The Cycling Life

It’s All About the Bike
The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels
by Robert Penn
Bloomsbury, 208 pp., $20

The Meet of the League of American Wheelmen, Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

In this age, when an Olympic gymnast is unable to make it through a floor routine without a television announcer bringing up their father, who is dead, their aunt, who is crippled, and their brother, who has bad breath, it is refreshing to find an engaging writer who sees in physical exercise not a triumph of the human spirit but simply athletes and their chosen sport. Such a writer is Robert Penn, and such a measured though still enthusiastic view of cycling pervades this lovely book.

Penn even pedals one mile further, leaving aside the whole subject of athletic performance, to discover human achievement in the bicycle itself. It is a tale of low technology, of an invention so well-developed that its latest trends—take, for example, the recent swell of interest in fixed-gear cycling—tend to look backward to earlier, more primitive models. Penn’s approach is similarly antiquarian, though he doesn’t always play the gentle docent. There is even a fighting note in the book’s title, a seemingly banal statement which contradicts the title of another, better known book, one “bullish” and “ghost-written account of recovering from cancer to win the Tour de France.” That is how Penn describes It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life by Lance Armstrong. Amazon shoppers will not miss this point-counterpoint, as when they search on Penn’s title, Armstrong’s comes up as the very next result.

It’s All About the Bike is not without its own shtick. Penn, who lives in Wales, sets out to build his dream bicycle, perfect part by perfect part. And he has never heard of FedEx. So he travels to Vicenza, Italy, for his drive train components. For his frame, he flies to Portland, Oregon. For his tires, he goes to Korbach, Germany. And so on.