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Bike Ping

Thanks for the long post. No apologies necessary.

There are quite a few of us here in "The FR Peloton" who have ridden at Cat3 USCF or better and fully understand not only the dedication to maintain that level of fitness, but the pressures that increase as status grows.

When I was riding I lived near Santa Cruz where a lot of riders lived and trained. I knew Jock Boyer who was the first to ride the Tour and met Greg only once. But, both of them had a respect and admiration for the sport and seemed to me to feel a responsibility to American cycling for setting a good example and image. Greg, more so IMO. I'll never believe LeMond used any PED at all, even though he was riding when the simple practice of blood doping became common. I think that began in eastern Europe too, but I could be wrong. There was a lot of talk about it when the '84 Olympic team was exposed, but it was something that was so wide spread it was a case of doing what everyone else was doing. Besides, what was so wrong with saving your own blood to use later, eh? That of course led to other techniques, then EPO.

If you've been following the Tour de France thread here over the years, you'll know that there is a wide variety of opinion in the FR Peloton. I think I am in the minority. "Vision", "euro-twit", "kevkrom" and others are very hard line on PEDs and also came down much harder on Lance than I did. They eviscerated Contador, too. I defended Lance longer than anyone, maybe because of his cancer ordeal and having met him at a USCF banquet when he was still with Motorola. When you meet someone its easy to feel for them a bit more, I guess. I also defended Floyd Landis - I just didn't want it to be true.

Thank you very much for the link to the Tour de France discussion. I have been on Free Republic for a long time and hadn't noticed it before. It is good to know that there are others here that know something about what it is like to actually ride competitively.

My wife and I still ride a tandem frequently, but I haven't entered a bicycle race for over 30 years. I retired as a firefighter six months ago and have been working on increasing my fitness level and losing pounds for the past few months. Things are starting to come together. Who knows? Maybe one day I will be light and fast enough to be competitive in my age group.

“Jock” Boyer was one of my heroes. The Seattle area had some notable riders at that time as well. Mark Pringle who won the 1976 Nevada City Classic when he was 19... A couple years after that on a rainy winter day he exclaimed I was crazier than he was. As a young junior I had ridden 50 miles up from Tacoma in the rain and pushed the pace on an early season 40 mile club ride and then rode back home in the rain.

My younger brother had a huge crush on Rebecca Twigg. When they were both intermediate’s (under 15), they crashed together in a drainage ditch at the side of the road in a race near Redmond. He was using some Cinelli track pedals on his road bike. You had to reach down and pull a lever to get the pedals to release. He was head down in this deep ditch. He couldn't get to the lever and the more he tried the more he slid toward the water a couple feet deep at the bottom of the ditch. Suddenly a beautiful angel came to his rescue. He was scratched up but they rode back together and he felt no pain. He couldn't stop talking about her for weeks. Unfortunately for him nothing came of it.

There were many others... Tom Brosnowski was probably the rider who was the very nicest to me. My room mate at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs won the JR Nationals the following year. It was a long time ago and you probably have never heard of most of my friends, but it was a pretty close knit community.

In those days a lot of the best races near us were in British Columbia and we used to go up there a lot. I rode with a group whose leader had on old VW Van, a crazy mustache and a pony tail that went to his butt. Incredibly, we crossed the boarder dozens of times but were never hassled even one time. None of us were pot smokers because we didn't want to screw up our lung capacity.

Well it is fun for me to reminisce.