My love affair with the bicycle began at an early age, near the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York, during the 1970’s. Very few kids were chasing the sport of cycling, but I’d seen pieces and parts of the Tour de France, which, back then, was covered as much as a public interest story as a grueling team sport. But I could readily see why this bunch of diminutive guys should be respected. My dad must have noticed my fascination because I got my first, good quality, “ten speed” around the age of twelve, followed by a sky blue, French made racer as I entered college. By the time I entered my freshman year, I’d already logged thousands of miles, even notching my belt with a couple of “century rides” (hundred miles). In the time between high school and college, I’d managed to find just one friend who wanted to do that kind of riding. The late ’70’s and early ’80’s unfolded well before the bicycle craze of the ’90’s, so, and though I would play as well (soccer would be my specialty) American team sports like baseball, football, and basketball were still on top.
In college, I met a few like minded people who wished to be referred to as “cyclists”. There would be four of us and the atmosphere was very much as it was defined in the “coming of age” film “Breaking Away”, which featured a very young Dennis Quaid in his breakout role. “American Flyers” with Kevin Costner would come a few years later. My college town of Oneonta, New York had its “preppies” and “townies” just like in “Breaking Away”. I hung out with an eclectic crowd which included both factions, plus our small group of “independents”. The hills and mountains that surrounded town ran along the northern edge of the Catskills and were perfect training grounds for cycling hopefuls like us. We rode several times a week together, leaving time for longer rides on weekends. These rides typically hovered around sixty or seventy miles. While I had no real idea as to how “good” we were, we entered a couple of regional events during our junior and senior years and didn’t see any way that we could encounter riders who were far better. Some, yes. That level of confidence was about right, as we all placed in the top third finding ourselves better than most but lagging behind the best. It was a wakeup call, one we could use to push ourselves harder. As a group, we entered no more races. Had we put in more time than we already were, we knew it would affect our studies as we worked our way through to graduation. As I was carrying the heaviest course load as a dual major, it took me an extra semester and I would be the last to graduate. I haven’t seen or heard from my group of cycling buddies since but through the grapevine I came to know that I was the only one to take cycling to its pinnacle. By then, I was hooked and, after I headed west and landed in Colorado, I had become a rider to be reckoned with. The mountains of Colorado would become my training ground and I logged tens of thousands of miles climbing, often in the saddle for six or even seven hours and climbing and descending multiple mountain passes in a single ride. Some of these rides took me on a course where I would climb some 18,000 vertical feet in a day. In Colorado, that equates to four or five mountain passes. I have profound memories of many of those rides. One ride that comes immediately to mind came on a Sunday when I’d planned to head into the office and catch-up on a half-day’s work and do a forty miler in the afternoon, getting home in time to complete a few chores. Instead, I found myself riding from Golden, at roughly 6,600 feet, to the summit of Mount Evens at over 14,000, and back down those three big mountain passes. At 50+ mph and coming all-too-close to hitting a mountain goat, I got back to my office well after dark. I was racing, predominantly of the mountain bike variety, whenever I had the chance to breakaway for a weekend, typically finishing in the top five for my age group and category (expert/elite), one group removed from professional riders. It was about as good as you could do with a day job and no sponsorships. Not to take anything away from their talents, pro riders make a living. however meager of profitable, living in the saddle and don’t generally carry a career as a doctor, lawyer, or engineer on top. There are only so many hours in a week, and being a professional cyclist takes all of them.
By the time I hit my early-30’s, my career in mining and process development became more and more immersive. I would say that my chosen field was quite demanding, with more than a little pressure. With the amount of training (running, mountain biking, road riding, and skiing) I was doing on top of a 55+ hour a week commitment at work, I began to feel an overwhelming sense of daily exhaustion and was generally unwell. Like some insidious disease, the feeling seemed to have crept up from behind while I was unaware of its presence until it had taken root and begun to spread. I sought the help of a doctor who prescribed a stress-test and a suite of blood work. He found that my heart was fine (I think it was protocol to check on my heart relative to the symptoms I was presenting), but I was anemic, low on protein, and had high levels of cortisol and adrenaline in my blood. From those results, he also suspected that I had depression. It seems that I had “hit the wall”. The thing is that unless you push yourself to your personal limits, you’ll never know quite where “the wall” is for you as an individual. I began taking antidepressants because my brain was getting mixed signals and the major swings in serotonin were eating away at my mental health. My doctor thought that I’d benefit from counseling and I was accepting of the idea. I knew that my problems could not be handled from within because the matrix of variables was far too complicated for me to fix without qualified help. Not if I wanted to continue to have the kind of life I’d laid out for myself. I would go on to meet a therapist who would change my life.
