Road Cycling Project, How it Started

It was Pi Guy’s idea. “Wouldn’t it be fun to ride our bicycles to Cortez? “ Cortez being Cortez, Colorado, where we have relatives, Pi Guy’s Uncle, Aunt and cousin, my in-laws. The implied “from” is Colorado Springs, Colorado, where we live. Pi Guy is thirteen years old. I’m his dad, forty-four years older. That ten word question covers about 350 miles.

Something in his question established a bit extra drive in me to chase it down and to not dismiss it as just wishful thinking. Perhaps it was to undertake a collaborative project of a common interest and develop a basis for open conversation over the years to come. But it also hooked into some powerful memories from my own childhood.

A lot of my youth was entwined with bicycle adventures. I always had had a bicycle while growing up, the one speed coaster brake kind, and the three-speed hand brake kind. After moving to Walpole, New Hampshire a friend (now professor at Colorado University) and I would take off on our bicycles and traverse into Vermont and out toward Marlow, Chesterfield & down to Keene from our homes in Walpole. We were about the same age as Pi Guy is now.

These bicycle rides were some that would have been considered longer automobile trips by some of our neighbors. And it was before the time of Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong, so there were no real bicycle heroes for a couple of young rural American boys. We also had no real awareness that there was a sport of bicycle racing. It was for me, at least, the satisfactory combination of friendship, mobility and adventure.

With proceeds from grounds keeping when I was fourteen, a five-speed derailleur Schwinn was one of my first major self-funded purchases. It was high tech, and further fueled my sense of adventure and mobility. I would cycle, solo, an occasional forty or fifty mile round trip to Springfield, Brattleboro, Spofford or Acworth; and Keene was a more occasional destination.