For whatever reasons, a lot of people dislike the major bicycle manufacturers. I’ve ridden Specialized bikes for two decades now, and one question I haven’t talked about is: “Why Specialized”?

So I wrote this big long essay following my progression as a cyclist over time and describing all my bikes and how much I used them and… never got around to answering the question.

So instead of a multi-volume encyclopedic life history, how about I just answer the goddamned question?

Episode One: The Plastic Bullet

So to finally answer the question…

I ride Specialized because their products have been excellent: well-designed, durable, and suited to my needs as a devoted endurance cyclist.

While I’ve come to expect petty greed from big corporations, Specialized has been shockingly generous with »more

With Pæthos in the shop for a tune, this seems like a good time for a post-op update.

On March 7, I had a metal mesh plug implanted in my heart in order to close a hole between my two atria: a possible cause for my past and potential future strokes. It’s been seven weeks since the operation, so let’s review how my return to fitness has gone… And, of course, the prognosis going forward.

Phase One of my recovery consisted of 10 days completely off the bike. I had incisions into both of my femoral arteries that needed to fully heal before I could do anything as strenuous as walking, climbing stairs, or having a bowel movement, never mind cycling! I had tenderness and a sizable hematoma in my groin, and heart palpitations that mostly dissipated over time. After a few days I started doing s »more

For reasons I’ll explain in a second, improving my diet became a critical consideration following my stroke. But I had lots of questions about the areas where healthy eating directly conflicts with sports nutrition’s best practices for endurance athletes. I decided to get answers from a professional, and this blogpost summarizes what I got out of consulting a nutritionist for the first time in my life.

This is one of those posts where it’s not clear whether it belongs on my general blog or here on my cycling-specific blog. Since I came at this from a cyclist’s perspective, I decided to post it to the latter, so that other cyclists would more readily find it. But most of this is equally relevant to my non-cycling readers.

Where I Started

The statistics say that 25 percent of stroke survivor »more