There’s no outfit so fantastically ridiculous as the too-tight, brazenly colored, and obnoxiously patterned ensemble for riding a long distance on a bicycle. It’s too much. Ostensibly the outfits are colored and patterned wildly to present a bold contrast to the dreary roadside so motorists can see you, but I think outfits are designed to keep bicyclists from reproducing. Really, there’s no reason it has to be this tight, this bright, and reflectorized.

My kit involves a pair of special elf shoes with yellow Velcro straps. They’re elfish because there’s a metal shank extending from the toe to the heel that prevents them from bending in the middle and provides more pedaling power. But for no reason at all, the toes curl up a little at the end.

And while I’ve got your attention, let’s look at the rest of it. Those shorts. Usually these are modestly colored, black or white or red. Mine are white with a blue stripe down the sides. The color isn’t the problem. The arresting feature is their superhero tightness, and I’m not Clark Kent. A little pudge is squeezed out of the top and bottom, and to add insult, a nice thick wad of padding is sewn into the crotch and ass portion. Sure, it gives me a more comfortable ride on a small seat, but when I stand up it looks as though I’m delivering a newspaper, carried in the least convenient of places.

We’re nowhere near done. Wait for it.

Cycling jerseys come in two options: bright and ugly, or ugly and bright. Mine is a blown-up and pixilated version of the California flag. There’s a blocky depiction of the state brown bear on my chest, sniffing a chunky star on my right shoulder. The sleeves are red with white stripes and come to green elasticized ends at mid-bicep. Around the waist is a bright green band. I chose this jersey for its subtlety; I’m not joking about that.

Let’s get this over with. On my hands are black and orange striped gloves, and on my head is a red and white striped helmet.

Cyclists reading this are thinking, That’s a reasonable outfit. And everyone else has the look of pained incredulity on their faces. And you’re both right.

Cyclists as a group are insulated. We travel in small packs and try hard to stay where we’re safer, off busy roadways, which offers the added benefit of remaining out of the public eye. If everyone around you dressed in a rejected costume from an unaccredited clown college, you wouldn’t feel out of place. So to us, this outlandish way of dressing for safety is suitable. But walk through a deli for a quick sandwich and watch mothers pull their children away from your thinly concealed “garbage.” You know what I mean.

I’ve worn this outfit before. Once for a 50-mile race from Rosarito Beach to Ensenada. And again for the Tour de Palm Springs, a 55-mile “fun ride” — although, after nearly four hours on a bike, “fun” must be redefined to include “Sweet molasses in the morning, is my crotch ever inflamed!” Among thousands of other cyclists on those days, I wasn’t by a far shot the most obnoxiously dressed. An entire SpongeBob ensemble comes to mind.

I thought I’d wear the kit today because for riding a bike, it really is a good option. The tags that come with all of these silly articles say things like “Made with Quik-Flo technology to wick sweat from your jumbley bits and to let your nipples breathe free! Now with more padding!” and it’s true. It’s more comfortable to ride a bike for a long time in one of these soft-in-the-right-spots-and-porous-in-others getups.

But today I’m going to stop in shops and walk around amongst noncyclists, and I won’t be in a pack of my kind; I’m riding solo. So I strip off and change clothes completely. I won’t be in the high-tech cling wrap today. Just a pair of blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of black Converse will do.

My mission, decided wholly by me and passed down the chain of command from me to me, is to ride Blackie the Black Bicycle of Wonder and Truth to the glider port in Torrey Pines for a big, gross, oily cheeseburger and a Diet Coke. Then return on said bicycle to Mission Command, my grubby apartment in North Park, near the intersection of 36th Street and University Avenue.

I chose this mission because it cuts through a large swath of San Diego and covers a handful of the environments one can encounter on a bike ride: the coast, city streets, dedicated bike paths, and lanes shared with vehicles. Other reasons for the ride include “because it’s fun and it’s supercool,” which is kind of what riding bikes is about. Sure, bikes are a form of inexpensive — sometimes free — transportation, but if it were wholly drudging work then you wouldn’t have wanted one when you were eight. Is there another reason for the trip? Art appreciation, maybe, or shopping? No. It’s because bikes are fun and San Diego is a cool town. And the glider port is cool too.

So. With that I walk Blackie the Black Bicycle of Daring and Chance across the terra-cotta tile of my courtyard and onto the cracked asphalt of 36th Street, hushing and whispering softly, “Easy, girl. Easy.” She’s champing her bit. It might be the last day of good weather for a month, and Blackie can’t wait to wear down her tires before she’s put up for the winter. I mount her and yell, “Hyeah, Blackie! Hyeah, girl!”

Off we go! Up 36th toward University, but I remember my map is behind me, on my coffee table. I eyeball the 200 feet I’ve covered already and decide it’s too far, so rather than turn around for the map, I steel my frontier spirit, fold my ears flat against my head, shift gears, and carry on. We’re mapless and free and riding wild for this one, kids. Strap in.

