Hello

That grainy photo in the header is me and my first racing bike.  By racing bike, I mean that it shared the same stickers as the pro’s bikes and didn’t come from a department store.  By me, I mean the kid whose elbows, hips, shoulders and shins have yet to meet pavement in any meaningful way.

The photo is a good thirty years old.   I hadn’t seen it for a long time, or really looked at it in the decade since I started racing bicycles.  Can it possibly be that my legs were bigger and my arms were skinnier?  Maybe it’s an illusion of the shadows and the cut-offs.  But I can see my back peeking out over the inside shoulder; some things don’t change.

Middle age is when most men notice some changes.  I notice a lot.  Not all changes and certainly not all colored by the hardening lenses of middle age.   Which brings me to blogging:  the lot I notice seems unusual.  Not terribly unusual, but just enough to be interesting.  I hope.

I ride almost every day.  Racing well involves more time in the saddle than I care to admit.  But it’s genuinely enjoyable and satisfying on a number of different levels.  It’s a trip – both literally and figuratively.  In blogging, I hope to figure out whether the trippiness is an endorphine soaked, oxygen debt induced hallucination or something more enduring.

On a more concrete level, I plan to blog about riding and racing.  For me, that’s masters bicycle racing in New England.  This is perhaps a hopelessly thin slice of sub-sub culture.  Everyone should have a slice of sub culture to call their own.  We'll see what I can wring from mine.