely red and literally dribbling from the fingertips like a sink faucet turned on low. I stood up straight from the shock of this sight but the horrendous pain in my back sent me hunching over again only to have the horrendous pain in my chest send me back up a bit and then I teetered there desperately trying to find the angle of equilibrium at which I could somehow function. I hobbled around and surveyed the damage to my bike. The front wheel was completely bent up (tacoed as we say in the bike world) and my seat post was bent back into this grotesque fold that just seemed like an impossibility even given the circumstances. I somehow managed to scoop the thing up by getting its handlebars into my elbows and that’s how I hauled it all the way back up to my place from the depths into which we’d fallen together.

Later that night after cleaning up and inspecting the sailboat shaped bruise that ran from my neck to my gut and somehow getting both of my amazingly swollen and most definitely broken middle fingers taped into a set of those foam and metal splints, my girlfriend returned home from wherever it was that she had been. She saw me sitting there morosely on the futon in a kind of injured lotus posture with my wounded and bandaged appendages ironically stuck in the up position. She didn’t say anything at all; she just wandered off into our darkened bedroom. In retrospect I think it was a most fitting goodbye.

Going back to Jersey was a move I made against my will but after the breakup I found myself essentially homeless. I had some promising employment prospects in the area and on the horizon but prospects don’t pay the bills, so with my tail between my legs and my head hung low I came skulking back to Morris County, but I had previously envisioned myself living in Arizona forever. I’d fallen in love with the entire state and if I had to leave it I wanted to at least bring everything that was there back home with me. But it’s a state so unlike ours that it’s impossible to recreate any of it over here. So I left empty handed, but as it turns out I did in fact bring back a kind of concillation prize—riding the bike. I often joke that out of all the education I received in college, all the classes I attended, the main thing that stuck with me the most was the way in which I traveled to and from school.

Upon my return I took up my old job at the hospital to get some cash flow going and in my free time I discovered our local trails and rode them hard. Pretty soon I realized that I needed a new mountain bike so I got myself one. Then I bought myself a road bike to switch things up a bit. I’d always envied the speed at which the Arizona road bikers would pass me out there and I wanted to join in on their fun so I did. I mapped out some really extensive road routes for myself and began getting up way too early in the morning and riding them before work. I was training for something but I didn’t know what. Then I saw the brochure on the counter at one of the bike shops that I frequented—The Northeast Aidsride. I’d have to raise all sorts of money and kick in a bunch myself but the opportunity to ride fully supported from New York to Boston over the course of three and a half days was something that I couldn’t talk myself out of doing.

It was around this time that I got myself the job here at our bike shop. The hospital gig was so not what I was supposed to be doing as a college grad that even my boss there was helping me look through the help wanted section and faxing out my resume to prospective employers. It came down to a late night junior editor position at a very famous but apparently low paying New York newspaper or the better pay and better hours of the racket that I’m currently all wrapped up in. It was an easy choice. Was it the right one? Eh probably not, but your bikes have been working pretty good since ’02 haven’t they? Just kidding : )

So anyway cutting to the chase, I train extremely hard for this Aidsride, six days a week taking saturdays off. I start logging 50 miles every morning before 8am. Sometimes when I don’t have to be in at work until 12pm I manage to squeeze in 85. So finally the event arrives and I’m completely unsure of myself but I do my 350 miles with ease! I arrive at camp every afternoon alongside the first 100 of about 3000 riders. I break my bike a bunch of times along the way but never fail to victoriously and ingeniously fix it myself right there on the side of the road. I pull my first century ride (100 miles in a day) and I encounter a wide variety of the endorphin-based spiritual experiences that you always hear those too excited fitness gurus blathering on and on about on TV. I return home and play the part of a conquering warrior who raised a bunch of money for a deserving charity while performing feats of strength and impossibility. I feel as if I have completed some major achievement and can finally relax and enjoy the fruits of my efforts, but I decide not to. I choose to keep it up and fulfill my destiny of becoming some kind of biker superhero.