There’s no way I’m taking University, and I’ll tell you why. Buses. Your average pickup truck or Volvo station wagon is frightening enough to ride beside, but buses terrify the squirt out of me.

Let’s look at the difference between a bus and me on a bicycle. I’m five foot seven inches in my black Cons and 206 pounds after a hearty breakfast. My bike is a 1985 Trek that originally weighed, from the factory, a scant 23.7 pounds. A lot of the original components are long gone. It has a different derailing system that shifts gears; for that matter, it has different gears, and wheels, handlebars, and brakes. Some replacement parts are heavier than the originals and some are lighter, but we’re not slaying dragons here, so let’s guess my bike weighs about 25 pounds. Good.

Now. Sitting on the bike, hunched over like a dog with its hind legs perched on an ottoman, I’m probably five and a half feet tall, and combined with the bike, I’m 230-ish pounds. A New Flyer city bus, model number C40LF — the bus of choice by the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System — is 40 feet long, 11 feet high, 8.5 feet wide, and without even one passenger weighs 28,875 pounds. Fully loaded it can weigh as much as 39,630 pounds. That’s twice as large as my apartment and over 170 times heavier than my little steel bicycle and me.

Also consider, a city bus swerves intermittently into the bike lane, stops to pick up riders, then swerves back through the bike lane into the street, past the cyclist, only to return a minute later, swerving past our hero toward the curb to pick up more riders. There are two bus routes from 36th Street to First Avenue, at the far end of Hillcrest, and the kind receptionist at San Diego’s transit phone service, 511, assures me that the wait at a bus stop on University will be no more than 10 to 15 minutes.

So, spread out in ten-minute intervals are two bus lines diving through the bike lane, 15 tons of metal, rubber, and glass each. When dealing with a bus, a cyclist becomes Bugs Bunny, desperate and sweating, trying diligently to escape the conveyor belt in a canning factory. Giant smashing things, choppers, and flaming ovens conspire to grind me into potted meat, label me, and set me on the shelf as hasenpfeffer.

No thank you. I’ll ride up 36th, cross University, and turn left down a quieter street with only light pickups and passenger cars as the hazards that fly up my rear at 35 miles per hour.

I pull left through the intersection at 36th and Orange Avenue and breeze down freshly laid pavement. Orange Avenue has brand-new asphalt, dark and smooth, quite in contrast to the neighborhood, which offers the sight of two-liter soda bottles that have been inexplicably tossed onto the roofs of the houses, opened envelopes on the sidewalk, and destuffed plushy toys strewn across dead lawns.

The City started renovating the streets after it was found that San Diego had one of the worst road-maintenance records in the country. In 2001, 2003, and 2007 the County Grand Jury evaluated city streets — not all of them, only 1250 miles out of the 2800 miles, about 45 percent. The grand jury found the streets to be in “a deplorable situation.” I got that from San Diego County’s own website, sdcounty.ca.gov. I like the wording of it, “deplorable situation.” It sounds so bleak.

Anyway. Mayor Sanders allocated $13 million to repair the streets. That sum exceeds the funds budgeted for street repair in the previous seven years combined. Don’t get too excited. The $13 million will repair about 100 miles. But it’s a start.

Stretches of Orange Avenue, Lincoln Avenue, and University, all around my neighborhood of North Park and into City Heights, are apparently included in those 100 miles of road budgeted for repair. Blackie the Bicycle and I thank you, the Fine City of San Diego, My Beloved Home.

I shift Blackie the Black Bicycle of Justice and Good Times up a gear and pick up speed, and I cross the 805 freeway on a bridge where Orange Avenue becomes, for no deducible reason, Howard Avenue, and I’m heading toward the heart of North Park, 30th Street. Thirtieth Street is the only major street that connects Broadway with Adams Avenue without interruption. It is the quickest route to get from Golden Hill — via a little jog at Fern Street — to University Heights. Adams and University Avenue cross 30th, and the three of them distribute traffic from as far as Kensington and La Mesa across an urban spiderweb all the way to Hillcrest and as far south as Logan Heights.

And none of those roads has a bike lane. In fact, there isn’t a dedicated bike lane — where bikes enjoy right-of-way, separated from vehicle traffic — in all of uptown or downtown except for TWO walking bridges that span a few dozen yards each. And I’m heading toward one of them.

There’s a walking bridge that crosses Washington Street and an on-ramp of the 163, located at what appears to be a dead end on Vermont Street. Now, to get there you’ve got to wiggle your way around the quiet residential streets lined with Craftsman houses that parallel El Cajon Boulevard, and you’ve got to get to the west side of Park Boulevard. If you’re a coffeehouse-and-food person, you’ll recognize that area as where Cream coffeehouse and El Zarape Mexican restaurant serve the hungry and undercaffeinated. You’ve got to get to the west of those; on any route you take — Adams, Monroe, Madison, El Cajon, whichever — there’s a little hill to get up that peaks at Park Boulevard.

Keep going. Push into the unassuming neighborhoods around Campus and Meade. I take a left on Maryland. I’m pleased to find I’ve taken the correct turn, despite my lack of a map. I’m reassured of my decision by the clickety sound of a freewheeling hub behind me.

