Bicycle Love: Stories of Passion, Joy, and Sweat

All athletes love their sports, but cycling has a fetishistic side to it-the love of this deceptively simple machine that allows you to silently float, race and climb. These 50 essays on the many varieties of bicycle love range from dreamy reminiscences of childhood bikes to powerful, sometimes insane adult attachments to mountain bikes, road bikes and tandems. They all celebrate the freedom of cycling, the elegance of the machine and the beauty of the act. The characters are everyone from a teenage girl on a moun-tain bike to old men crossing the country on touring bikes to couples falling in love while cycling. Funny, revealing and intensely emotional, these stories show the secret inner life of every cyclist.

Garth Battista is the editor of The Runner’s Literary Companion and How Running Changed My Life.