The other day, I treated myself to my first new road bike in 17 years - a Specialized Tarmac Expert. Carbon fiber, Dura Ace, Ultegra, Mavic. Need I say more? A picture's worth a thousand words, though.
My old friend Dennis was the owner of Pine Lake Bicycle, my local bike shop when I was growing up. He’s about 5 or 6 years older than I am, but because he owned the bike shop while I was in high school I thought he was MUCH older (with MUCH longer hair). He’s been semi-retired to Scottsdale focusing on his golf game for a number of years now. I learned how to do weight training in high school by riding to the shop in the summer before it opened, and Dennis and I worked out with free weights. That and other stupid things like riding TOSRV, the Tour Of the Scioto River Valley in Ohio – 105 miles per day out and back, Columbus to Portsmouth, on a weekend – with no base miles at all, in April. Maybe that’s why Dennis’ knees are wrecked.
The really crazy stuff used to happen around the bike shop in the winter when it was dead-dead-dead. I remember Dennis and his co-owner Ray had a mechanic assistant they used to persecute (in a fun way) named Ronnie. Before they used cable ties to hold bikes together in cartons, they used industrial-strength rubber bands. After a summer of building bikes they had an awesome collection, and found innovative things to do with them. They used to have awesome rubber-band fights, and kept nailing Ronnie. He naturally got paranoid and harder to ambush. I remember one time Ray actually hid up in the drop ceiling above the acoustic tile with a tile pulled aside to shoot Ronnie as he came into the store. Another time they attached all the rubber bands together (there must have been a hundred of them), and stretched them out in front of the shop. It stretched out like 60 feet. Ronnie came around the corner, Ray released the one end, Ronnie went, “AAAAAHHHH!!” a second before he was enveloped in a cloud of rubber band :)
Aaah, good times :).
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