It's official. I am a big Doofus.

In keeping with my stated policy of preemptive self deprication, I have a true story that I've been meaning to write about. This story confirms the long held public and personal opinion that I am, indeed, a big Doofus. Please keep in mind that I am willingly telling this story about myself. I only hope that my story can help others.

Last fall, specifically, October 18th, I made the long drive from McKinney to Mineral Wells, TX, for a ride called the Kiwanas Crazy Kicker. I knew this was probably going to be the last outdoor rally of the year for me, before we moved indoors into the spin studio. As all of my cycling friends are bigger Weather Weenies than I am, I made the two hour drive and did the ride, all by myself.

Before I go any further into this, in order to truly appreciate the story, there's a couple of things that you need to understand. This July, I will be celebrating 20 years of happy marriage to Trish. Trish will be celebrating 14 years of happy marriage to me. As far as I'm concerned, 14 out of 20 is not a bad batting average.

To quote an old joke, "the day I got married, I lost all interest in women". That is to say, that Trish has been pretty firm in her "no dating" policy ever since we got married. Frankly, in my opinion, she's been downright unreasonable about it. There's just no talking to her about it. It's just one of those things that we've just agreed to disagree on. So, with Trish's heels firmly dug in on this, I've pretty much let my skills at getting girls to agree to go out with me diminish. Just seemed kind of unnecessary.

Please keep all of this in mind as I continue with my story. It will help explain some of my Doofusness.

The ride starts at 8:00am, and I'm doing the 100k course, again, by myself. I ride into the break point at about mile 40. This would be the 2nd to last break point before the finish. As I'm standing there by myself, eating a cookie and drinking my Gatorade, an attractive lady in her mid 30's ends up standing next to me, and she strikes up a conversation. As a middle aged cycling dork, happily married for the last 20 years, I really don't pay this too much mind. I'm polite, making the usual bike ride conversation. After I finish my cookie, I wish her good luck with the rest of the ride, and I hop back on my bike and head down the road.

Now that right there ought to tell you just how much my girl attracting skills have faded over the years. Twenty years ago, if an attractive woman would have paid any attention to me at all, she would have probably needed to get a restraining order taken out to get me to leave her alone. But here we are, twenty years later, and I don't give her a second thought.

I ride another 12 to 15 miles down the road and I come to the last break point. Again, I'm standing there, minding my own business, eating another cookie or a power bar, and who should ride into the break point a few minutes later, but the same girl who was talking to me at the previous break point. She gets off of her bike, gets herself something to eat, and walks straight over to me.

Now I start to think that there just might be something going on here. Exactly what is going on here, I have no idea. I do recall this sort of flirtatious ritual from somewhere in my past, but as to what I'm supposed to do or say next, I haven't got a clue. We again make the usual bike ride polite small talk.

"Good ride, isn't it?"

"Yea. Lots of hills."

"Yep."

"Yep."

As you can tell, without even trying, I was just sweeping her off her feet. This continues for a few minutes, and I nervously start inching my way towards my bike. All I want to do is get the hell out of there, finish the ride, drive home, and confess the whole tawdry thing to my wife. As I'm just about ready to get back on my bike, with my virtue still intact, she hands me a slip of paper with her phone number on it, and says, "you should call me sometime".

OK, now I know something is up. At this point, I'm nervous and pathetically scared. As I have my cycling gloves on, she can't see my wedding ring, which contains some sort of magical power that normally protects me from these types of situations. Confused and bewildered at this turn of events, I smoothly and suavely blurt out the only thing that comes to mind.

"You mean, like, for a date?"

You really had to be there to understand just how pathetic I looked when I said it. I had this confused look on my face, my head did the Cockier Spaniel tilt, and if I'm not mistaken, for some reason my voice actually cracked when I said it. I truly was the walking, talking, living example of doofusness.

To her credit, instead of just laughing in my face, which would have been a perfectly normal response to my question, she just smiled and said, "Yea, just like for a date." Now, I'm just literally seconds away from a full on panic attack. I'm actually giving serious consideration to just running off into the woods crying. To my credit, I don't.

Somehow, I manage to gather myself, and I calmly explained to her Trish's "no dating" policy. I even manage to sound gracious, telling her that it's not that I don't find her attractive, but if I were to pursue this, the last thing I would ever see would be Trish standing over me asking, "How do you reload this thing?".

She's obviously embarrassed and apologizes. I tell her not to worry about it, jump back on my bike, and finish the last 10 miles of the ride in record time. As promised, I race back to McKinney and confess the whole thing to Trish. She thought it was probably the funniest thing, if not the saddest thing, that she had ever heard.

So doofi of the world, (doofi being the plural of doofus), behold, for I am your leader.

Peace out.....Nearly Famous Fred

Behold, my new super power...

Sometimes, life surprises you in the most unexpected ways.

As a big time, famous writer of a free Internet cycling blog, I knew there would be certain benefits. The parties with rock stars. The world travel. Hanging out with professional athletes. Dating super models. And don't even get me started on the money. All of these were benefits that I certainly anticipated. But the other day, I discovered a bonus "super power" benefit of writing this blog.

As a writer of a cycling blog, I read a lot of other cycling blogs. When you sign up to write a blog, I believe that you are required to read as many other cycling blogs as you can squeeze into your day. I actually think it's a rule. So, during my hours and hours of reading other blogs, I have made an amazing discovery.

