How I decided to ride 4000 miles next summer

My love affair with biking started a long time ago, back in the 60s when I was growing up on the northwest side of Chicago, but that's not where I'll begin my story. Instead I'm going to tell you about three pivotal events that occurred over the previous nine years, the first in 2009, the second in 2016, and the third in 2018.

Do you want it?

In July of 2009, while visiting my brother Greg in Minneapolis, I took a ride around the neighborhood on his 1989 Centurion Ironman road bike. I think that was the first time I had ridden a bike since the mid 90s when I did a small amount of riding in Manhattan shortly after I moved there in 1995. I did not enjoy riding in Manhattan, and my bike, a 10-speed Mercier I bought in the early 70s, was soon stolen from my basement. So when I rode Greg's bike in 2009 it was the first I had ridden in 13 or 14 years. It felt wonderful to ride, and my wife, Lori Belilove, said that she saw me come to life when I got on the bike. After my ride around the neighborhood Greg asked "Do you want it?". I wondered where I would ride (I recalled my dislike of riding in Manhattan) and where I would store the bike (we have a lot of space but there's never enough), but eventually I said "Yes".

Centurion Ironman in 2014

The bike arrived in October, and on October 26th I went for my first ride. I committed to riding through the winter no matter how cold it got as long as the roads were clear of ice and snow, and I've kept that commitment every year, all the way down to seven degrees Fahrenheit. I had become a cyclist again!

This Road I Ride

In May of 2016 my friend Jan Albert gave me a copy of Juliana Buhring's book This Road I Ride, her story of her solo ride around the world for which she received the Guinness World Record as the fastest woman to circumnavigate the globe by bike. After reading the book in a few days, I decided that if Juliana Buhring could ride around the world by herself with only eight months of prior experience on a bike, I ought to be able to take a three-day trip, even though I hadn't taken a multi-day trip for 40 years. So on May 28th I set off for a ride along the Hudson River with my destination the West Point Motel, just south of West Point.

The distance from my home to the motel was about 55 miles, but it took me eleven hours to make the trip. How could it have taken so long? There are three reasons. First, I spent a ridiculous amount of time on navigation because I was unfamiliar with 80% of my route and was using paper maps rather than my phone. Second, in all my decades of cycling I had never encountered the sort of climbing I did that day. Third, the temperature reached as high as 90 degrees and I was probably not drinking enough water. I arrived at my motel an hour before sunset where I had a hot shower followed by a steak dinner at Hacienda, a Mexican restaurant down the street. The next day I rode a few miles to and around the West Point campus and back to my motel. I completed the ride home the following day in six or seven hours. I was hooked on the idea of multi-day trips.

Inspired to Ride

In June of this year, 2018, I took a two-day bike trip from Manhattan to Norwalk, Connecticut, and back. In Norwalk I had dinner and spent the night with my friends Audrey Cozzarin and Serafino Carri. The next morning I told Audrey about my desire to ride the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail. I had seen the movie Inspired to Ride (click here for the trailer) which was about the Trans Am Bike Race, an unsupported race of more than 4000 miles from Astoria, Oregon, to Yorktown, Virginia. The roads looked beautiful, and the thought of riding cross-country was exhilarating, but I was hesitant because I wondered where I would stay, not knowing people along the route. Audrey suggested I write to my family and friends to ask whom they knew who might put me up.

As I rode home I thought about Audrey's suggestion, which soon morphed into the idea of riding a different route, one on which I would visit my family and friends. I started to think about a ride that would follow a big loop, starting and ending in New York. After arriving home and having gotten into bed, I used Google maps on my phone to create an initial route that would take me through sixteen states and include visiting my six siblings, my mother, several cousins, my in-laws, and friends from grade school, high school, college, graduate school, and beyond. I went to sleep knowing I would ride this route next year.

Click here to go to a page that has information about my 4000-mile trip.