Cycling has been my sport for over a quarter century. (Picture from CNN.)

I rode as a kid, even felt like I invented bicycle motocross on a lot near my house in the mid-60s. But I didn’t really become a cyclist until 1978, after coming back to Houston, Texas with a journalism degree and a burning hope to become a writer.

A close friend, Joe Bentley, owned a bike shop. He sold me a brown Sutter, a French road bike I could afford, and on Sundays he would map out a route for his family, for mine, and for a few other friends as well. We would drive for an hour or more, away from Houston’s oil boom, with its skyscrapers, its traffic, and its yellow sky filled with exhaust. We would ride to some small town, in front of an empty general store, we would pull our bikes down from our cars, and then we would head out for 30, 40 or 50 miles on the FMs, Texas’ Farm to Market roads.

The FMs were first paved in the 1930s, when Texas desperately needed a market for the tar that made asphalt. (Photo by AmyDove.) Money was coming out of the ground, and the world needed gasoline, but without buyers for what came from the bottom of the refinery cracker petroleum might be worthless. So every village and town got a road, to every other village and town. A beautiful, black ribbon of asphalt, crowned in the middle, with dirt on either side.

These roads were still empty, and quite inviting, to Joe and to me. Joe was an aging hippie before he found the bike, and a career as a mechanic, shop owner, and organizer of minor-league races around the state. But Sundays were for pleasure, for long slow uphills where you could feel each breath, and you could hear your heart pound, followed by longer, glorious downhills where you could freewheel at up to 30 mph, and wondrous flats where you could peddle along, in a group or alone, at your own pace, to see cattle waiting to become beef, grass waiting to become hay. Joe drew out triangular routes, from town to empty store to town, so we always made it back safely. Once a route went through a town festival, one of those food frenzies where the men all have Donlop Disease (my belly done lopped over my belt) and the women look packed into their cotton dresses like sausages. We laughed and laughed at them, smelled all that good smoke, and then rode on. There would be time for beer, after the ride.

My wife Jenni and I crashed the Sutter early in 1981. Some jerk in a Chevy didn’t see us coming through a light, under a freeway, our week’s groceries in tow on a “Blue Sky” trailer (that was the brand), held by a leather strap around my seat post. I wanted out in the worst way (and I’d get it, a disastrous job in Birmingham, Alabama), but first Joe replaced my old machine with a beautiful yellow frame, with Campagnolo derailleurs and Christophe toe clips.

My valedictory to this good life would be riding to Austin with Joe, then on through the Hill Country to my wife’s home in San Antonio. We would sleep on the ground, in state parks, and go beyond our normal haunts to the glorious land beyond, where the hills were longer, steeper, the downhills even faster, and where if you saw more than a car in an hour it was called rush hour.

Well, I failed. I was fine on the flat. We slept by a monument in Sealy, Texas, pushed on a second day, and on the third day I remember passing the baseball stadium in Austin, where my college baseball team was playing Texas again, and failing again. I think that was the hill where I gave up, my lungs gasping, my legs quivering. A long argument with Joe, so diappointed, got my legs to San Marcos, to a place by the freeway where Jenni would drive to meet me.

And that was my athletic career. I felt tears coming to me and watched as Joe rode on, alone and unhappy. For me it was a long drive of despair, back home to Houston and, from there, to another life, a thousand miles away from my friend.

But there was the bike. When the going got hard (then harder) in Birmingham, there was the bike. I would ride out to Bessemer, a miniature version of Birmingham to its southwest, a failed town of half-painted houses and boarded-up stores. Then I would think of depression as I rode back.

When I was mercifully fired I carted my bike to Atlanta, where I had a job like the one in Houston waiting for me. And on the weekends I would ride, waiting for Jenni to join me there. I found triangular routes like those in the old days, five miles to the side, which let me see my new hometown close-up, the houses and neighborhoods, the hills though much harder, leaving me spent at their top, hacking out my breath from car exhaust, sad, lonely, but free.

The next years were marked by bike rides. We did a century in Birmingham, and another outside Atlanta. But gradually we slowed, and when Jenni became pregnant with our daughter, in 1987, we stopped.