I swivel my head over my shoulder like an owl to see a gigantic man in a helmet that’s the color of green usually reserved for iridescent plankton. He’s on a bike that looks as if it could grasp mine, flip it on its side, and stomp it into the mud. His bike is chrome and blue, the top tube rides at about the height of my neck, and it has aggressive new styling. If his bike is Shaquille O’Neal, then mine is your sixth-grade PE coach, in those ugly short shorts, that Conway Twitty pompadour, and those arthritic, pale hands of his.

“Hello,” he says in a voice not unlike Herman from The Munsters, only with a little bit of an off-Broadway limp.

“New bike?” I ask.

“Yes-s-s-s, it is-s-s,” he answers, obviously thrilled.

“It’s a beauty,” I offer.

“Thank you. Oh well, thank you,” he speaks in a breathy tone. “I just love it.”

“How come you’re cycling?” I ask.

“Faster,” he answers. “I live on Adams and work at the hospital.”

“You just start riding?”

“Yeah. You know, I’m only a couple miles from work. My house is just back there,” he says and nods behind us. “I just thought, the other day, hey, why can’t I bike to work? And a friend helped me buy it and showed me the bridge.”

Our hubs whirr in that way that sounds as though we’re battling a giant marlin with a Snoopy My First Fishing Pole (WHIIIIIIIZZZZZZZ), and we round the corner, dashing between potholes and across the pavement to Lincoln Avenue; then we whiz, side by side, left onto Vermont Street toward the circular dead end and sidewalk. His longer legs rotate the cranks much faster than I can, and he shoots past me. Damn my short, inadequate tadpole legs.

He bops up an easement, crosses the sidewalk, and appears to fall off the cliff onto the 163 and Washington below, but he doesn’t really fall. He glides into the narrow corridor of a pedestrian bridge, and I’m right behind him.

The bridge is blue metal framed with panels of stainless steel about shoulder height that are machine-cut with inspirational phrases from people like Dr. Seuss about the joys of walking. The inspirational phrases all, unbearably, have to do with “walking miles in my moccasins” and “no greater joy than shopping for shoes all day” (or thereabouts) and a bunch of painful garbage, and I’m thankful I’m on a bike and buzzing past so quick that I don’t have time to read that drivel. Oh, it’s trash. You should go see it.

Gay Herman Munster and I slow a bit as we cross the span of the bridge, because on the other side, at the opposite end of the walking bridge, coming toward us is an antique woman, seated and humming along in a burgundy, motorized Rascal scooter.

Herman and I shimmy our dead reckoning to the right of the woman, and I feather my chrome brake handles a touch in case Herman plows into the crone and I’m stuck behind a two-person cyclist-versus-septuagenarian pileup. Herman slows and I slow more. I was planning on bombing past her, but big Herman Munster slows and I slow behind him and he’s right; we shouldn’t blast past her. It’d be rude. So we slow wa-a-a-a-a-ay down.

We’re going much slower than walking speed; our hubs are clicking methodically and loudly and echoing against the metal sidewalls of the bridge. Cars hum and honk at 50 miles per hour 40 feet beneath our rubber tires and the steel archway over Washington Street.

“This is a walking bridge,” the woman hollers as we near. “This is a walking bridge.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I offer from behind Munster’s wide shoulders. Herman and I slow it down a little more.

“This is a walking bridge!” the woman bellows from under her plaid blanket.

Herman and I slow even more. It would now be quicker to disassemble our bikes, pack them into bags, and crawl them across the bridge like short mules than to keep going at this speed. But we don’t. We stay mounted to our cycles, clicking toward the woman slowly.

“THIS IS A WALKING BRIDGE!” she shouts emphatically as we pass.

“Need I remind you,” I should’ve said, “that you, ma’am (!), are not walking either!” but I don’t. Of course.

I say, “Thanks,” and ring my little bell, which goes ping!

Thanks. For screeching at us like a badger trapped on the world’s slowest go-cart.

Thanks, I say.

I’m a dumbass.

Anyway.

Once off the bridge, which empties onto Vermont Street, beside Ralphs and Trader Joe’s, the Munster busts away from me with a few powerful turns of his long crank. Maybe that sounds better in my head, but the gist is he drops me and powers out toward University Avenue through the parking lot of Ralphs grocery.

Seizing an opportunity to win a race Herman Munster doesn’t know he has entered, I shag ass down a ramp and into the underground parking lot to the right; it’s behind and under Ralphs. It’s a shortcut! I ping my bell furiously and turn my headlight on so cars backing out from parking spaces at 300 miles per hour in the dim light of the underground parking garage can ignore me even further. I tuck against Blackie and zip through the parking lot, and I’m spit out into the sunlight of University and Tenth, in half the distance and time it takes Big Herman Munster the Cycling Newbie.

I turn right on the red light and enter traffic on University and deem myself the winner of the race that Gay Herman Munster didn’t know he had entered, and I’m doing the announcer voice in my head, “Olivieri takes the gold!”

