All athletes love their sports, but cycling has a fetishistic side to it—the love of this deceptively simple machine that allows you to silently float, race and climb. These 50 essays on the many varieties of bicycle love range from dreamy reminiscences of childhood bikes to powerful, sometimes insane adult attachments to mountain bikes, road bikes and tandems. They all celebrate the freedom of cycling, the elegance of the machine and the beauty of the act. The characters are everyone from a teenage girl on a moun-tain bike to old men crossing the country on touring bikes to couples falling in love while cycling. Funny, revealing and intensely emotional, these stories show the secret inner life of every cyclist.
| Surprised into Flight | 9 | |
| Pedaling Fool | 13 | |
| Scratching the Surface | 19 | |
| Crash and Learn | 23 | |
| The Perfect Bike | 27 | |
| Morning Revolutions | 29 | |
| Streetpulse; or, How I Learned to Stop Taking the Bus and Love Bike Commuting | 33 | |
| To Africa and Back | 37 | |
| Callie's Gift | 41 | |
| Full Cycle with Spin | 47 | |
| Another Way of Getting There; or, How My Bicycle Became My Lover After Many Years of Servitude and Neglect | 53 | |
| Wanted: Young Bike, for Adventure, Escape, and ... Who Knows? | 59 | |
| The Mountain Bike Club We Started | 65 | |
| Loving My Rockhopper | 69 | |
| Heaven Is a Wide Berm and a Tailwind | 73 | |
| Haleakala High | 77 | |
| Break Up | 83 | |
| Riding to Freedom | 89 | |
| The Unbearable Lightness of Biking | 95 | |
| Riding for Nefertiti | 101 | |
| Mas Fina | 107 | |
| It's About Freedom | 111 | |
| An Old Bike and an Even Older Man | 115 | |
| If All the Traffic Were Bicycles | 119 | |
| Into the Wind | 125 | |
| Pedaling in Tandem | 129 | |
| Traveling in Tandem | 133 | |
| Go Hard or Go Home | 139 | |
| The Lady of the Ditch | 145 | |
| Lazarus | 149 | |
| A Return to Freedom | 153 | |
| Lessons from the Great Divide | 157 | |
| Saddlemasochism | 163 | |
| Bike-Speed | 167 | |
| Life Is Short but an Ugly Bike Is Forever | 173 | |
| One if by Land, Two if by Sea, and Nine if You're Like Me ... | 177 | |
| Bicycle Bliss | 183 | |
| War Bike | 187 | |
| Ma Kettle Biker | 193 | |
| Kneeling at the Altar of Schwinn, 1966 | 199 | |
| The Downhill Stretch: An Elegy | 205 | |
| Pedaling Pregnant | 209 | |
| "Who Wants to Marry a Bicyclionaire?" or, Bicycling in Search of the Erotic in an Ekpyrotic Universe | 213 | |
| The Secrets of the Love Affair | 221 | |
| If Ever There Were Warriors... | 223 | |
| A Rusty Old Memory | 229 | |
| Leaving the Sport You Love | 233 | |
| Running with the Big Dogs | 239 | |
| The Face of the High Desert | 245 | |
| Did Someone Mention Bicycles? | 249 | |
| The Revolution Evolution | 253 | |
| It's Not About the Bike | 257 | |
| The Inside Spin | 261 | |
| The Yellow Huffy | 267 | |
| Phat | 271 | |
| Dalton Highway | 275 | |
| The Great Bicycle Experiment | 281 | |
| The Life of an Inspired Cyclist | 287 | |
| Bicycle or Boyfriend | 291 | |
| Medical Experience | 299 | |
| Bicycle (Carriage) Built for Two | 303 | |
| Loving a Cyclist | 307 |
Anonymous
Posted January 2, 2009
funny!! Glad to see others love their bikes as much as I do!!
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Overview
All athletes love their sports, but cycling has a fetishistic side to it—the love of this deceptively simple machine that allows you to silently float, race and climb. These 50 essays on the many varieties of bicycle love range from dreamy reminiscences of childhood bikes to powerful, sometimes insane adult attachments to mountain bikes, road bikes and tandems. They all celebrate the freedom of cycling, the elegance of the machine and the beauty of the act. The characters are everyone from a teenage girl on a ...