The inspiration for this post comes from the fact that, as of 2022, my first cycling career, which ran from 1965 to 1979, and my second cycling career, which so far has run from 2008 to 2022, are now equal in length. Interestingly, the gap between those careers was 29 years so that next year, in 2023, the sum of my two careers will equal that gap. Will this be an excuse for another post?
Forget about another post, is this post even justified? By what logic did my first cycling career not start until 1965? I have (and have posted) a picture of me with my first bike which was taken in 1956 and I haven't been without a bike since. I did at least one recreational bike ride back then, a long ride a friend and I took, way out into the countryside around Santa Rosa. (I have no idea what "way out" meant to me back then.) By the same token, the 29 year interregnum between my first and second cycling careers was not entirely devoid of cycling, I remember at least one ride with my son, Michael, when he was in elementary school. (If memory serves, I rode my old 3-speed.) And then there was my year and a half gap at the beginning of my "second" cycling career. Perhaps my second cycling career should be dated from 2010, not 2008. All good points, but in the end some arbitrary decisions had to be made and I am sticking to the dates in the previous paragraph.
What happened in 1965 that defined the beginning of my first cycling career? It was the purchase of my first "10-speed", a 1963 Schwinn Continental from my Uncle Leonard who owned a bike shop in San Jose, California. It was once I had that bike that I began taking recreational rides regularly. I have no photographs of that bike so cannot be entirely sure when I purchased it. It could not have been before 1963 because I remember enough about that bike to be able to date it’s model year but I might have purchased it a while after the nominal model year and it might have been a while before I started riding it seriously.
My second cycling career started in 2008 when I took my 1963 Bianchi Specialissima into Daniel Boone Cyclery and had it restored to rideability and continues through today, 2022, 14 years later. How has it compared to the first? The obvious, most important difference is my age. My first cycling career ran from age 16 to 30, my peak athletic years. So far, my second has run from age 59 to 72, both starting and continuing well into the inevitable decline of old age. I have never been an exceptional athlete so even in my first cycling career there were always cyclists who were much faster than me; I didn’t win a lot of bicycle races. On the other hand, completing a ride was rarely a problem. The closest I came to confronting my limitations came during the summer of 1967 when I cycled through Europe and discovered that I could not ride every single day for weeks on end without a day off now and then. My second cycling career, on the other hand, has been dominated by disappointment. I plan to accomplish something in my cycling, not something unreasonable but something that seems almost modest, and over and over again, I am unable to accomplish it. The biggest accomplishment of my second cycling career (other than maintaining it for 14 years) was the completion of two 200 kilometer brevets in 2012 and 2013. That sounds great until you realize that what I had hoped to accomplish was to follow that first 200 kilometer brevet with a 300, 400, 600 and then on to a Grand Randonée, 1200 kilometers long. Many cyclists, some older than I, have been able to do that. Not me.
Not as significant as my age but another big difference between my first and second cycling careers is the impact of computers and related technologies. This started with the plain old desktop computer and its word processors, spreadsheets, and databases and continued with cycling computers for tracking speed, distance, heart rate, cadence, etc. Let’s begin with the gathering of ride data; distance, time, average speed, etc. During my first cycling career, all the options were mechanical. The only device any of us ever used was a small odometer mounted on the front fork. It consisted of a small counter attached to the fork and a mechanical activator attached to a spoke. Every time the wheel completed a rotation, the activator would hit a gear-like mechanism on the counter and via some mechanical mechanism, that would be converted to miles. These caused a bit of drag and also were not entirely robust to high speeds, e.g. descending a mountain pass. At high speed the activator would hit the counter so hard it would advance more than it should resulting in an overestimation of miles. At the extreme, this would damage or destroy the counter. My memory is that over time we all stopped using them. We did occasionally estimate ride length in miles, but did so by measuring the distance on a paper map. Even more rarely, we would measure ride time using a mechanical stop watch (especially for sprints) or a wrist watch and using the two together could calculate speed. All of this is probably moot because if memory serves, we made little or no use of any data we collected and in particular did not record or save it.
I purchased my first computer in 1982, after my first cycling career had ended. In 2008, at the start of my second cycling career, computers were an everyday part of my life and that turned out to have a great deal of impact on my cycling. When I got home from my first 5 mile ride, I decided to start recording my rides in a spreadsheet on my computer. Within a few months, I had purchased a Catseye bike computer that tracked miles, time, speed, etc. When I went for a ride, my cycling computer recorded the data from the ride which I transfered, along with any subjective comments I want to make, to a spreadsheet or word processor document and as a result I now have a reasonably detailed record of every bike ride I have taken during my second cycling career. In contrast, I have no record of my rides from my first cycling career other than photographs and the odd souvenir.
Another very impactful aspect of computer technology was the Internet. This blog is one example, but the availability of an almost unlimited source of information about cycling is another. I am pleased that I still have my childhood encyclopedia, the 1956 World Book, which was considered a good encyclopedia at the time. How does it compare with Wikipedia? There are differences due to both age (1956 vs today) and scope but since this post is about then and now I will lump those together. World Book had about two pages on the topic Bicycle, one taken up entirely by photographs (including the one to the right) which is pretty much the only place I could find any cycling information. My encyclopedia did me no good back during my first cycling career. By comparison, Wikipedia has been and continues to be an invaluable source of information during my second. Wikipedia is invaluable, but nowhere near the most important cycling asset on the Internet. That honor would go to the plethora of websites dedicated to every imaginable cycling subtopic.
Another big change that computer technology has brought to our lives is digital cameras. When I first started thinking about this post, I assumed this would be significant, but as best I can tell, it has not been. I confess I have been too lazy to count all the photographs I have from my first and second cycling careers, but glancing at the two collections, they do not look all that different in size. There is no doubt that digital photography has made photography cheaper, easier, and better, so all I can figure is that the rate limiting step in how many cycling pictures I take is something else, perhaps the inconvenience of interrupting a ride to take that picture.