“Hello-o-o-o, we meet again,” Herman says from behind me, and he rings his bell that sounds like an ice cream truck bbbbbbrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnggggggggggg.

“Hey,” I say and give him a ping as he speeds past me. Damn, tall guys are fast.

No matter, I already won the race because I said so.

At the next intersection Herman arrives before me, just in time for the yellow light, and I get the red, so I finger my brakes and pull my Converse from their little pedal cages, roll to a stop, and lean. Herman keeps going through the yellow light, and that’s the last I see of him. He disappears after a sharp right turn at Fifth toward the hospital.

And yes. I have to take University. Even though I ranted against it earlier, it’s the quickest road from the walking bridge to the hill that drops down from Mission Hills into Old Town. And I’m at least consistent in that I constantly change my mind and I’m hypocritical on my previous stances. So there.

Onward! Excelsior!

I get going again down University, and I have a great deal of luck with hitting green lights and with cars that don’t seem to want to squish me dead and flat in the road. I’m making good time. I shift Blackie’s derailleur around until I can get her old gears to stop chattering, bring in my elbows, narrow my eyes, and then I’m off, like a shot in the sunlight, down the quirky buzzing University Avenue, under the expanse of the Hillcrest sign, and past the busy retail district that ends at about Urban Mo’s Bar and Grill, Bread & Cie, and Peet’s Coffee and and gives way to a less bustling neighborhood, one with fewer cars pulling from driveways or entering traffic from side roads.

While I continue down University, riding by an elementary-school playground in the narrow shared-with-cars lane, a black BMW cozies up about two feet from me and electrically lowers its rear window to allow a poodle the size of a motorcycle to stick its head out and FRIGHTENINGLY bark in my ear. A quick shouted expletive, a startled shimmy, and a short burst of escaped urine, alas all from me, and with a hum the BMW and dog are, quick as they appeared, gone, and I’m cycling normally, with the exception of a heartbeat somewhere near the cyclical rate and noise of an M60 machine gun.

The son of a bitch rolled down his window so his dog could bark at me. Can you believe that?

If you’re a cyclist you can. That sort of thing happens a lot, actually. My friend Ed, while on his bike, once had to slam his fist into the fender of a pickup truck attempting to run him over, a last-ditch effort to survive an oncoming machinery death. And it worked. The angry motorist backed away, presumably to save himself the trouble of repairing any body damage Ed’s fist and his bike might’ve impressed upon the truck.

Another friend, Eric, was door-jambed, which means that someone, while stopped at an intersection, waited for Eric to get close enough, then blew his door open a smidge to catch Eric in the front wheel and teeth. Sort of a “Hi! How’d you like to slow down from ten miles an hour to zero and hug this column of steel?” While Eric recovered, heaped on the ground, rubbing his bloody nose and gums, the traffic signal switched to green, and the vehicle slowly motored away. Eric’s front wheel, frame, and forks were crumpled and wadded beneath him. Nobody stopped, but to their credit the other drivers swerved so as not to run him over.

This all seems as though I’m begging for pity, doesn’t it? Poor us. The cyclists who have to share the road with cars and buses are oppressed. I know what you’re saying. “If you don’t like it, don’t do it. It’s not like you have to ride a bike.”

True. You’re right. Cyclists are slow and are forever in the way. I know; I’m not just a cyclist. I also drive regularly. While I’m driving I get annoyed by the slow cyclists, and while I’m biking I get pissed at the motorist breathing down my neck. I’ve ridden in a group of bikes and been harassed by cars. I have also driven down the street and been swarmed by a bunch of inner-city bicycle kids, en masse, who stopped my truck so I couldn’t get through an intersection. I’ve been on both sides, and if I could be in two modes of transportation at once, I’d irritate the hell out of myself from my truck and atop my bicycle, equally.

The solution is a separate lane for cyclists and pedestrians. If a completely separate lane is not viable, then designated bicycle lanes, outlined in white paint. Cycling in a designated bicycle lane and adhering to road rules reduce a cyclist’s chance of an accident by almost half, according to the League of American Bicyclists.

And if you’ve ridden a bike down a San Diego street, you know that bike lanes are rare and oddly placed, sometimes materializing from nowhere and ending as abruptly just a few yards away.

On the topic of roads and phantom bicycle lanes, consider this. SANDAG, which has the important-sounding title of “San Diego’s Regional Planning Agency,” has budgeted out the next 40 years of revenue from TransNet.

(Let’s not get TOO dry here. We’re already nearing day-after-Thanksgiving-turkey area. But let’s press on.)

TransNet is a half-cent sales tax we all pay that’s allocated to transportation projects. In the next 40 years, the wonderful wizards of SANDAG have allocated about $8.6 billion for streets, highways, roads, and miscellaneous projects. Not that those are necessarily “bad” funds, but for pedestrian and bicycle projects, only $.28 billion of that tax is budgeted, which is $280 million. Which amounts to road and highway projects receiving 30 times the amount of money that is being allotted to bike and pedestrian projects.

