Rob Holland’s Story

“My name is Rob. I’m 55. My wife Jessy and I have two sons. Jamie is in college at Miami, Oh. and our younger guy Cal is a senior at Lakewood this year. I’ll tell you my story about bicycling and how it changed my life. I was working this job. I was 40 years old and two things happened at the same time. One was the pick up truck that I own broke down, it needed some major repairs and at the same time I had seen my doctor and I was smoking then, I was overweight and he said you need to quit smoking, change your diet and get some exercise. So I was trying to figure out what to do about replacing my truck. I didn’t have the money for it. I started biking to work. It was about 6 miles. I started in January and I got hooked. It was an adventure every day. It was something new. I look forward to it and I just started shedding pounds. I quit smoking and It really changed my life. I got hooked on it, so I just kept biking around and the company I was working for was located in Westlake, after a few years, they moved out to Avon and so my commute went from 6 or 7 miles and it went up to 15 miles one way so I kept it up for three years doing 30 mile round-trip and was never better shape though I was about to turn 50 and I decided I couldn’t keep commuting that far, so I took a leap of faith and I quit that job. It was a good job too and it was said I was crazy to leave it, so for three years I puttered around jobs and worked in a couple different places and that’s when I landed this job that now ,which is 5 miles away, and that’s a big reason that I took the job, the commute is just perfect. Then my bike, a Kona Smoke, I had it for years and put 1000 miles on it. I was riding it in a pub crawl in Lakewood and this was in and outside of the bar and my friends went into the bar and I could see my bike outside. I didn’t have it locked up and I went to pay my tab and turned around and it was gone, and I thought one of my buddies was playing a big joke on me and that one of my buddies had hijacked it and was just riding around the neighborhood or trying to freak me out, but by the end of the night, but my bike never turned up the next day, I realized that it was stolen and then I realize that that was my most prized possession. I didn’t realize it until then and I was heartbroken over that. Then my neighbor gave me a bike similar to my original one as a gift, a Trek 7.3 FX. I really enjoy Cleveland Critical Mass, Slow Roll Cleveland, Ray’s Indoor Mountain Bike Park and all of Lakewood’s great bike shops. , so that’s my bike story in a nutshell.”