Welcome to The Cyclist Diaries!

I wanted to call this blog "The Accidental Cyclist" because that's what I am. But that url was already taken by some chick in Texas who does triathlons. Couldn't she call herself The Accidental Triathlete or something like that and let me have my blog title?

Oh, well. The Cyclist Diaries it is.

I was never meant to be a cyclist. In fact, I really wasn't really athlete material at all. I spent my entire school years being picked last for dodgeball, ducking volleyballs, and running desperately after stray tennis balls. I finally decided it was easier to just run than to chase after or run from anything.

And so began a moderately successful years-long running career that isn't the point of this blog at all except the part where my college running coach decided that we should "cross train." He would send half the team down a trail on foot and the other half down the road on bikes. We would meet up halfway and switch. We thought it was a form of torture, right up there with water boarding.

After college, I kept up the running and happily skipped the cycling until one summer day in 1995 when my new running partner invited me to something called the Girls' Ride. This will likely be the subject of a future blog post, but in short, the Girls' Ride is a Wednesday night women's mountain biking affair in Cody, Wyoming, where I was living at the time. So I hauled my Huffy out of the shed and showed up at the bike shop after work the following Wednesday. I was immediately hooked on mountain biking. This led to the purchase of an actual mountain bike--a rigid aluminum Cannondale that would escort me down sweet singletrack in Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, and Oregon for the next eight years.

For most of those years, though, running was still the main thing. I trained for my first marathon, then a faster one, then Boston, then faster still. I traveled to run marathons all over the country. Finally, my hard life began to catch up to me and my low back simply hurt too bad when I ran too far or too many days in a row. Over time, I ran less and cycled more. I took spin classes, commuted 15 miles to work, and even went on the occasional road ride. And I grew ever more passionate about mountain biking.

Now I run two days in a good week. I race Cyclocross and read BikeSnobNYC. I canceled my subscription to Runners' World and subscribe to three cycling magazines. When I see someone running on a favorite trail, the first thought that crosses my mind is "why would you run this trail when it's so much fun on a bike?"

Somewhere along the way, I accidentally became a cyclist.