Of course, there are easily 30 cars on the road for every one bike. Maybe that money should go to car funds rather than walking and biking funds, because there are just MORE cars.

But this is San Diego. Routinely named one of the healthiest cities in the United States. Joggers trot down the San Diego River path to Dog Beach every day. Hikers strap their boots up and plod around Cowles Mountain constantly. Every June, we shut down the 163 freeway, set up a stage every mile, and let possibly deranged people run the Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon. And a quick search reveals 284 businesses related to the term “gym” in the San Diego area.

Why couldn’t we have a separate path for bikes and walkers?

Also consider this. Last year the price of $65 per barrel of oil was considered scandalous, but we pushed through and got comfortable with that. Now it’s almost 100 bucks a barrel. And CNN’s Fortune magazine reports that a few experts theorize the price of oil could hit $265 per barrel in coming years. I’m not here to argue whether it will happen or not, but do you really think gas will get cheaper? Has it ever gotten cheaper?

I predict a lot more bikes on the roads by this summer, when gas prices make their annual climb.

Why couldn’t San Diego be a leader in cycling and pedestrian traffic, championing environmentalism funded by the TransNet tax? Why couldn’t we push further toward independence from oil, foreign or otherwise? What would we have to do, dip into the $8.6 billion we’re planning on spending on highways?

Get us out of the vehicle traffic, and get vehicle traffic away from us. It works in favor of both our interests.

Here’s a cyclist’s pipe dream. Run a path, built up on the sides by curbs or raised from street level about a foot, for pedestrians and bikes only. It could be right down the middle of University or over to one side, where diagonal parking spots reside now. Cars could still park, but they’d have to park parallel instead of diagonally to the curb, but they could definitely park. The bike-and-walk path wouldn’t have to be more than four or five feet wide.

Walkers and cyclists could visit area shops and reduce emissions as well as congestion. College kids riding from SDSU could make it to Hillcrest or North Park in no time. The blue-collar folks who live in City Heights could get a bike (mine cost $225) and ride to the center of the city for work.

As long as I’m dreaming, how about we make it a nice material to ride on, like garden pavers, stone, or, hell, even concrete, and line the path with trees. The trees will provide shade and a small amount of protection from the occasional rampaging, haywire car, and they’ll also add to San Diego’s tree canopy and oxygen supply. And if the bike path were separated by trees, shrubs, and foliage, the motorists wouldn’t have to look at our ugly cycling outfits.

Good God, I’m smart. I should be president.

But enough of that horrid, boring crap. Let’s get back to my ride. Because as I stated before, riding bikes is cool and fun, and the most fun you can have on a bike is sliding headfirst down Juan Street.

To get to Juan Street, you have to leave University Avenue and ride north toward Washington Street. I take Goldfinch Street because I like the name. Don’t stop on Washington; push past until you’re north of it, amid the gentile and glorious mansions of Mission Hills. Don’t dawdle here, ogling the megahouses. Turn left on Fort Stockton Drive and veer (veer!) onto Sunset Boulevard (not to be confused with Sunset Street or Sunset Road) and turn right on Juan. Along your way, there are little rolling hills to conquer and middle-aged women with frost-tipped hair who will run you down like a coyote in the street beneath the all-weather belted radials of their Porsche SUVs, but stay vigilant. When you proceed farther west on Juan, you’ll come to a downhill part. That leads to a further downhill part and a yet more downhill part.

I’m not sure how the angle of a road’s downhilledness is measured. I know it’s in “grade,” but I’m not sure if a higher number is steeper or, like shotgun shells, the consequences get more dire as the number drops. Let’s say that grade is considered steeper the higher the number, and therefore Juan Street’s grade is about 450,000 percent.

Some people can encapsulate themselves, tuck themselves in completely, perch atop their bike, and drop like a bomb down Juan. I cannot. I am what is described as a sissy. Riding down Juan, I perk up as though threatened by snakes, my body hair stands alert, my pupils open, and the reserves of my adrenal glands are tapped to squeeze sweet paranoid juice into my bloodstream. I make myself larger, spreading out in hopes of increasing wind resistance. I jerk back on my brakes, hard, and ring my bell like a goddamn maniac as I glide gracelessly down the hill, jittery and screaming, “Don’t kill me!” at every intersection and driveway, to ward off any motorists who could pull out perpendicular to my plummeting path. During my freefall, squealing brakes are intermittently interrupted by terrified screeching and a rapid-fire ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping! until I reach the bottom of the hill and I’m emptied into the blind intersection where Taylor Street crosses Juan.

And voilà! I’m at the bottom. And that’s the most exhilarating ride in San Diego. And I lived. I look behind me up Juan and do a little cross over my T-shirted heart.

And I’m here in Old Town by the trolley station. Why there’s a trolley station in the tacky tourist trap that is Old Town I don’t know. I’ve never woken up and said to myself, “I really need to get a commemorative margarita glass, and what the hell, let’s take the trolley to go get it!” But I suppose someone has, and there it is, and here we are.

