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Every serious cyclist accumulates stories about their riding adventures. With tales of the 'first' bike, cycling to the 1984 summer Olympics in Los Angeles, racing in the World's Toughest Triathlon, seeing the Tour de France first hand and more, Pedaling Through the Years is a lifelong cyclist's memoir a collection of sixteen stories that illustrate cycling's blissful, funny or frightful moments and its unending potential for making unique two-wheeled experiences entertaining and unforgettable.
About the author
Jonathan Van Coops was one of those kids to whom a bicycle gave wings. He grew up in the 1960s riding the city streets of San Francisco area's East Bay flatlands. By 1970, he had nailed cleats on to his cycling shoes and began riding his modest French ten-speed road bike gradually further into the hilly Regional Parks and watershed lands east of Berkeley.A lover of bike racing but not a licensed racer himself, he became a decent climber by necessity and began focusing on longer distance rides in his teens and twenties. Three and four-hour rides covering 60 miles or more became regular weekend workouts. Throughout his thirties and forties he rode constantly and completed the various San Francisco area 'century' rides and an array of west coast long-distance cycling events. After many miles on the trusty Peugeot, he began assembling a varied collection of bikes in the 1980s. At one point, he owned steel-framed and Campagnolo-equipped Colnago, Masi and Coppi road racers, a Schwinn Paramount track bike, Santana tandem, and a pre-WWII Schwinn balloon-tire cruiser complete with 'tanks' and horn. Since 2006, he's ridden another steel road bike, this frame custom-designed and crafted by East Bay master builder, Bernie Mikkelsen.Repeated hip, shoulder and wrist surgeries during the past forty years have definitely impacted his current cycling adventures. His regular routes have become shorter and flatter but he continues to ride almost daily. Now at 70, his jaunts on the 'Red Mikk' are typically in the one or two hour range, leaving plenty of time for his other passions: cartography, writing and a growing group of granddaughters.
