The Bikes and the Bees

Stephen Madden, Editor in Chief, Bicycling Magazine

 

The birds and the bees: informal, basic facts about sex and reproduction, as told to a child.

The bikes and the bees: informal, heavenly pleasure of life enjoyed by an avid adult cyclist.

 

I once got a call from a headhunter asking if I was interested in a gig at Playboy magazine. After the inevitable round of jokes, I told her that I couldn't work there because I'd never be able to show my magazine to my mother. "I've heard a lot of excuses for saying no to a job, but that's the first time I ever heard someone use his mom as the reason," the head-hunter said.

 

My mother, now 83, is a protofeminist. She was an open-water swimmer back when women were supposed to be content to sit on the beach. She worked right up until she had her first baby, and when her sixth and last (that's me) was in second grade, she went back to work and kept at it until she was 65. She also drove me to the start of my first bike race, and told me she'd come get me afterward if I won but otherwise I could ride home—but that's a matter for another column.

 

One day when I was in high school, she went snooping through my room looking, she said, for candy. Instead, she found a copy of Playboy. I came home from raking a neighbor's leaves to find my "Girls of the Big Ten" issue on the kitchen table. "I understand that you might want to look at this stuff," she told me, as I sat mortified, shrinking down to miniature like Fred Flintstone used to do when Wilma caught him doing something stupid. "But that's not the way sex is. It's not about sitting by yourself in a room looking at fake women—these are not real, Stephen. It's about forming a relationship and loving a real person. A strong person."

Nothing my mother ever said informed my view of the world more than that. Maybe it's one of the things that led me to cycling, a sport that's populated by lots of strong, opinionated people—many of them very fit, very attractive and very fast, which is in itself an attractive quality.

 And lots of sexy people, too. I'm not the only one who thinks so. When we posted our cycling and sex readers' poll on BlCYCLlNG.com 'last fall, almost 3,000 of you responded and poured out your hearts. The results, some surprising, some not so, are on page 34, but their spirit informs this whole special issue. It's one I'd gladly show my mom.