When I started this whole writing experiment a few months ago, I thought I would be writing about wine primarily, but also about life in general.  I think I have pretty much been doing that.  I also had planned to talk about another huge part of my life: cycling.  I have published about 35 articles on this site so far and all of the posts thus far (with one or two exceptions) have been about drinking.  Thus, I could understand why you would think that I do a whole lot of drinking and not much riding–and that would be pretty close to the case during this past winter, but as the days start to get longer and gradually warmer I start to ride more.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t stop drinking and obsessing about wine, but I try to at least be a bit competitive in some local races.

Since I have become a father, this has been increasingly harder to do, given the baseball, basketball, swimming and piano practices/games/disasters.  My three year old also has the innate ability to make me feel guilty about going out for a ride: “Daddy can’t you play with me for five minutes before you go out for a bike ride?”  Yeesh.  My older son has started to think that hanging out with Dad is not all that cool, so that makes me feel even worse.  As a result, I have become a bit obese.  I usually say I ride so that I can drink, but over the winter, that has become a bit of a farce–I just drink.  So I saw this trip out to the West Coast as an opportunity to ride a bit and to get in some sort of base training for the upcoming bike racing season (and maybe lose a couple of pounds).  Don’t misunderstand–I am not obsessed/consumed with racing.  I used to be much crazier–but with the boys and an unfortunate relatively recent personal event, racing in mass start races have become a lot less appealing.  Suffice it to say that I can’t really afford to crash.  Ergo, I only race in time trials these days.  For those of you not cycling inclined, a time trial is a race against the clock (in French, it’s called ‘contre-la-montre’–against the watch) in which each individual racer has a start time and starts by themselves.  Even before my life-style restrictions, I always preferred these race for a lot of reasons–not the least of which is that I have no one to blame but myself for a bad result or even a crash.

About four years ago, one of the ways my wife convinced me to come to visit the in-laws was to buy a bike out here and leave it at their house (the other way, of course, was to bribe me with a trip to Sonoma or Napa and allow me to bring back at least a case of wine).  Being the poor bastard that I am, I bought a total POS (Piece Of Sheet) from a used bike shop in Berkeley.  I was further limited by the fact that I am tall (‘freakishly’ tall if you asked my slightly shorter than average brother–he’s 5’9″ and I am 6’4″).  Usually, I do not have a lot of choices.  For example, along with my height, I also have large feet (size 15) and when I walk into a shoe store, I am lucky if they have anything in my size (I once walked into the largest Birkenstock dealer in the world–it’s in Munich–and they just laughed when I told them my size–thanks jerk).  Don’t get me wrong, the bike has a little bit of a cool factor.  First, it’s a Bianchi.  A legendary bike, made in Italy.  Second, it is made of steel.  Again, for those less bike-inclined out there, steel is old school, the traditional bike frame material that is rather difficult to find these days.  Last, and most importantly, it was my size!  That is about the extent of the cool factor, however.  When I bought the bike, there was only one apparent negative: it is not the classic ‘celeste’  Bianchi color.  Nope, it’s lilac.  Not purple.  Lilac.  Purple I could handle.  Lilac?  You gotta be effing kidding me.  I was able to convince myself that color is merely cosmetic, I mean, who really gives a honey badger about the color?  So I bought it.

Well, I got the bike back to the in-laws and went for a ride.  A few issues popped up.  The first problem is that the bike is a bit sketchy on the descents.  Actually, that is a bit of an understatement.  Going downhill (and I like to think I am a rather good descender), basically scares the bejesus out of me.  What does that mean?  Well, basically, when I get the sucker above about 40 m.p.h., the bastard starts to shake like a pedophile at a playground.  Not good.  Especially since the in-laws live on the top of a rather large hill, I start every ride with a screaming fast drop to the bottom of the valley.  Second, and this only manifested itself in the last couple of trips, I get a flat tire roughly 30 minutes into every ride.  I approached it very systematically: I changed numerous tubes.  I changed the rim strip (helps prevent flats, essentially).  I then changed the tire.  No luck.  And it sucked out loud.  A flat every time.  A call to my father-in-law every time to come and pick me up.  Ugh….

This time was going to be different–I planned on buying another wheel another tire and another out look.  Giddy-up.

Click HERE for Part 2