Apparently, without any sort of formal training or education in writing or literature, I am now qualified, ney obligated, to offer my opinions and critique of the work of other, actual real writers. I say this because I have noticed several other cycling blogs offering book reviews of real books, written by real writers.

This is amazing. I have taken no classes in writing. I have never published any sort of written work. I have never been paid to write a single word. The only thing that even remotely qualifies me to review an actual book, is that I know how to read. That puts me in the same category as approximately 200 million other people on the face of the earth. And yet, by signing up for a free blog site through Blogger, I apparently have been endowed with the super power to legitimately criticize the work of real, published writers. Since I write a free blog, it appears that my opinion now matters. I could sign my cat up for a free blog, have him walk on the keyboard for a few minutes, and his review would be just about as legitimate as mine.

While I don't understand why I now have this power, don't think for a second that I'm not going to take advantage of it. I do read just about every book on cycling that gets published. If you're now telling me that people are going to actually listen to what I have to say about those books, you're darn right I'm going to offer an opinion.

I bet all of those people who spent 4 years and thousands of dollars getting literary degrees, really feel like chumps now.

So while I was contemplating my new super power, and how I might abuse it for my own personal gain, I couldn't help but think about what other super powers I might now have. Here's my wish list:

1) Ninja powers. Besides offering a huge upside for personal gain, I happen to look great in black.

2) The power to be a fashion trend setter. If I have it my way, we'll all be wearing shorts and flip flops to work next week.

3) The ability to speak like the late, great, soul singer, Barry White. I'm not particularly interested in singing like Barry White, just talking like him. Think about it. How many times in a normal day do you get the opportunity to sing. If you just start signing during a normal conversation, people tend to think you're nuts.

4) Really good posture. I've always had really bad posture. But I can't see how I could use this to my advantage. It's kind of hard to get rich, based solely on good posture.

5) X-Ray vision. This goes back to my teenage years. All you men out there know what I'm talking about. Guys never really grow up.

I'm sure there are a lot of other super powers that I could wish for, but these are the ones that immediately come to mind. I'm a man of simple needs.

I'm currently about halfway through a cycling book right now. So you can look forward to a review in the near future.

Now, were do I pickup my mask and cape?

Peace out.....Nearly Famous Fred

I didn't die, which only added to my enjoyment of the ride

Today I'd like to talk about the Super Bowl Sunday Ride that we did yesterday.

As I mentioned in my last post, every year on Super Bowl Sunday, cycling groups from all over the Dallas/Ft Worth area, ride to the area of downtown Dallas called the West End, have lunch, then ride home. For Team Bikin, this was about a 50 mile round trip ride. Now usually, a 50 mile ride isn't a lot to get excited about. But since this was the first time I've ridden outdoors in over 3 months, I was extremely excited about it. Some might say, I was down right giddy about it. Given to my Lutheran heritage and upbringing, I smiled myself downright silly.

For those of you who didn't get the humor in that last line, allow me to explain. If you aren't of Germanic heritage, or of Lutheran upbringing, the German people are typically very restrained, and not prone to outburst of emotion. So you wouldn't be bursting out in laughter. Therefore a big smile would be the most outward show of emotion that you would allow yourself. So when I say, "I smiled myself silly", I'm making fun of the reserved nature of the German people. While making fun of a particular ethnic heritage is somewhat frowned upon, as someone of German heritage, I feel that I get a free pass on this. So, now you get it don't you? When I explain it, it's extremely funny. It does tend to lose something if I have to explain it, but trust me, it's very funny.

As for the ride itself, it went pretty much as expected. As we started out from Plano, it was quite chilly, relatively speaking for Texas. I believe we were in the low 40's at our 9:30am start. For we Texans, that meant having on every piece of winter weather gear we had. We went straight into about a 15 mph headwind the entire trip to downtown Dallas. Traffic levels were quite low, given that it was 9:30am on Sunday morning. That would change on our return trip home.

Lunch was at Landry's downtown. It never ceases to amaze me how oddly people will look at you when you walk into a rather nice restaurant in full winter cycling gear. The way people stopped and gawked, you'd have thought I was from Mars. The looks only got more intense as one by one, the seven of us started stripping off the layers of clothing that we were wearing. There was a palpable excitement in the air as the patrons of the restaurant were trying to gauge just how far this impromptu striptease was going to go. And if I do say so myself, a bit of disappointment, when we all stopped just short of getting arrested.

Given the southerly winds, the ride home should have been much quicker than the the ride downtown. But, as these things always seem to do, the wind died down significantly for the return trip. It wasn't in our face, but I'm sorry, we had earned a much better tailwind than what we got. The other concern for the ride home was the fact that the amount of traffic had basically tripled from the morning ride. So, even though we didn't have nearly the tailwind that we were expecting, the added adrenaline that we had pumping through our veins probably made up for it. Never underestimate the fear of imminent death as a motivating factor.

As for me, I rode much better than I expected. Given my recent illness and brush with death, I was very pleased with my form. (My wife will tell you that I was never really in any danger of dying, but she always minimizes these sort of things. Again, trust me, I was gravely ill). I wasn't in middle of the summer, riding in the Hotter-n-Hell, type of form, but I did alright. I didn't get dropped, and I don't think I had any sort of cardiac incident, so it was a good ride.

You'll want to check back late Wednesday night or Thursday morning for my next post. In that post, I promise to reveal my newly discovered super power.

Peace out.....Nearly Famous Fred