Ross Del Duca Author

Brilliant Bicycles web page is full of some video and imagery of folks doing the kinds of things I love – riding some beautiful looking bikes. While there is no text yet indicating the details of their products, they seem to be crafting beautifully adorned steel “city style” bikes – similar to San Francisco’s Public bicycles. Their twitter page lists them as from New York and Los Angeles (but don’t confuse them with the Brilliant Bikes out of the UK). They have all the standard social media offerings one would expect of what appears to be a brand new bike brand just launching. So I went searching for more information.

Their Facebook page is filled with eclectic and decidedly artsy cycling related posts, Keep reading →

When I was a kid I actually looked forward to having a midlife crisis. I’d have a societally accepted excuse to buy a dangerously fast car and hook up with a young blond (of course at that time in my life ‘hook up’ loosely meant getting to second base.) Those of you that have followed this blog over the years may be surprised to know that I actually was quite a motorhead when I was younger. Classic American muscle cars were my thing. And I poured ridiculous amounts of money into making sure they would suck up as much gasoline as possible. All speed limit signs read “As fast as you can go and still keep it mostly in your lane.”

But I digress…

Somewhere between then and age 40 – which is when I’d always planned to have my midlife crisis – that passion for cars switched to a passion for bicycles. Well – first I bought a Prius in a lame attempt to somehow atone for all the carbon I’d dumped into the atmosphere drag racing on the streets of my home town through high school. That pretty much cured me of the fast car midlife crisis cliché. Instead, my first step in my midlife crisis was to open a bike shop. It failed. And being the silver-lining guy that I am, I’m kinda glad. In an effort to recover from the debt incurred running a failed, unprofitable bike shop I looked for expenses to cut. One of my larger monthly bills was my damned car payment.

So instead of buying that incredibly fast car, I did just the opposite and became car free.

Turns out I was right in line with what I was supposed to be doing. For me part of the point of a midlife crisis is to reset the clock and roll back to a mental attitude of half your age – hopefully taking along some of the good wisdom with you. It is the realization that, yea, I probably did waste my youth, but that doesn’t mean I need to be a boring old man. Many people lament “Gee, if only I could go back then knowing what I know now.” Well that is exactly what I planned to do.

And what does that have to do with being car free? Well, turns out the people that are chronologically half my age don’t much want to drive either. With improvements in health care and quality of life, more and more people are doing things in their 40’s that were previously reserved for those in their 20’s. Since 40 is my new 20, I’m off to do slightly reckless things in the pursuit of happiness, with just a slight tinge of older wisdom. In my case doing something new means, among other things, riding one of those funny bikes with knobby tires and squishy forks on dirt. And getting faster on the road. I ditched the car addiction, but not the addition to speed.

And the tempered with wisdom part? Well, that involves watching guys like this and realizing “That looks like a ton of fun – but you guys are fucking nuts…”