The air in this valley is thin with smog, and I cough a little and my eyes water. Fumes are forced up Pacific Highway from an offshore breeze, and I dab at my eyes. Sometimes being on a bike, without windows and conditioned air, can kind of suck.

Following Taylor Street across the trolley tracks, through an intersection with Pacific Highway, and under an Interstate 5 bridge, I’m on Rosecrans Street.

The thing to remember here is that to turn right onto Sports Arena Boulevard would be stupid and suicidal. It means you’re going to battle buses, weaving, chomping and smashing and HUGE, and coming at you. And after a short mental lapse, I turn right on Sports Arena. A bus rumbles up behind me, and I spend the next ten minutes screaming and pleading with the bus driver to spare my young life as she swings Ol’ Smashy the Giant Metal Box of Death in and out of my lane.

Through luck, will, or divine intervention, I make it down Sports Arena, across Midway Drive, and up the little slope to West Point Loma Boulevard, heading into my beloved Ocean Beach. Ah, Ocean Beach. Receive me like a lover.

Ocean Beach has a really cool bike path, dedicated strictly to pedestrians and cyclists. It runs from Dog Beach along the San Diego River and Interstate 8 to Mission Valley. You can find the bike path if you get into Ocean Beach and turn right onto Bacon Street. Bacon ends at Robb Field, and there’s a little easement that pops up from the street and onto the built-up edge of the river, where you can ride along the ravine.

For our purposes today, we’ll need only a fraction of the path. We’ll just follow it next to Robb Field for a little while. Did you know there’s a skateboard pool there? Yeah, it looks like a big, wavy concrete bowl, and there are bendy, elastic kids swooping in and out of it at 280 miles per hour on little hunks of wood with wheels. Wild, huh?

I stop for a moment to watch, and one kid pops out on his board, glares at me from beneath his helmet, and says, “Nice bike, fag.”

Why you little… If there wasn’t a fence here…

Anyway. I move on.

From the bike path you can wiggle your way over the Sunset Cliffs Boulevard and West Mission Bay Drive bridges and ta da! find yourself at the boardwalk beneath the roller coaster in Mission Beach. Sweet!

As I stand there admiring the morning light crashing against the Pacific Ocean and the bobbing black hoods of the surfers and the air that breezes in and smells like kelp, Foom! a cyclist bursts past me on the boardwalk, and I figure I’ve found my next interview subject. Besides, she is on a very cute little Schwinn.

Swiftly I pedal north on the boardwalk, the sun casting crisp lines of light over the beachfront houses, dazzling the beach and the splashing surf. Swifter now. And swifter. I’m a furious ball of sweat, elbows, and ass.

I catch up to the little powder blue Schwinn and matching helmet. I’m brusquely brushing past improbably patterned muumuus of vacationers from Minnesota or Iowa to talk to the pretty girl on the little blue bicycle.

She turns her head and spots me.

“Oh, hi,” she says, and she’s nice, like girls who don’t know they’re really beautiful.

“Hi,” I answer. “How come you’re cycling?” I’m a little winded from the sprint I’ve just performed to catch her.

“It’s faster and cheaper,” she says. And she’s really moving too; I’m having a tough time keeping up. She’s a hammer.

“It takes me the same amount of time to get to school whether I take my bike, a bus, or a car. So the bike is the cheapest,” she says. I’m not sure if she has an accent or if that’s just my throbbing circulatory system pounding away in my eardrums because I’m about to have an old fat man heart attack.

“You go to UCSD?” I ask.

“Yep,” she says, and she speeds away on her rickety cycle that’s about 20 years older than mine, and she’s easily 20 miles per hour quicker than me. And that’s it. She’s gone.

Damn. I slow down and stop to catch my breath and get a cup of coffee. A great place to stop is the Seaside Cantina. It’s a little adobe hut right on the beach, and it has an upstairs porch and a railing that separates the main patio area from the boardwalk. You can’t get coffee any farther west without enlisting in the Coast Guard. I lean Blackie the Black Bicycle of Goodness and Beauty against the railing and get an iced coffee.

Seated in a green plastic lawn chair with my feet against the railing, I watch between my Converse-covered toes the surfers bob in the water and stand up occasionally, ride a wave for ten feet, and then fall back over, which looks like a wonderful way to spend a morning in November. My God, it’s snowing in Chicago right now. To hell with that.

While I’m sitting there a buddy of mine, Aaron, jogs past on the beach. I holler at him and he comes over.

“What’re you up to, man?” I ask.

“Just jogging.”

“I don’t want to interrupt. I was just sayin’ hey,” I tell him.

“Aw, no worries,” he says, scales the seawall, crosses the boardwalk, and perches on the aluminum rail next to my tennis shoes. “We’re going to Tequila tonight,” he says, meaning Tequila, Mexico.

“You and who?” I ask.

