I haven't owned a bicycle for nearly fifty years.

[caption id="attachment_1791" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="My old bike (sort of)"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/bike_huffy_radiobike1a_550-300x186.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-1791" title="bike_huffy_radiobike1a_550-300x186" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/bike_huffy_radiobike1a_550-300x186.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="186" /></a>[/caption]

I had one when I was a kid, a basic one-speed Huffy bike (not the one in the picture, but close). I don't know how much it cost, because my parents bought it for me, but the kid in Stephen King's "Hearts in Atlantis" was saving for a similar bike and it was $25.

It was a relatively simple bike. You pedaled to go forward and pushed back on the pedal to slow down or stop. There weren't any gears, so there were plenty of times I had to dismount and walk my bike to the top of the hill.

By the time I was in my teens -- the mid 1960s -- 10-speed bikes were starting to come on the market. We called them "English racers," but I'm not sure why. I doubt that the UK was the only place people were riding them.

I guess I rode my bike for the last time when I was 13 or 14, and as best as I can recall, the only time I have been on a bicycle since was three years or so ago when Nicole and I rode a tandem bike at Huntington Beach.

That might have been the end of it, except that my son started doing triathlons. Running, swimming, cycling. He was good at it and he stretched out to where he ran in the L.A. Marathon -- breaking 3:30 his first time out -- and eventually working up to where he was doing Ironman Triathlons. In May 2009, at the age of 24, he swam 2.2 miles in the Mediterranean Sea, raced for 115 miles in the mountains just outside Nice, France, and then ran 26.2 miles along the beach.

[caption id="attachment_1792" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Virgile in Nice"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/CSC_0089.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1792" title="CSC_0089" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/CSC_0089-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>[/caption]

This kid isn't just a man, he's a horse.

Virgile started with a fairly nice bike, moved up to a really nice one and finally stepped up to one he assembled himself

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