Then on my very first journey out post-Aidsride I break my rear derailleur hanger 25 miles from home only to discover that I’m in a total cell phone dead zone. I manage to cut my chain down and turn my bike into a very badly functioning single-speed that allows me to hobble along for about 5 miles until I’m able to make one of those little reception bars appear on my phone’s screen. I start calling every single person I know but none of them answer because it’s like six in the morning on a Tuesday so I call a cab service. The cigar smoking driver who tracks me down—he rams my bike into the trunk of his Crown Victoria and whisks me away back home. Every so often along the way he blows out a puff of carcinogeny smoke, glances at his rearview, catches a glimpse of me sitting there gloomily in his backseat wearing only my tight little biker skivvies, chuckles to himself while shaking his head from side to side, and then he reinserts the chomped up cigar into his pie-hole for more of the same. I end up being dreadfully late for work and I decide to take a little break from biking.

After a morale-killing breakdown like that one it’s very tempting to become afraid of your bike. All of a sudden your dear and trusted friend has betrayed you and you’re no longer sure if you’re supposed to be a biker. You decide, alright, I’m gonna get four spare derailleur hangers and keep them in my saddlebag and only go biking on my days off so I don’t affect my work attendance . . . then after awhile you get all jazzed up about biking again and before you know it you’re hitting the streets in the dewy predawn hours and everything works out and you become the biker superhero prescribed in your birthrights. But instead of doing any of that I just kinda, I don’t know, DIDN’T. I started hanging out with my fun-loving friends again and late into the night at that. I reveled in the act of staying up as late as I could and sleeping in as late as I could before having to get up for work. My days off were a whole other story—a story about undiluted sloth and gluttony for the most part. Quickly I discovered that life is truly so much easier and a lot more fun when you cut down your riding from roughly 30 hours a week to, well, when you cut it down to not even seeing your bike even once over a period many months—I had my bikes tucked away in the darkest and dustiest corner of the basement and I refrained from even peeking at them when I had to go down there to do my laundry.

At this point I was lucky enough to be living with my friend Jeff in the house he’d inherited from his grandparents and turned into the most ridiculously awesome bachelor pad that two English major geeks could ever hope to inhabit. His walls were densely populated with shelves that were in turn densely populated with literally thousands of the greatest books ever written. We had a GIGANTIC big screen TV sitting atop of a pile of hundreds of DVD’s and video games and every single video game system available in the American marketplace to go along with them. There was also the Bang & Olufsen stereo and home theater. Hanging up in frames and everything there were movie posters, photographs of famous writers, quality musicians, and portraits of composers. We had sultry magazine cover shots of Fiona Apple and Christina Aguilera hanging in the kitchen and plush South Park dolls residing in the bathroom. There were also Star Wars figurines and memorabilia propped up everywhere and all kinds of Taekwondo and Aikido equipment scattered all about the place. Oh and the swords! Real and heavy and sharp swords braced to the dining room wall! Excalibur! William Wallace’s broadsword! The triple decker Samurai thingy up on the mantle! Man oh man! All in all it was a dwelling completely and unabashedly devoid of even the slightest semblance of female supervision and we couldn’t have been more proud of it. Visiting married females would shudder in repulsion upon admittance to our Dojo but their husbands would begin to quake with seething jealousy after taking only a quick look around and Jeff and I would nod at one another in acknowledgement of a job well done.

