About

I didn’t ride a bicycle for about 25 years. I had moved to New York City in 1978 from Boston and came within a whisker of being sandwiched between two merging buses while dodging potholes and manhole-covers on seventh avenue in Times Square. At that time cycling in New York City was almost exclusively the province of bike messengers. This fearless breed appeared to me as skillful then as they are now. I had no desire to be a bike messanger. I just didn’t have that kind of nerve.

Recreational cyclists were few except for those riding along the paths and roadway of Central Park, or up and down the Hudson or East Rivers. On the streets of the city though my recollection is that bicycles for transportation or recreation were rare.

I pedaled home that day of the near miss, leaned my beloved ten speed yellow Raleigh against the wall in the hallway of my apartment building, and never thought about riding again until just after my fiftieth birthday. I’d had that Raleigh for probably ten years. We’d pedaled many many miles together over the hills of western Connecticut and throughout New England. I don’t know what happened to that bicycle. But I wish now I had never let it go.

I also don’t know precisely what it was  that rekindled my interest in riding twenty-five years later. But whatever it was that prompted me to get a bike and ride it,  I’m thankful. When I pushed off  on my first seven mile ride, the one that forced me to question my sanity, I wondered what took me so long, and why I ever stopped. To feel again the wind on my skin and the simple pleasure of getting from here to there, under my own power, was delicious. Getting back on a bicycle was a great decision though I do think it was made for me, rather than by me.

I love to ride hard, challenged to push myself to keep up with those who are younger, stronger, and better riders than myself. And it’s because of the inspiration provided by those men and women,  I’m in the best shape of my life.

John Sutton is among other things a web developer, wood turner, writer, antique restorer, and cyclist living in the Green Mountains of Vermont.