Even The Dog Days Didn't Diminish The Joy Of Biking On The Open Road

A little over a year ago my wife, Anne, and daughter, Louisa, gave me a bicycle for my 49th birthday, and almost immediately it began to change my life. Now I have two bikes, normal blood pressure after years of high-average checkups, a lower resting pulse rate, leg muscles that I flex for friends at slight provocation and. having taken off 25 pounds, the bean-pole build of a teen-ager. What's more, I have gained a window on an all-but-invisible American subculture—competitive bicycling.

In late August this year, a week after my 50th birthday, I pedaled off on a 700-mile solo bike tour. Anne was writing a book. Louisa was heading back to school, and I had some vacation coming, so it was a perfect time for such a journey. And I had a couple of goals: first, to make a pilgrimage to the Saratoga Springs. N.Y. shop of Ben Serotta, the craftsman who built the frame of bike No. 2; second, to thumb my nose at encroaching age. I had begun to be concerned about that some months before the birthday bike, a middling-quality 10-speed, arrived. The cause of my concern was a Manhattan street scene in which a persistent hooker and I were the actors. Angered by my rebuff, as a parting epithet the lady had snapped, approximately, "You white-haired old fornicator."

White-haired I was, and am—prematurely, of course. But old? How could she have been so cruel. Admittedly, after more than two decades of magazine writing and editing, years of heavy smoking and frequent deadlines. I couldn't pass for a kid anymore. I knew I could stand some exercise. But I despised jogging and, being a heavy-boned sinker, swimming was out of the question. But to my astonishment, I took to bicycling like a raccoon to garbage cans. Soon I was doing 20, 30, 40 miles a day on the lightly traveled roads near my home in the exurbs north of New York City.

As I studied up on bicycling, I began to get a yen for a "nice bike." an ultralightweight number of the kind racers ride. After seeing a report on a Serotta in Bicycling magazine, I ordered one. On the day after Christmas 1978, I drove over to Park Ridge, N.J. to get it. There is no Santa Claus, you say? I give you two—Ben Serotta and Walt Grotz, the latter a former intercollegiate and New Jersey state track racing champion and onetime holder of the U.S. 25-mile road record, who runs the Cyclesport bike shop and is Serotta's retailer in my part of the megalopolis. Grotz and a helper. racer Dave Rosencrans, spent the afternoon patiently, expertly completing the assembly of a dream of a bike. When they were finished, my glistening blue Serotta frameset of Columbus tubing was hung with Campagnolo brakes, cranks, pedals, derailleurs and such, 3ttt saddle and stem, Cinelli bars, Mavic wheels and Clement sewup tires.

That bike was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. And, oh my, what a beaut on the road. At 21� pounds—compared with the 30 of old No. 1, which I kept for bad-road, bad-weather riding—and with a shorter wheelbase. smaller fork rake, steeper angles and those sewups, the Serotta was to my other bike as a quarter horse is to a lead pony. That I paid close to $900 for it struck some of my friends as extravagant. But I regard it as perhaps the best and most sensible purchase I ever made. It is not merely functional for fun and fitness; it is a work of art.

As I began planning my I'm-50-but-don't-feel-it tour, I wasn't crazy about the idea of hanging luggage panniers and a seat bag on that racy bicycle, but of necessity I did, and on a gray August morning, wearing black bike shorts and a T shirt and with cleated shoes strapped into toe clips, headed toward Saratoga Springs. 190 miles away.

A broken spoke two hours out was a minor, easily fixed annoyance. The Housatonic River in western Connecticut was a frequent companion as the miles floated past. Four deer came down from a steep green ridge of the Berkshire foothills to eye me and nibble at windfalls in an orchard, where I took refuge from a sudden rain-squall not 300 yards from the day's destination, the White Hart Inn in Salisbury, Conn.

I did 65 miles on Day 1, and at dinner in the inn that evening, attired in a "dress" outfit of red polo shirt, green trousers and orange lightweight running shoes—a clash of colors that would have sent Anne up the wall had she seen it—I was euphoric. The ride had been invigorating, the scenery splendid, the passing motorists courteous, as they would be throughout the tour. I felt young.

The next day's ride, to Williamstown, Mass., brought the first of the tour's three flat tires (with uncanny foresight I had packed three spares) and momentary doubt as to whether I should have switched to the more common clincher rims and wired-on tires. Standard wisdom says to tour on wired-ons, but I found the feel and lightness of the more vulnerable sewups irresistible. Still do. Glass fragments caused two of the three flats, and I realized I might have prevented both if I had used "tire-savers" or run a gloved hand over the tires more often to brush away the roadside debris they picked up. My failure to do so makes me no less angry at people who throw bottles from cars. The aggravation they cause bicyclists nationwide must be enormous.

That afternoon a thunderstorm caught me far from shelter on Route 7 in northwestern Massachusetts. I crouched for half an hour beneath a table tilted up against the rain at a roadside picnic area. Next morning the local newspaper reported that a man had been killed by lightning in the same storm. Irrationally, I suppose, the story reinforced my longstanding belief that the average luck that had marked my life would continue indefinitely. I would cash no million-dollar lottery tickets, but then I wouldn't catch a lightning bolt, either.