Now one of the numerous problems associated with living your adult life in exactly the same fashion that you fantasized you would when you were four years old is that it really promotes poor nutrition and a lackadaisical attitude towards getting adequate exercise. Neither Jeff nor I possessed a dishwasher. However we did share an extreme aversion to dirty dishes and the washing of them. A resolution we came up with for this dilemma was the combination of paper plates, plastic flatware, and the placing of telephone calls to our favorite local Trattoria/Ristorante whose drivers would happily bring us all different kinds of exotic deliciousness on a daily basis so we didn’t even have to get up from the couch. I’m sure you know where this is going. You got it. On the inside of probably only six months I ballooned once again into a leviathan blob of goop that only a mother could love—but that wasn’t exactly true. Inexplicably, amidst my darkest days, when I looked my worst, probably even worse than I look now, I somehow acquired another girlfriend, and no she wasn’t also massive like me she was actually kinda small, an avid dancer with a shapely physique and everything. Whatever mental problem she suffered from that enabled her to see past my looks and habits was never uncovered; nonetheless we were together for a good amount of time. Ten months? Something like that. The twist here is that it was a long-distance deal. She was a Jersey girl but most of the time she was off at her Midwestern college doing all sorts of collegey things while I sat around like a lump just eating and watching TV if I wasn’t working (hmmm sounds a lot like my current situation). During the summer she went abroad and I became inspired to utilize that lengthy chunk of time to get into this full-bore commando style weight loss plan that I’d concocted and it worked! By the time she returned home I’d become a considerably smaller person and she was impressed. After only a short visit she had to return to school and I continued on with my plan. Her next trip home wasn’t scheduled until Thanksgiving.

In the interim I went at it even harder. I was back to my original six day plan with adaptations tacked on to amp things up a bit. In addition to eating right of course, Tuesday through Friday I’d get up at three in the morning and hit the streets on my road bike by 3:30 and I wouldn’t return home any earlier than eight. At night after work I’d spend an hour in the basement with my bike hooked up to a trainer and I’d slug away down there listening to this Jamaican radio station on Jeff’s Bose radio that he kept down there. Then I’d spend another hour right next to the trainer riding my track bike on a set of Tacx rollers that I’d acquired from Ebay for a steal. Then I’d do my Navy SEALs calisthenics for a third hour and finally I’d drag myself to bed only to repeat the process upon waking. My days off from work (commonly Sunday and Monday if you’re familiar with our hours) I spent on my other bikes. I gleefully referred to them as “Mountain Bike Monday and Single Speed Sunday”. Mountain bike trails are usually packed on the regular weekend days which I find to be a turn off because I enjoy the woods only when it’s a solitary experience, but on Mondays they were blissfully unpopulated. On Sundays I’d hit up these pretty easy and therefore not so popular trails in my hometown that I’d make more difficult by riding my single speed. Those are my reasons. Are they the real reasons? Maybe. There is a chance I kept up those schedules just because I liked the alliteration in their very fitting nicknames.

Usually I’d take Saturdays off but sometimes I felt inspired to go seven days in a row. Those were funny occasions. Down the hill from my neighborhood there’s this go-go bar and its googley-eyed and inebriated Friday night denizens would still be out in the parking lot shuffling around smoking cigarettes as I whizzed past at quarter to four in the morning. It was always a good source of reality checks when I wanted to gauge how healthy of a life I was leading.

When the end of November rolled around I had gotten myself into the best shape I’d been in in years. I wasn’t as thin as I had been while living in Arizona, but I was close and I can guarantee I was physically fitter and more capable—the bestest, strongest biker I’d ever been. Even Artie, my coworker and harshest biking competition, alright pretty much my only competition, who was well versed in waiting for me at the top of big climbs, suddenly he wasn’t waiting for too long anymore and he was even going around telling others about how much I’d improved. My girlfriend and I had been apart for the longest stretch yet, three months if I remember correctly. And prior to her return our phone/email/instant message relationship had become a rocky and treacherous terrain beset with insecurities, bickering, and accusations. We figured the general grumpiness between us could be attributed to the separation and wondered aloud to each other how military couples could do it for even longer periods of time.

The day that she was to arrive home and come over to my place I put on this outfit that I’d had all planned out, this really top notch and slimming jeans/shirt number that further accentuated my truly significant weight loss and when she finally showed up at my front door I yanked the thing open in this TA-DA! kind of way but she barely noticed. She just came slinking inside wearing the grimmest of expressions on her face and proceeded to tell me all about the other guy at school who had apparently been around for some time.