Holding a master’s degree in counseling and fifteen years of experience, she seemed to “get” me from our first session on. Her name was Pie Frye, which made me smile. In the beginning, I would see her twice a week, after work. Though there wasn’t much information available at the time in the way of holistic medicine and what would later be known as living “mindfully”, this was her area of expertise and I was lucky to have met her. My first assignment was to read Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. It was an eye opener and I used many of the suggestions in the book, including compartmentalizing my life to add structure and maintain achievable goals. Then there was a chapter on learning how to say “No”. Like many diligent and hard working perfectionists, I was all about “being all things to all people” and this meant that “saying no” to my boss was just something I didn’t do. With how busy I was chasing competing goals (like being both a top notch endurance athlete and the best project engineer at my place of work), I was the perfect example of the downside of being an “overachiever”. This cycle of push and pull had brought me to a level of extreme exhaustion and frustration where I began to see my boss as the enemy. After all, it was he who stood in the way of my taking my endurance sports to the highest possible level.
As with many people who move to a place like Colorado, the relationship between work and play can be a difficult one. Many people view adult athletes as kids that just never grew up. That we couldn’t possibly be any more driven than they were. I remember how I’d once said that it was easier to live life as a “workaholic” than it is to be a top level athlete while simultaneously managing a professional career. This was a time when I needed to do as my therapist would have me do and that is to begin to chip away by tactfully learning to say no when a chronic “yes” would continue to foster massive frustration. My boss was a religious man and I knew for a fact that he respected staff with families who were church-going, standup citizens. That is what he could relate to and he had absolutely no respect for my chosen lifestyle. I elected to live at 9,200 feet in the foothills of the Front Range and take on the hour-long commute to and from work so I could train at altitude in the same way many endurance athletes do, for precisely the same reasons. Colorado is full of them so I had no trouble finding like-minded people outside of my workplace. There is far less oxygen available at 9,200 feet and above than at sea level, or even at an “endurance athlete mecca” like Boulder, which comes in at a mere 6,000 vertical feet. I didn’t want to be “as good” as these highly-gifted, hard-working athletes who “lived below”, I wanted to be better. To this end, and not just in one sport, but a half-dozen, I trained like a maniac. If I wasn’t working, I was training. At one point (which lasted for more than a decade), I was focused on how long-distance running could be a boon to my mountain and road biking, so, along with riding a couple of hundred miles a week, I was running sixty. I had dropped so much mass that, at six-four, I was just 175 pounds and less than four percent body fat.
Push came to shove and I’d just had a successful mountain bike race to celebrate my 32nd birthday, which, that year, fell on a Saturday. I placed second and, after going out on the town that night with my wife (also an elite mountain athlete), we did the long drive home on Sunday. That Monday, my boss announced that we had just signed a big contract with a new client and were going to be running a pilot plant 24/7 for the next six months, seven days a week. Then there was the thing that completely put it over the top. We were to perform the process refinement work in the high desert of Nevada, two months on and seven days off. At another time in my life, this wouldn’t be a problem but at that time it would eradicate my plans for entering at least eight mountain bike races over that same period. As with most sports, the athlete has a finite window of six or eight years when they’re in their prime. I was smack-dab in the middle of mine and, good or bad, being a high-level athlete had become the most important thing in my life. It had taken an incredible amount of work, discipline, and sacrifice to get to where I was and I wasn’t about to blow it all off for one project at work.
I’d chosen a steel-toed boots and hardhat path in my field because it was safely within my capabilities and my plan was to simply work a forty-five hour week and be paid just enough from which to lead an athletic, adventure-driven lifestyle. The mountain sports I chased took years to cultivate and I was now good enough at each of them to never turn away. My career goal was to end up as a middle manager at most and continue to work well within my comfort zone, with a reasonable amount of overtime like most of my friends managed to do. I was capable of landing something in my field that was at a higher level, but I’d have invariably been chained to a desk, stuck in someone else’s idea of a life. This was the career sacrifice I had made to live a mountain lifestyle like I’d dreamed of since I was in my early teens.
I was exhausted from my weekend race in Gunnison and walked into my boss’s office to ask the hard question: “Was I to be appropriated to the team that will be spending the next six to eight months in Nevada? He answered “of course…you’re the best “float guy” (flotation is a chemically complex mining process) we’ve got”. I was slated to be a project lead. My head was spinning and before I knew it, I said “no thanks” and that I would be happy to work some long hours supporting the project from our facilities in Golden, Colorado. I knew that that would be a viable alternative, but he had already picked his “home team” and the reason given was that these were “family guys”. This presented me again with my thoughts on being a workaholic; that it was commendable to work long hours and make personal sacrifices for those with families to feed but could always use something like “Johnnie’s baseball game” as an excuse to take a pass when they needed one. They would receive no demerits for not pulling their weight in the same manner that some of the rest of us did. This particular manager had a dim view of dual income (“DINC”) husband and wife teams with no parental responsibilities. It was almost as if he thought of us as evil…seriously. Those of us who were either single or married without children were thus the backbone of his group in the company and were expected to rise to meet the challenge such that those who were fathers (or, in a few cases, mothers) could expect to work more standardized hours but enough time on top to be considered by their families, friends, and peers s “workaholics”. I had nothing but disdain for this wholly American paradigm. I knew something about European culture and most countries had a completely different view of what life should entail.
