Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Bill Humphreys. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Bill, appreciate you joining us today. Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.
“Selling my car to buy a bicycle in order to keep my driver’s license.” I was living at the beach in San Diego just doing odd jobs with no plans, or goals in life, when the moving violation tickets I was accumulating with my red Austin Healey became a threat to losing my precious California driving license.
I say “precious” because it was a solid piece of identification that had my picture and a local address which proved that I “belonged” and was not just a transient passing through.
I had to go before the judge, who admonished me for my failure to appear for previous violations and he took my driver’s license for two weeks, with a stern promise that I would lose it for good if I got another ticket in the next year.
I sold the Healey the next day and bought myself a $110 Raleigh 10-speed bicycle. This would ensure that I would not get another ticket, but at the same time, I had no idea how this simple act would change my life.
My bike commuting to work, along with weekend rides up the coast, became an exhilarating escape for me, and then I showed up for a San Diego Bike Club time trial race and I got hooked on bike racing. I had great results in my first 3 Novice races and was moved up a class and could not finish a race, so I gave it up but still loved riding my bike.
It was an inauspicious beginning to a career that would completely surpass any previous visions I may have had as a high school or college miler on the track team.
I still wanted to make a statement on the bike and in the summer of 1972, I rode my bike from San Diego to Quebec City, then down through Vermont to my hometown of East Hartford, Connecticut.
I didn’t know where the bike could really take me over the next 20 years, but this trip set my cycling career in motion beyond my wildest dreams. This would be just the beginning of my 50-year odyssey with the bike as my instrument of personal growth and education.
I would end up getting haircuts, shaving my beard and legs, while riding more expensive bikes and competing internationally for the USA. Then I became a USA Team coach and travelled with teams to Europe and South America, before transitioning into race promotion and ending up as a special events manager for Bicycling Magazine.
I am 79 years old now and rode my bike 6000 miles this past year, so that simple act of selling my car to save my driver’s license continues to be the time in my life when everything changed.
Bill, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
In the spring of 2008, I was back behind the wheel of a tractor-trailer. The last time I’d sat in this position was over 40 years earlier. Why and how I ended up being a truck driver again after all this time made no sense to me, yet here I was on my first day back, much older but apparently not much wiser.
As a young, 23 year old driving rookie on a two-driver rig that never stopped moving, I had no idea how many ways I would crisscross this country before I would settle down. That was 1967 before CB radios, movies and country-western songs made truck drivers into folk heroes.
My dad was not overjoyed that I had become a truck driver instead of a West Point graduate, but he respected my work ethic and understood how hard the job was.
If you had told me that by my 28th birthday I would have ridden a bicycle across the country on many of these same roads and be racing eight-day, 750-mile bicycle races in Ireland, then representing the USA at the world championships in Barcelona, Spain, I would have looked at you in total disbelief.
Now, here I was decades later, sitting back behind the wheel of an 18-wheeler, with my life flashing before me. It was Deja vu all over again.
I had immersed myself in so many different jobs and lifestyles over the years that I had lost count. I had no endpoint in sight. I had just gone with the flow of the adventures that kept coming my way, but now I was 63, married, with a 9-year-old son and a mortgage.
Somewhere around the age 53 it had hit me that I was running out of time to attract the right woman into my life, and I could end up drunk and alone on the barroom floor.
By the time I was 54 I had graduated college, landed a great job in the cycling industry, got married, bought a house, and had a baby boy. I had finally joined mainstream America, but I kept looking over my shoulder, wondering if I really belonged.
I have always felt pride in the life I chose to live, but at the same time I felt like I was in an imposter or living in the witness protection program, especially when I ended up settling down in this quaint little Connecticut village. My most recent fling with truck driving, which would last nine years, confirmed those thoughts.
The songs on the radio late at night brought back an amazing array of stories, and questions about my audacious life that I never had time to reflect on until I heard that diesel roar once again.
I had dined in palaces, drunk wine with kings and queens, hitchhiked across the country, been a seaman in the merchant marine, helped build jet engines and nuclear submarines, ridden my bike across the country, competed internationally for my country, then coached at the Olympic Training Center, produced world-class cycling races, graduated from college, written a best-selling cycling book, and done business in the Benelux countries.
So how could I be a truck driver again?
Did those things really happen? Had I run out of time?