So it goes. (props to Kurt Vonnegut—the master)

I found a new girlfriend with a quickness that was relatively ultra-sonic. I swear I was in talks with her that same week and we’d reached the level of calling each other by official titles before the month was even out. Now this one was a hairstylist, a career woman, older than me, more mature than the previous one, and as it is pertinent to the subject at hand I’ll admit she was also more curvaceous, more voluptuous and other words like that. This gal ushered in for me a more laidback lifestyle, complete with home-cooked meals, lazy and content nights in front of her television set, lots of free haircuts and almost no bike riding at all. I began to swell again as usual but I’d make the occasional effort to keep all that in check with a little cutting back on the carbs here and there and a little squeezing in of a bike ride every now and then.

Then something new and confusing entered the picture. My girlfriend lived on the third floor of her apartment building and whenever I’d leave her place and walk down those stairs my knees would hurt a little. Then they started to hurt a lot. I knew biking certainly couldn’t be the culprit since I’d already taken such a lengthy hiatus from it so I figured that all the standing all day at work had finally gotten to me and I needed a vacation. So I took one. My first real vacation, a big ten day affair with nothing planned other than even more relaxation. That should do it, I thought, but it didn’t. My knees only got worse and worse. It was this hot, crackly, grinding, swollen up and splintering agony. I’ve never been the kind of guy who considers his random pains serious enough to warrant a trip to the doctor so I simply clenched my molars down tight, grinned wide and dealt with it.

After almost a year together she too turned out to have some secret mystery man who’d been lurking about in the background the whole time so we cut our ties and moved apart. Afterwards, I felt like there wasn’t much in my life. During all this cumulative time spent with girlfriends I’d managed to neglect my regular friends and regretfully I let them just float away from me. I was alone in the world facing a future of cranky knees and haircuts that cost money. The forecast was bleak but I decided to do something about it. I became more social, tried not to focus on the depressions of losing a significant other, and in the process I won back pretty much everyone I’d lost along the way not to mention the many new friends that came along with them. Things in general were perking up but my knees certainly weren’t so I finally took them to the MD. I was tested for everything that he could think of (I swear they took a gallon of blood out of my arm) but all those tests came back negative. Then after stumping two different orthopedists with the fifty billion X-rays of my weird looking little kneecaps I was prescribed some pain killers and a truckload of physical therapy.

The therapy seemed very cool and official at first. I’d stop by a couple of times a week to have the guy rub some funky electro-stick on my knees and then he’d wrap them up in these straight jacket looking things that would then mildly electrocute my thighs in the name of muscle stimulation. But when we moved on to just doing leg lifts and utilizing his literally broken (trust me I can tell) Stairmaster and Lifecycle bike, that co-pay started to feel a bit hefty. When I considered the fact that I had much much MUCH better equipment at home I decided to just go back there and use that stuff for free but as you are already aware the Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll is a fat and lazy mechanic so instead I just didn’t do anything.

Sometimes my laziness isn’t 100% my fault. Sometimes it’s helped along by one unfortunate occurrence or another or several all at once. Many times throughout my life I’ve said something like “I’m gonna get back in shape” and it seems like right after I finally manage to start the process up I get sick or injured or something. I think it was 2005ish that I became involved in a string of calamities that forever changed the way I think of myself and shortened the extent to which I trust my own body. During a freak dog chasing accident I threw out my back so bad that I had to spend ten days pilled up in bed before I could confidently walk around again without using a cane. There were also a few aftershocks in the following months that were less severe and only put me out for like a weekend or so. The incident left me with a messed up spine that never really feels quite right and still gets all wacked out every once in a while, and it’s never the result of something strenuous, it’s always after something simple like standing up from a chair or opening a door or reaching for something a little high up, so I never really know when I’m going to get hit up with another major backache and being extra careful/fearful all the time doesn’t seem to make any difference. The doctors say I have a slipped disc but they don’t want to operate because the dangers outweigh the potential benefits yadda yadda yadda I just gotta live with it. That fall and winter I also caught more than my fair share of sicknesses (tonsillitis, bronchitis, strep throat, major ear infections, something horrible on the plane to Las Vegas when I went there for Interbike with Artie, and some weird kind of thankfully mild pneumonia that I cannot pronounce) and it was this unrelenting succession of illness that year that turned me into a germaphobe greather than Howie Mandell but still less than Howie Hughes (Purell and Airborne are always at my disposal and when someone coughs or sneezes, like Pavlov’s dogs I involuntarily start saying my prayers to the immunity gods).

