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It's not your typical 50-year-old guy who posts the ups and downs of his midlife crisis on a blog for friends, family, co-workers and the just-curious to daily follow. That is what Ken Fuirst did this summer at "Ken's Bike Ride," the personal blog the insurance broker meticulously kept while bracing for and riding out "My Midlife Crisis."
There was more humor than frank confession in that subtitle he gave his blog and the strenuous journey where few middle-aged guys of slowing metabolism and growing girth dare go, let alone go alone as Fuirst did. Humor is a good companion on the solitary road he took, and it travels light.
"This became everyone's summer reading - watching this saga of me go across," he said one August morning behind his president's desk at Levitt-Fuirst Associates Ltd. in Yonkers. Though his wife gave it a thumbs-up review, the well-traveled beard the broker grew in the course of his midlife crisis was recently shorn.
Go across America, that is, from sea to shining sea on a road bike that carried Fuirst ("first, second, third," he said by way of phonetic help with his surname) and 45 pounds of midlife cyclist's baggage over 3,556 miles. From the cross-country cyclist's traditional dip of his bike's rear wheel in the Pacific at Seattle to the dip of his front wheel in the Atlantic on the Jersey Shore on Aug. 1, Fuirst's journey was 48 days.
He shed 10 pounds on an already lean body along the way, on top of the 10 he lost in his year of training for it. "And then I lost five pounds on...