To say that I had had an extraordinary life would be an understatement, even if it was uncharted, unplanned, and considered irresponsible. But was it all going to be lost on me, my wife, and my 9-year-old son because I was back to driving a truck?
At 73, I would give myself “regret checks” while soaked in sweat, moving freight around in the back of a 100-degree trailer on a hot summer day. Don’t get me wrong, I was proud of being a truck driver and becoming part of the underappreciated working class in this country. I had never let my trainers, bosses or fellow workers know how old I was or what I had done in my previous life. I was in their world at the time and that was all that mattered.
With the advent of Facebook, I learned that many of my former teammates and high school friends were now long-retired grandparents.
Here I was at a truck stop wondering how I could still manage another 14- hour physically demanding workday while trying to get home in time to watch my son’s lacrosse game. All the while asking myself, “Was the life I had lived worth it? Would I trade places with any of my childhood friends or teammates who had lived more, shall we say, responsible lives than me?”
When I was in my early 20s and developing a pattern of recklessly abandoning jobs and hopping from lifestyle to lifestyle, my dad said to me one day, “Son, are you writing all this down?”
His question was not one of frustration, but more like one of hope. This tough former FBI agent, who came from a long line of senators, plantation owners, Confederate generals, and governors from the state of Mississippi, wasn’t disappointed or lecturing me. He was hinting that if this was the path I was going down, then I should take some notes, because if I kept this up, at the end of the line I was going to have one hell of a story to tell.
50 Year Highlights
Bill Humphreys Contributions to Cycling
Contributions as a rider
1973 & 75 Tour of Ireland
1973 World Championships
1974 Tour of Newfoundland
Contributions as a coach
US Teams in the Vuelta Costa Rica 1976 & 1980
Junior National Team Coach 1978 (LeMond, Keifel, etc.)
Senior National Team Coach 1979
Contributions as Soigneur
1978 & 1979 Tour de L’Avenir
1979 Tour of Suisse
1979 World Championships
Contributions as a Race Promoter (18 total races)
1981 Worcester Whirlwind
1983 St. Petersburg Klondike Cyclone
1984 Olympic Development Road Race
2008-10 Whaling City Cyclone
Contributions as a Sponsor
1977 East Coast Regional Team Red Zinger Classic
1984 St. Petersburg Cyclone Racing Team
2009 Junior Club Team
Contributions in the Cycling Industry
1997 to 1999 Marketing Manager Bicycling Magazine
1999 to 2004 Sales Rep American Bicycle Group
2011 to 2013, Velo Nation Global Sales
Contributions as a Journalist & Author
Articles in Velo News & Road Bike Action
The Jersey Project ‘2011Book of the Year’ Competitive Cyclist
2019 Organizer “The Tour of Ireland Reunion”
2021 Organize “Legacy Advisory Board” for USA Cycling
Have you ever had to pivot?
In the late fall of 1977,after my second season of being a rider-coach for a grass roots cycling team in North Carolina transitioning towards coaching and getting off the international racing circuit, the USA National Team coach called to say he wanted me to take my first coaching assignment with national team program at a seven-day stage race in Costa Rica over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. This would be the start of my almost full-time coaching career as a member of the U.S. Cycling Federation coaching staff. My rise to the top level of coaching was similar to how I quickly I arrived as a top level competitor in 1973. What came next was an incredible, “Tour of Duty” as a coach/manager and soigneur that took me from the jungles of Costa Rica to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado to the Swiss Alps in just my first year.
The world was opening up to me again as a coach and it would help build my resume towards my ultimate goal of race promoter. The things I would learn and the people I would meet took me to the upper echelons of international cycling on the European continent where no American cycling team or coach had ever been.
Before leaving for Costa Rica, I took several massage lessons from my masseur in Chapel Hill and I stocked up on vitamins and herbs from my company so I could keep the team healthy and relaxed during the 7 day race.
My team consisted of top level riders hoping to work their way up to the National Team. I had raced against all of them over the past few years, but they were much younger than I and still had a chance to race internationally for the immediate future.
Right away I had to make them realize that I was not there to compete against them but to help them with the experience I had gained racing internationally. American teams travelling to South and Central America had a history of getting sick from bad water and food and then not finishing enough riders to qualify for the team standings. B
The system of developing a qualified coaching staff was simple. If a new coach could survive with a team and get results in the jungles of Latin America, then they would earn better trips to Europe in the future. My main goals were to just remain calm by meditating and give the boys a thorough massage each night and have the whole team finish the 8 day race without getting sick.
