I’m in my 40s, with a wife, two kids, etc.
I have enjoyed riding road bikes since 1983. I got my first real racing bicycle, a Cannondale R500, in May, 1986, with money earned from a paper route. I put about 10,000 miles on it from 5/86 to 5/88. In 6/88, I did the Assault on Mt Mitchell as both my first ride in the mountains and my first century (100-mile bike ride). Two days later, I started working as a counselor at Camp Burnt Gin, a summer camp for handicapped children. The job left considerably less time for bike riding than my paper route and college studies, but I did meet my wife-to-be there. In 5/89, I did the Mt Mitchell ride again, improving my time from 8-1/2 hours to 7-1/2 hours, despite bonking. At the top, I got my first kiss from my wife-to-be, who decided on the way down the mountain that maybe I was worth having as a boyfriend instead of just a friend. I was napping with my head on her shoulder.
In 1990, I took my physics degree from Wofford College up to Brandeis University in order to be near her while she finished at Tufts. After we both had masters degrees and had enough of Massachusetts, we settled in North Carolina in 1993, conveniently between her parents in Maryland and mine in South Carolina. In the fall of 1994, I returned to the mountains to do a ride like Mt Mitchell, but which finished on Grandfather Mountain. My 6-1/2 hour time there held promise of a sub-6-hour Mt Mitchell in 1995, but a crash at mile 65 knocked me out, literally and figuratively. Professionally, I ran the physics lab of Shaw University and taught lecture courses until our daughter was born in 1997.
Staying home with Katie Rose for her first year was a joy. I loved spending time with her (still do), and I also had lots of time to cook. I started looking for a new, post-kid career and decided to pursue accounting. I found business and finance intriguing from a former administrative temp job in the executive suite of Boston Scientific Corporation. The broad opportunities available to accountants also looked promising. When I found a 1-year master’s program in accounting at UNC-Chapel Hill that would let my by-then-jealous wife stay home with our planned second child, we bit the bullet and put Katie Rose in day care for the year.
As a new accountant, I started at IBM. Our son Pete was born shortly thereafter, and my wife began running the home. The following year, I led the team running the Americas ledger, the system on which the accounting is done. I enjoyed the systems aspects and next worked on testing and deploying the next release of the ledger program. I then became a systems analyst for the ledger. With degrees in physics and accounting and now a job as a systems analyst, I qualified for a Platinum Pocket Protector–though at this point nearly everything is softcopy and my pens are more for decoration.
In August, 2003, I got a new bike, a 2002 Cannondale R4000Si, to replace my ’86 Cannondale. After years of averaging 1500 miles per season, I started moving back over 2000, and returned to the mountains in 2005. I had a banner year in 2006, with over 3500 miles, including 3 centuries (1 hilly and 2 in the mountains) and 1 mountainous metric century. In 2007, I lightened my training to allow more family time, but still managed a similar 3 centuries and 1 metric century, and 2800 miles.
I broke my knee in a Cub-Scout-astronomy accident (stumbled down a steep bank while walking around in the dark looking up for a place to set up the telescope) in April, 2009, which restricted my training that year. Â On the bright side, a couple friends who were perhaps intimidated by trying to keep up with me before were eager to train with me for the 11-mile bike leg of a family team triathlon that July once I got back on the bike in June. Â The following couple years I had a job that involved a lot of travelling that also interrupted my training schedule, although I did manage to ride a metric century with one of my new riding buddies in 2011.
In 2012 my travel lightened, and I was able to get in enough training to return to the Bridge to Bridge ride up Grandfather Mountain in September, the Tour de Pig metric century in October, and topped 3,000 miles for the year in November.