Now all this careful behavior has kept me relatively sickness and injury free over the past couple of years but it’s also contributed to my laziness, wimpiness, boringness, grumpiness, out-of-shapeness, and then ironically enough all of these things turn around and combine forces and bite you back by making you less healthy than you could have been in the first place. Why do sit ups if they could potentially throw my back out again? Why go biking? It’s a little chilly out and I’ll have to bundle up but then I’ll get sweaty and have to take off layers and then I’ll catch a cold! These are literally the kind of things that I allowed myself to think and even though my doctor’s orders were to get exercise and lose weight my own hypothesis on the matter was that I needed more rest because I just felt so lazy and tired all the time. So I got myself tested for Mononucleosis because I kind of felt the same way I did back when I was 17 and actually had it, but those results came back negative too. Funny thing is that eating lots of fattening food and not moving ever is pretty much the prescription for increasing your general feeling of exhaustion and malaise, but I kept at it for a good long time because I wasn’t fully convinced and because sitting in front of the internet can be a lot of motionless fun and the egg crate on my mattress is just so extra cushy-comfy.

Finally some changes came along that brought everything into focus. Loud and painful changes i.e. all my other joints. No longer was it just my knees hurting and crackling but very steadily literally every single other joint in my body joined in the chorus—except for maybe my toes they seem to still be truckin’ along like little champs. As for my ankles, hips, wrists, elbows, shoulders, NECK oh my neck I could crunch that thing around every ten minutes and make those around me cringe every time, and then there was my hands—every last digit in my fingers—they ached and crackled and locked up randomly and every minute of every day they existed in this stasis of weakness and pain. And so it was back to the doctor who gave me some kind of NSAID pain reliever and sent me to the orthopedist who gave me some other kind of pain reliever and sent me to the rheumatologist (an appointment I had to wait like 6 months for) who gave me cortisone and basically told me, “Hey there big guy welcome to the rest of your life and allow me to introduce you to your new best friend ARTHRITIS! Since there’s nothing else I can do for you I’ll just make myself scarce and let you two get better acquainted . . .”

Arthritis. It’s something you hear old people complain about every day but you ignore it just like you ignore their “when I was your age” stories. I don’t mean to sound harsh but old people’s complaints are easy to ignore because well, they complain about everything. “The price of peas is too high, that waitress’ skirt is too short, this president doesn’t know what he’s doing, my arthritis is killing me, music ain’t what it used to be hell in my day Tommy Dorsey woulda whooped Lil’ Wayne’s behind without missing a beat.” The truth of it all though is that arthritis is really horrible, not horrible enough to kill you but horrible in the sense that it robs you of all the ability and comfort you once knew and replaces it with a hollow, swollen pain that remains with you through every minute of every day. As long as you are awake you are constantly aware of it and apparently it’s not just for old people—but if you end up with it you become just like an old person mighty fast. Even though you’re still in your twenties you find yourself wanting to sit down all the time. Utter dread flushes through your body when you accidentally drop something that should really get picked back up. You begin to believe in and even try out all sorts of kooky cures like eating gin soaked raisins and the potions and creams your mother ordered up from the Harriet Carter catalogue and when your brother invites you skiing you look at him like he’s some kind of crazy kid even though he’s ten years older than you and when your friend Anthony invites you rock climbing you want to punch him but you know it would hurt your knuckles more than it would his face and even though you’re not a particularly religious person you find yourself investigating the travel and lodging costs associated with a pilgrimage to bathe in the reputedly healing springs of the shrine at Lourdes.