How about changes in cycling technology? I have blogged a lot about how disorienting I found those changes, but upon reflection, I think they have been very beneficial to my second cycling career. I am working on a future post discussing my current bicycles. Here is a quote from that future post: “I love my 1960 Bianchi Specialissima … [but] it has never been a practical bike (at least not since the 1970s).” Not since the 1970s, that is, not since my FIRST cycling career. Back then, I usually only had one bike and it was always one very much like that Bianchi. I rode such bikes for everything and everywhere with never a thought they were in any way deficient. I now find my one survivor* from that time almost unacceptable compared to my more modern bikes which range from modern but retro to full out cutting edge modern. Why is that? To be honest, I don’t completely know, but I can imagine two possibilities:
- What was comfortable for my young body is now uncomfortable for my old body.
- Back then, I had nothing to compare the Specialissima to so it did not suffer by comparison.
Some specific then and now comparisons:
- Clipless pedals are way better than pedals with toe clips and cleats. Clipless pedals were invented after the end of my first cycling career.
- Lower gears, which I now need, are much more available than they used to be.
- I think that my modern bikes have much more relaxed geometries than the Specialissima, something my aging body now needs. I don’t think those geometries were available during my first career.
- Clincher tires are much better now than they were during my first cycling career, and thus I can take advantage of their practicality with no significant loss in performance.
- Brakes have gotten much better over time.
A recurring topic on this blog is different ideas about training and how I could apply them to my own cycling. How does that compare to how I trained during my first cycling career? As best I can remember, I had no formal training schedule back then, I just rode as whim suggested and occasion allowed. I did have some sources for training information. In the first place, my bicycle club, the Modesto Roadmen, had a coach, the only time I have used a coach in my life. Unfortunately, we did not take nearly the advantage of him we should have and I could probably write an entire blog post as to why. Another potential source of training guidance was “American Cycling” magazine, predecessor to today’s “Bicycling” magazine. I don’t recall that we ever used that guidance and I am really not sure why not. Finally, I still have two small books about British bicycle racing, “Cycle Racing” by Kenneth Bowden, published in 1958 and “Scientific Training for Cycling, third edition” by C. R. Woodard, published in 1961:
“Cycle Racing” is only 129 pages long and only 12 pages are about training. Here is Bowden’s training schedule for excelling in the 100 mile time trial:
- At the end of the season, take off two weeks.
- For the next 20 weeks, take 50 to 120 mile long rides, riding at 15 to 17 miles per hour, rides that should be “relaxed, warm, comfortable, companionable - pleasure miles”. That said, do not stop, carry your food with you, and do all your eating while riding. The total of these rides should be about 2,000 miles. (This works out to about 1 to 2 rides a week - the Zombie.)
- For the next 2 to 4 weeks, ride six days a week. Three of these rides should be short (less than 10 miles,) easy, utility or pleasure rides. One ride should be 80-120 miles long ridden at 16-18 mph in a 68” to 72” gear. One ride should be 20 to 30 miles long ridden at 20 mph in a 70” to 72” gear. The third ride should be 40 to 60 miles long ridden at 18 mph.
- From the end of that 2 to 4 week period to the beginning of the racing season, ride a similar schedule except up the speed and gears a bit and ride a few 250 to 300 mile weekends.
- Thereafter, racing will provide most of the training you need.
It goes without saying I could not complete this schedule today, even if - quite literally - my life depended on it, but how about during my first cycling career? I do recall that pretty regularly we would do 100 mile long rides into the Sierra Nevada Mountains on weekends, so perhaps the initial 20 weeks of training described above would not be too different from what we did, but beyond that, I can say no more. Even if our training did follow this book, I don’t think it was deliberate. Rather, I think any resemblance between our training and that book was purely coincidental.
Scientific Training for Cycling, by comparison, was comically less useful. Looking back through it today I was reminded of the hysterical laughter it invoked when we first got it and I have exactly the same reaction today. Out of kindness, I will say no more.
The final thing that has differentiated my first and second cycling careers is that cycling has gone from being an almost invisible niche sport during my first cycling career to being a mainstream sport in my second. This has resulted in the proliferation of different kinds of bikes and the amount of content on the Internet described above but has also made many more books on cycling available, some of which I have reviewed on this blog, which is where I get many of my training ideas. Back during my first cycling career, I had no idea about what the community thought was the right way to train. During my second, I am inundated with those ideas. I occasionally wonder, what if I had a time machine and could go back and advise my 16-year old self how to train, would it make a difference?
So which was better, my first or my second cycling career? I was inspired by writing this post to give that question a great deal of thought. I went down a rabbit hole of psychology and philosophy trying to understand the meaning and purpose of happiness and came to a firm conclusion: that question is not interpretable, much less answerable. What I can conclude is that my cycling has been a tremendously positive force during both of those careers, and that my life would have been much better without the interregnum separating them. More than that, I cannot say.
* I actually have two surviving bikes from my first cycling career. The first is the 1963 Bianchi Specialissima which is the focus of this post, a bike I acquired used in 1970. The second is the 1967 Hetchins Mountain King I acquired new the summer of 1967. The reason I am focusing on my Specialissima is that it is virtually identical to the way it was during my first cycling career. In contrast, when I got the Hetchins back 50 years after I sold it, all I got back was the frame and even that had been modified. As a result of being built up with all new components, it has a much more modern and comfortable feel than the Specialissima.
^ There have been some retrospective posts on this blog about my first cycling career but that first career has not been covered on this blog in nearly as much detail as the second.
