Niece Erin and I crossed paths with this amaz­ing fel­low at the end of a nice walk along the Sam­mamish Riv­er Trail.

He had bro­ken his col­lar bone in four places in mid Jan­u­ary while rid­ing into an area of pos­si­ble ice and remem­bers noth­ing of his acci­dent where­in a bystander stood over him so he would not be run over while await­ing the ambu­lance. He was next con­scious and aware in the hos­pi­tal. He has a tita­ni­um plate hold­ing his col­lar bone togeth­er and is rid­ing today only six weeks after his accident.

Today he had rid­den down to the Bain­bridge Island Fer­ry in the ear­ly AM to fer­ry over to the Cas­cade Bicy­cle Club’s Chilly Hilly 33 mile ride then back to Seat­tle and on back to Wood­inville where we met him at his mile 80 for the day. He rode over 10,000 miles last year that includ­ed 30 cen­tu­ry rides.

He’s rid­ing his brand new Rodriguez cycle that he has set up as his dream machine. It includes a Rohloff rear hub with 14 ratios (which can shift while stopped) there­by need­ing no mul­ti­ple chain­rings in front allow­ing for a very cool belt dri­ve sys­tem, S & S cou­plers, a Son gen­er­a­tor front hub that not only feeds his light­ing sys­tem but also pow­ers a USB port inside his han­dle­bar bag, a Pletsch­er dou­ble leg kick­stand, a new high tech Brooks C17 Cam­bi­um sad­dle, Marathon Plus tires, and an array of elec­tron­ics. Quite the dream,

After I insert­ed all the above I went brows­ing on the Rodriguez site and found that he had post­ed these ten shots of our fel­low’s cycle. Lots of inter­est­ing close­ups of the many fas­ci­nat­ing parts he chose.  One ques­tion I wished I’d asked him was why he chose can­tilevers instead of disc brakes. Click on any of the images for a larg­er version.