I couldn’t have ended up with a boss who was anymore different from me and it left me wondering if this was some sort of test from on-high. To make a long story short, I decided to regroup and make another run at him the next day. To me, the issue remained unresolved, though I’m sure that he already understood my sentiments.
I woke up the next day at my usual time of 5 AM to get some sort of workout in before I showed up at work by 7:15. A typical workday found me getting in a two hour ride or run before arriving back home between 8 and 9. My wife and I shared the responsibility in seeing that our two wonderful dogs got their exercise needs taken care of and that they were as well cared for as most people’s kids. We spent every available moment with them. I was also putting in some of my “spare time” as a volunteer firefighter and head EMT for our mountain fire department and rescue team. I was completely maxed-out. My boss knew of my commitment to community service but seemed to give me zero credit for it. To him, it was just one more reason I had to juggle my time. To him, I was nothing more than an enigma and not of the variety to empathize with. By now, we had a grave dislike of one another. I had zero respect for his life and he had even less for mine.
I’d asked that he meet with me at 9 AM that Tuesday morning. I would have just 20 minutes of his time to try to get an impossible point across. When I asked if he’d had time rethink anything, like my being able to remain on “the home” team in support of the field work in Nevada, he simply replied “no”. From my perspective, and from experience, I knew there would be plenty of work to be done for the same project at our facilities in Golden. He gave me a clear picture of his intentions for me and I felt the wall behind me closing in. I sat there for five minutes and he didn’t budge. My back was now against that wall. I sometimes wondered if, in some twisted way, he was trying to “break me”. But, I had a certain level of confidence in that I was well thought of within the greater company and had already met with executive management on my struggles with my current boss, who’d already been having his way with me for three years. John’s (my boss) responses to anything I proposed in lieu of spending the next six months in Nevada were to the negative. I remembered the book I’d read and just this once I was going to hold my ground and say “no” to the Nevada project, particularly if it meant virtually never being home for half a year. In saying “NO!” I had followed through on a promise I’d made with myself. I let him have it with both barrels and he threatened to have me fired. I did him one better and quit. I refused to allow him to have free reign over my time. I was already averaging 55 hour work weeks and was very good at my job. I’d proven myself as a performer within the company and had acquired a broad based skill set in terms of the business of mining and minerals process development and could confribute effectively to any of the six or seven groups within the company. Not even 24 hours after I’d walked out I got a call from our VP of operations asking me to layout the things that would make my job more enticing, if I were to be assigned to a different program manager, one whom I happened to know well and with whom was a personal friend. We came to an agreement, which came with a promotion and a raise and I was told to take the rest of the week off, with pay. You could have knocked me over with a feather!
Thus, a new chapter opened in my life and I would never again have to fight so hard for what I believed were my rights. The biggest change came after seeing my therapist for about a year and reading several more self-help books on living mindfully and “how to live your best life”. For the rest of my career, I worked my but off and was happy to do so as long as my needs as an individual were respected. Sure, there would be gaps in my training at times when I believed work needed to come first. It was always a difficult balancing act, but somehow I managed to become a top notch cyclist, riding (and being ready to ride at the drop of a hat) at any opportunity that presented itself. The key was in being effective with the time I had and, quite often, being short on sleep. I would continue on this insane path, being so driven that I absolutely had to be among the best at whatever I did. Ultimately, I would begin to have problems with my back which would lead to my demise not only as an athlete, but as a professional person. Regardless of not wanting to end up in some executive level position in my career, that is where I landed. My last mountain bike race was just days before my 44th birthday. I placed second. I continued to pursue mountain sports at a high level until I hit 50 and all hell broke loose with my lumbar spine. Somehow, I made comeback after comeback, from one surgery to the next. I’ve had five spine related surgeries, an emergency gall bladder removal, and several near-death hospitalizations. I was able to recover and continue to remain on the bike until my 58th year. I had a final road cycling event that I went on to win in 2014. I was 53.
Between my first major spine surgery in 2012 and the second in 2019, I rode over 30,000 miles. I have what I call “100,000 mile legs” in terms of my lifetime on the bike. I have been forced to quit every sport and activity that ever meant anything to me and am currently having difficulty walking. The pain is otherworldly. I do not know everything that the future will bring, but, at 63, it isn’t looking good.
I still have dreams of riding again but my back is diminishing faster than I can maintain it. I have learned to let a lot of things go and focus on a simple life, living with my beautiful wife and incredible three dogs in rural Central Texas on some property. I am thankful for the amazing times I’ve had throughout my life and am attempting to live alongside the depths of the unknown in terms of how much time I have left on this earth. But, having known the highest of highs and the lowest of lows is something I signed up for with such high expectations of what can be accomplished in one person’s life. There is a cost to even the best decisions we make. On balance, I will die a happy man.