And that’s pretty much how it went down and how it remains to this day. I have my good days and I have my bad days. Sometimes I’m as stiff as a board and it takes me ten minutes to get down the stairs in the morning. Sometimes I spend the whole weekend on the couch. Sometimes my hands hurt so bad that I just clutch them together and fight back actual tears while thinking about giving my guitars away. But sometimes I can hop around pretty effortlessly and bound up stairs two at a time and even when I really focus and try to find some residual pain deep in my knees, it’s just not there. It comes and goes. I don’t want to come off as this whiny excuse wimp but I do feel that it’s necessary to explain that my big fat guy status is not wholly attributed to the deep affection I feel towards Baja Chalupas—I’m also an arthritis case who is no longer always capable of the feats of strength that I once was—but I still cling to some hope. There’s the case of Ray Audette, author of Neanderthin and this other random guy who rode up to my shop one day and made me guess his age. He looked to be in his late forties and since he was so pushy on the subject I humored him by guessing that he was in his early forties. He then proudly announced that he was 95 years old and offered up his 1910 driver’s license as proof. I’ll come back to both of these characters in a later blog but for now my issue is that they both claimed to have conquered arthritis and poor health in general. One of them did it through eating; the other did it on the bicycle. I plan to do it via both channels and together we’re going to see what happens.

Now this brings me back to where we began. TREK WORLD 2008: the really big gathering of bicycle people from all across the nation. The number one thing that I learned from my time in Wisconsin is that no matter what corner of America they come from, the majority of bike geeks look and act exactly the same. For the most part they are these skinny, self righteous, humorless, and smug little dudes who decorate their shaved calves with chain-ring tattoos, decorate their faces with weird eyeglasses, carry little man purses everywhere they go that are filled with nothing they actually ever need, and dress childishly and inappropriately for whatever setting they may be in. There are also two basic subspecies: the capris-pants/too colorful and weird indoor soccer shoe wearing Eurostyle type who exemplifies the description above, and then there is his boss, the older, really really fat guy who sports a silver ponytail that has remained tightly wound since the 1980’s, a frighteningly unkempt Santa beard, dirty cargo shorts, biking socks with sandals, a greasy, worn-out bike logo emblazoned T-shirt, little John Lennon circle glasses, and a disgusting Campagnolo cycling cap that hasn’t been in style since White Men Can’t Jump was the cool movie to go see that weekend. These people collectively drive me crazy and I feel that they are the number one reason that our industry isn’t anywhere near as successful as it could be and I’m proud to say that we don’t have any of them working at our shop. When a normal human being walks into a bike shop harboring the intentions of buying a bicycle only to discover that he or she has to purchase said bicycle from one of these creatures, the natural reaction is to run out the door and straight to the Hummer dealership and use said Hummer to drive over as many baby trees as possible and can you really blame them?

Anyway I had to go spend a long weekend with these goofs and I wasn’t too excited about it, but then I got to meet John Burke, president of Trek, the head goof himself. He’s this big tall guy with kind of a crispy John Edwards haircut, an apparent reverence for khaki pants and polo shirts, and a real knack for looking like he’s somebody’s dad. He’s got this Craig T. Nelson ex-jock-turned-coach air about him and in speaking to all of us at a special gathering offsite at the famous Orpheum Theater, he really did take on that role. He made sure we felt proud to be Trek dealers, made sure we felt confident about the direction they’re going as a company, and with a dialed fanfare he revealed all the more noteworthy products and bikes that would be coming out that year and somehow he accomplished all of this by employing his own distinct brand of blandness that’s almost in the style of Steven Wright, the kind of monotone that makes you wonder if he’s a comic genius or if there’s just something wrong with some certain sector of his brain.

I also got to take a tour of the actual Trek factory out in Waterloo. We watched carbon frames being woven up and glued together, frames and components being tested. It gave me a much deeper respect for the amount of labor and skill that goes into the creation of just a single bicycle. Pretty neat stuff. Be sure to check out my photos and videos of it all at the end of this piece.

Later on, back at the Monona convention center where everyone was walking around checking out all of the attractively displayed new stuff, we started to notice this group of young girls riding around the carpeted showroom pretty carelessly on the most flowery and girly beach cruisers available shouting out “excuse me’s” to anyone in their way. We started muttering to one another about how rude that was, where are their parents et cetera et cetera until one of the Trek employees chimed in that they were Mr. Burke’s daughters and “hey I’m certainly not going to say anything!” And then I saw them all go cruising right past the man himself and he didn’t say anything! If either of my parents happened to own the biggest bike company on the planet and I pulled a stunt like that at one of their conventions when I was a little kid I can guarantee you they would have clothes-lined me with more skill than Johnny Knoxville. But the guy didn’t even blink. I was totally shocked. Then I started to think about it.