“Me and Larry,” he says. Larry and Aaron are co-owners of Cantina Mayahuel on 30th and Adams Avenue, and they’re consummate tequila connoisseurs. “Guillermo will be distilling for Los Abuelos,” Aaron says, and he elaborates on how he and Larry are going to shoot footage of how tequila is distilled. Los Abuelos is their favorite brand. “We’re going to get a lot of footage,” he says. “It might only be worthy of YouTube, but we’ll still shoot it.”

You have to admire a man whose vacation videos feature the process for brewing his favorite booze.

And with a wave and an “All right. Well. See ya,” Aaron dismounts the railing, hurdles the seawall, and continues his jog down Pacific Beach. I love that randomly I can find people I know almost anywhere in San Diego, and while I’m outside of a car, I have more access to them.

I overturn the last of my cup into my mouth and frown. Guess it’s time to move on. I unlock Blackie from her hitching post (easy, girl, easy) and cruise her farther north on the boardwalk. For everything the Seaside Cantina has, it’s missing a restroom. But there’s one on the boardwalk at the end of Grand Avenue.

Around the entrance to the public restroom on Grand swarms a gaggle of bums. You don’t leave your bike, locked or unlocked, to a group of homeless. The three of them have two bikes, one a short pink girl’s beach cruiser, either donated to the wino by a very generous young lady or swiped from a porch. They aren’t going to acquire a third bike to complete their riding party today; I ride on, north toward La Jolla.

As if to put a finer point on my separated-bike-path idea, I look up Hornblend and see the blinky digital lights of a fire truck. I ease Blackie up the street toward the fire truck, and close to it, I notice a bluish gray BMW that’s been smacked and spun sideways, and hunks of it are scattered around the road. I’m glad I was riding on the boardwalk instead of Mission Boulevard.

While we’re on the subject, let’s look at some crash stats. According to a bicycle advocacy group — heroically named the Thunderhead Alliance — between 2003 and 2005 California reported, on average, 110 fatalities annually involving bicyclists. Of those 110 in all of California, San Diego rang in with an average of 3.7 bike deaths. And in 2006 — the year after the Thunderhead Alliance study — the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office counted 5 “auto versus bicycle” deaths.

That doesn’t seem too bad, does it? Yes, I know those 5 folks in 2006 would argue otherwise, but with all of the thousands of ways to eat it in the end, from drowning (39 people in 2006) to exposure (21 poor souls) to cardiovascular-related deaths (698!), biking doesn’t seem so dangerous. (This is only the people autopsied and reported by the Medical Examiner’s Office, but let’s keep this simple and use that as a cross section of the bigger whole.) A look at that last fact reveals that sitting sedentary, eating tubs of sugary goo, and NOT bicycling, to the point where you’ve acquired a cardiovascular disease, is almost 140 times more likely to bump you off.

Sure there are crashes. I’ve heard of some miserable ones. But anecdotally I’ve never heard the story of a bicycle death. Mostly, my friends and I have suffered bouts of “road rash,” where the skin is peeled from your arm or lips or behind by the sandpaper effect of sliding the body part across asphalt. Or we’ve had a nice conk on the head that left an ostrich egg above one of our eyes. Or we’ve simply leaned the bike over onto a rock or bush and laughed at our own lack of balance. Mostly, we’ve done all right. We’re light and zippy but not moving so fast that if we run up on something quickly we’ll seriously injure ourselves or anyone else.

Back to my ride.

Having ridden the boardwalk to its northernmost end, I turn east on a road I can’t quite make out from the sign and probably won’t remember anyway, Crystal Lane or something, and I hunt around for La Jolla Boulevard. (Not to be confused with La Jolla Village Drive, La Jolla Shores Drive, La Jolla Hermosa Avenue, or La Jolla Parkway. Who names these?) I find La Jolla Boulevard, and I’m again pedaling north into the quaint seaside village of La Jolla.

Riding a bicycle on any road in San Diego, you can pretty much tell where you are by the cars that bolt out in front of you from side streets, alleys, and driveways. In my neighborhood of Cherokee Point, it’s mostly purple Cressidas and brown Datsun pickups with the occasional minivan and landscaper’s truck. Around Hillcrest, it’s Vespas and Mini Coopers. On La Jolla Boulevard, while traveling north, the vehicle type that tries to playfully dislodge you from your bike transitions from the surfer VW vans of Pacific Beach to the polished and gleaming sports cars that rip up and down the north end of La Jolla Boulevard.

I don’t see the Maserati, and the brunette behind the wheel doesn’t see me. She breaks into the flow of traffic, revs the engine like a sewing machine, and peels out from Pearl Street almost to Prospect. My front wheel misses her rear bumper by a fraction of an inch, and I scream, “What the hell are you doing, lady?!” and ping my bell furiously. The sound of living the ultimate Southern California dream must be a bit too loud for her because she never hears my cries OR loud bell pinging. Blackie is a little spooked too, but I calm her down and carry on.

From Prospect Street, I get lost in a nimble manner. Riding to the end of a cul-de-sac, then coming back and taking what I think is a correct turn, I end up across a Y-shaped intersection. One lane leads to the fourth dimension, one is designed in a Möbius strip, and the third circles interminably around an outcropping of eucalyptus trees. I take a couple of spins around the trees, lean Blackie against one of them, and unleash the coffee I bought in Pacific Beach. With no real way to get unlost ahead of me, I venture back the way I came.