I made sure they took the special herbs of cayenne, golden seal, acidolphilus, garlic and multivitamins twice a day. These herbs were to cleanse the blood while stimulating circulation in the gastrointestinal tract and act as herbal antibiotics against foreign strains of bacteria that cause diarrhea and fever or “Montezuma’s Revenge.” I practiced reflexology on their feet which hits pressure points that reflect on their internal organs helping make them resistant to infections from the poor and different diet they were subject to as they raced 80 to 100 miles a day.
I had to fight “Tooth and Nail” to protect my riders to make sure they were not taken advantage of by typical, “South of the Border” favoritism by the locals and the officials.
The team accomplished their goals, everyone finished, Steve Jennings placed 3rd overall and we beat the Cuban’s by placing 3rd in the team standings.
In February of 1978 while walking the aisles of the New York Bike Show I was approached and congratulated on my success in Costa Rica by Ernie Seubert, the president of our governing body, who had suspended me for racing in South Africa a few years before, who asked me if I would be interested in being the national junior team coach. This caught me totally off guard but I said yes and he informed me I would be working with a new national coach, Eddie Borysewicz, who was a former member and coach of the Polish National Cycling Team. Eddy was the guru from the sports medicine schools of the Eastern Bloc countries that dominated amateur cycling on the continent. I was on a ground floor level to learn everything about thier successful training and racing programs. Our focus on the Junior program paid off with a first ever Bronze Medal at the Junior Worlds Championships, and I would go on to pioneer the soigneur position, a combination of Athletic Trainer and massage therapist for the next 2 years taking teams to Europe and Latin America, before moving on to become a successful race promoter with a partner who became my mentor and best friend over the next 6 years. I would move from the Sports/cycling mecca of Boulder Colorado to partner with Gerry Dunn in Worcester, Ma. We would produce 2 major races in Worcester and bring over a team from Holland to race for a few weeks with sponsors we secured. Then we would relocate to the Tampa Bay area and produce over 15 major international cycling events between 1983 and 1988. We raised over $100,000 for the Police Olympic Program and worked with city governments and over 75 different sponsors. One event started in Cypress Gardens and went 110 miles through downtown Tampa and over a major causeway to finish on the waterfront in St Petersburg.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
There was the fitness outdoors group that Boulder was becoming known for and then there were the hard drinking crazies who had always been there.
What the cyclists in town didn’t know about me was that I was dedicating my time to both groups and I paid the price.
I spent as much and eventually more time in places like The Spanish Moon; that Little
Feat sings about as I did on the ski slopes or on my bike.
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I owe a long journey while I am writing my memoir, but most of all, I owe all the truth I can wheedle out of myself.
By burning the candle at both ends I ended up on the wrong end, and found myself lying flat on my back after the last call, looking up at the clear starlit sky wondering, how the hell did I get here? Not exactly the image an Olympic Training Center Coach wants to project.
Weighing 220lbs full of whiskey, beer, I would start the year off fasting for seven days. I found a great chiropractor, and using everything I learned over my racing and coaching years about nutrition, meditation, EST, massage, Rolfing and cleansing I began the long trip back to fitness.
Six months later I would be the Colorado State Time Trial Champion at age 36 beating all age groups.
Flash forward 10 years and after a successful stint in bicycle race promotion and import sales, I would find myself sidetracked again as a used-up bartender in Savannah, Georgia.
Once again, I would pull myself up by the bootstraps, and begin anew.
Within 3 years I would graduate with my BA from UMass/Amherst Sports Management School, get hired by Bicycling Magazine as a Special Events Marketing Manager, get married, buy a house and have a baby boy.
Nowadays, at 79, while walking my dog, each evening, in the lakeside neighborhood, where I grew up, I will hear “Spanish Moon” on my wi-fi and know it took a true test of character and belief in oneself for me to bounce back from the near disasters I put myself through over the years.
It becomes clear that throughout all the travels, competitions, and jobs, that some bigger spirit was looking after me. I have been blessed, after all my ramblings, and trials by error to arrive late in life with my body and mind still intact and ready for whatever else comes my way. (I’m not done yet).
Contact Info:
- Website: www.therealbikeguy.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bill.humphreys2