The Paceline — by Bill Stevenson
This article was written several years ago by Olympia's Bill Stevenson. It originally appeared in the newsletter of the former Capital Bicycling Club. At several key junctures in my early days of cycling people went out of their way to teach me the inner workings of road riding. Two of them, Jerry Baker and Bob Kaye, were particularly influential and important to me. Both men are local legends. Neither they nor the uncounted others who helped me learn the ropes of cycling had any good reason to spend their valuable time coaching a callow youth from Olympia. But they did, and their help opened the mysteries of road cycling to me, providing one of the greatest joys of my life in the process. It is in memory an appreciation of this help that I sit down today with paper and ink to try and pass on the wonderful gift they provided. To the uninitiated, road cycling can seem like a province of some secret society inhabited by a strange race of Lycra-clad humanoids. Many ...