Bikes are supposed to be ridden. They’re not supposed to be up on pedestals while clowns in funny clothes walk around them eating brie and drinking microbrews. John Burke’s kids knew that and that’s why they felt obliged to take them for a spin. John Burke himself knows that and so does everyone that works for him and that’s why his company is so successful. All of us clowns know it too, and seeing those girls happily pedaling around, not causing any real damage other than to our own unfortunately skewed senses of adult propriety, it gave us all the itch, even your humble narrator, we got that itch to just get out there and ride around. But instead we just kept at the brie and the beer and eventually we meandered back to our hotel rooms.

The next night, after a day full of sometimes good, sometimes mind-numbing nod-off kinda classes, we gathered again as one large group in the main auditorium for what was billed as a “Major New Product Announcement by John Burke”. I listened in to all the “what’s it gonna be?” conversations gurgling around me and everyone was pretty sure that he was going to unveil either a new Tour de France Team or a new line of shoes. That was the extent of their creativity, but I felt a much bigger vibe than that bouncing around so I decided to allow myself to get a little excited.

The auditorium went dark . . . a movie reel started rolling . . . John F. Kennedy at his podium talking about how America is going to put men on the moon and how she’s going to do it not because it’s going to be easy but because it’s going to be hard. Then another film clip played, the same one Sal and I adopted for the intro to our Fit Kids Smile More program. The one from “Pay It Forward” where Kevin Spacey assigns to his class an order to come up a with a way of changing the world and gives them the whole year to think it over. So we watched these couple of clips and sat there in our chairs kind of dumbfounded until Mr. Burke came back out and slowly but surely revealed the simple yet mind-blowing master plan: first we bike dealers actively try to get people to stop driving their cars to places that they could ride their bikes to, then children and adults will begin to dissolve the astonishingly prevalent trend of American obesity, then traffic congestion will thin out, then the environment will begin to clear up, and last but not least us bike dealers will in return have more business to busy ourselves with.

Okay that’s the short version and not a very good rendition overall. I can tell I’m not stirring up the same kind of emotion in you that Mr. Burke stirred up in all of us but in my defense it’s very late at night as I’m writing this and Burke had all sorts of really cool charts and facts and figures and a really cool Power Point and all that jazz at his disposal and trust me everyone in the room was jumping for joy over this idea and how much biker advocacy Trek was declaring they’d put into this commitment and we were on the verge of belting out in unison a rendition of Elton John’s “The Circle of Life”. It was that good. Then Mr. Burke wrapped up his presentation and told us where the buses would be waiting that were to take us to a big party planned in our honor. Then some guy in the back stood up and shouted out, “BUSES? WHY DON’T WE RIDE BIKES?” At first I thought it was just some bike shop prankster, but as he stood there in the hazy spotlight of the giant overhead projector, I made out that it was Jon Minor, Trek’s Kids Bikes Product Manager, probably my favorite Trek employee that I’d met that weekend, a jovial character with a good attitude, a not so skinny person who works in the bicycle industry—my kind of guy. Our attention panned back to Mr. Burke who said something like, “Well that is an option. Even though it’s raining and there really are buses out there, we do have twelve hundred bicycles parked on the patio for those of you who might be interested.” Behind him he switched on a slide that showed the rows and rows of Trek Limes parked right in front of the very building in which we were all seated. Needless to say we were all interested.