With luck, I find a walking bridge that begins at a children’s school fence and ends, inexplicably, at a car wash. Emerging from behind the car wash I recognize a street sign and make my way from Torrey Pines Road (not to be confused with Torrey Pines Lane) north on La Jolla Shores Drive. (Not to be confused with…ah, never mind; you get it already.)

This is the fun, or as it stands, not-so-fun bit. Because La Jolla Shores Drive moseys lavishly north, flat or slightly downhill for a little more than a mile, then departs sea level in favor of a massive climb, straight up into the clouds. The hill starts at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and ends at UCSD.

Turning the cranks slowly and watching my skinny front tire creep along one inch at a time, past a dead squirrel, then a cigarette butt, then a polystyrene coffee cup, I can think only of the young lady on the creaky old blue Schwinn who must do this every day. And I think of what a wimp I am in comparison, so I pedal faster, Faster, FASTER, until my thighs glow like the filament of a high-wattage bulb and I can’t stand it, so I slow back down to my turtle’s crawl. Other cyclists pass me smartly, and between huffs I call to them. “Puff! Puff! How come… Puff! Puff! Cycling? Puff! Puff!” Sweat eases into my eyes. The other bicyclists on the hill regard my incoherent babble with slightly cocked heads, like a dog listening to a radio broadcast about cleaning drapes, and continue their ride.

At some point, and I’m not entirely sure where, La Jolla Shores Drive intersects with Torrey Pines Road again. My normal state is one of panicky confusion, but throw in a climb of hundreds of feet on a bicycle, and it’s too much to bear. I’m lucky I remember what I am doing up here in the first place.

So anyway, the hill breaks and gives way to Torrey Pines Road, and you can see to the right of the road the big chunky buildings and manicured lawns of UCSD. I’m regaining my faculties the farther I ride. Torrey Pines Road is nice and even and flat and has a broad bicycle lane, so I’m slowly acquiring the composure I left on that hill as the brisk breeze dries the sweat from my head.

To the left, I recognize the Salk Institute, and at an intersection I ask a man who’s crossing at the crosswalk where the glider port is. He throws a thumb over his shoulder, motioning west toward the coast and down Salk Institute Road, and says, “Back that way.” Excellent!

At the terminus of Salk Institute Road is a dirt parking lot. I dismount Blackie the Black Bicycle of Honor and Might and continue on foot until I come to a man sitting in a white lawn chair with a garden hose across his lap, watering about a 30-foot radius of an acre of grass.

“How many times you have to move that chair to water the whole thing?” I ask.

“I don’t even try,” he answers from beneath his floppy khaki hat. November 30, sitting in a white plastic chair, beneath a sun hat, watering the lawn. I love San Diego.

“Anyone flying today?” I ask him.

“No,” he says. “Conditions are all wrong. See that smog over the water?” he directs my attention to a brown layer sitting like a shelf of mud in the air over the Pacific. “That smog blew out there from the Santa Anas. We need it to blow the other direction for the pilots to get off the ground.”

The glider port at Torrey Pines is a small patch of lawn overlooking a 300-foot steep cliff beside the ocean. People pay good money to strap themselves to a parachute or glider and, when a stiff wind catches them, jump off the cliff. No thank you.

The glider port also has a shop to buy the rayon jumpsuits, parachutes, and ropes and things for the activity and — why I’m here — a small outdoor café. Since it’s not a popular lunch destination, and there are no pilots flinging themselves yon into the open blue, I have a small area of a dozen white patio tables to myself, except for a fat black Labrador who comes to have a sniff at the back of my right knee.

I lean Blackie the Bicycle against a length of fence and pet the dog. From an open counter a thin man in a white chef’s outfit calls out to me. “What would you like to eat?”

Finally. The reason I spent a morning riding a narrow steel bicycle 24 miles, down 200 feet to sea level, then 200 feet back up a winding road to here. Gorgeous here. “A big cheeseburger,” I reply.

“Sorry,” he says. “We don’t have cheeseburgers anymore.”

My shoulders slump. I hang my head and rub my forehead with a gloved hand, spreading crystallized sweat salt and road grime across my brow. I pat the chubby dog on the head.

“Okay,” I call back to him and wave. “Thanks.”

I pull Blackie the Black Bicycle of Morality and Justice from her hitching post, point her away from the cliff. I nod to the man in the patio chair watering his patch of lawn, and he nods back. And I walk Blackie through the dirt parking lot again, muttering to myself, “Maybe Coronado? Yeah. I think the Night and Day Café has a good burger for lunch… Yeah! I can take the Rose Creek Bike Path back. And get an ice cream at Gelato Vero, you know, for the carbs. It’s going to be a long ride…”

At Salk Institute Road, I mount Blackie the Bicycle again and shout, “Hyeah, Blackie! Get up, girl! Hyeah!”

And we’re off.