As we made our way out, I realized I was carrying an expensive camera, a cell phone, a bunch of paperwork and catalogues and other important things that would A) occupy both of my hands and make it hard for me to control a bicycle and B) become destroyed if they got wet. But I threw caution to the wind and realized I’d been in much stickier situations before and decided to just see how things turned out. As we neared the exit, we passed through a gauntlet of Trek employees. One of them pointed at me and shouted out, “Hey there’s one!” Another guy handed him something and then he handed it to me. It turned out to be a little waterproof Nike cinch-up backpack thing. “For your stuff,” the guy said. Now I know it might sound lame, but that one gesture right there, that little detail, that one little extra consideration on their part just sealed the deal for me. I decided then and there that the Trek Corporation will forever be my favorite bike company kind of like when Lance Armstrong decided he’d always be in dept to his sponsors when they really stuck their necks out (pre-tour victory) and threatened their insurance companies to take him in when no one else would because of all his pre-existing conditions.

Then some other people set me up with the ill-fitting helmet and poorly adjusted bike I mentioned 25 pages ago and off I went. It really wasn’t raining that badly and I was feeling positive about things in general. It had been so long since I’d ridden a bicycle around other bike people that I started out really intimidated but the pace was pretty laid back and I didn’t feel like too much of a tortoise. Despite my non-biker like shape, I got the feeling that those around me assumed that I knew what I was doing. It didn’t seem like any one of them was onto me just yet. Then the sky opened up and everyone sped ahead to shorten the amount of time they’d have to spend in it . . . except for me . . . I ended up coming in last place, the wettest place, alongside a hunched over old man who was either an old timey bike shop owner or some homeless thief who’d blended in with the throngs of Trek dealers on his way towards free food and drink and bicycle.

I rolled up to these big tents set up in some athletic field, winded and drenched but not altogether demoralized. I was impressed with myself. I actually made it there by bike without falling apart. Maybe I wasn’t as bad off as I had thought I was.

The party had been deemed a Luau. We were all given flowery leis to wear around our necks upon entrance and hired Hula girls were dancing about, but none of us were reminded of Hawaii in the least bit because we were all either soaked or freezing or both. I ate free food, I drank free beer, I cracked jokes with those around me, I watched the Hula girls do their thing. Before long we all got onto buses and headed back to our hotels because sometimes you really can have too much fun.

Later that night, after cleaning up and putting on my last set of clean AND dry clothes I decided to stroll on down to the Best Western cocktail lounge to see if anything was shaking there, but I realized that my shoes were obliterated. They were so soaked that when I flexed them, water literally poured out from their stitchings so I tucked them into the heater in my room and turned the thing on high. Then I remembered that Trek had given me a pair of cutesy baby blue Wasabi flip flops as a little welcome gift when I had checked in earlier that weekend. I unwrapped and stepped into them in front my room’s full length mirror and I cannot even describe the depth of personal insecurity that flushed through me at that moment, but the draw of a Best Western cocktail lounge is a power to be reckoned with so even though I was dressed like a buffoon, I walked out my door and down the hall.

When I got there and eyed up the dudes at the bar I knew everything was going to be okay. Not only did the place turn out to be a veritable Mos Eisley Cantina of bike geeks, but there also sat a little blue flip flop upon every single foot in the house.

The next day, the last day, always a sad one when you’ve been having fun, we all just kinda looked around the showroom again while waiting for the buses to come and take us back to the airport and all our separate hometowns around the country.

Airport security in Madison Wisconsin is much more severe than it is in Newark. When going through my belongings, this young kid working there shut down the whole conveyor belt because of something of mine and he had to call over his mustachioed supervisor. As the guy came strolling over I saw that he was wearing latex gloves and my entire being tensed up and I readied my fight and flight response but the issue turned out to be nothing more than the size of my liquids baggie. I listened to a long lecture about how a gallon bag is not the same as a quart-sized bag but because my particular choice of toiletries would have fit into a quart-sized bag I was off the hook. As the guy turned around and left, the kid offered up an embarrassed little “sorry” to me and I retaliated by cheekily asking him if that guy was his dad.

So I made it home unscathed and pumped and determined to make some big changes around here. That’s it, I’m getting back in shape and I’m gonna do it by riding my bike like I used to. And I’m gonna get other people to ride their bikes too! Yeah!

And then a whole year passed. It just kinda snuck right by me. When I looked back on it, I realized that I’d done nothing at all.