Since starting “Inside Cycling” a few months ago, I’ve written about dozens of people instrumental in expanding modern road cycling in North America. For many readers, those pioneers are just names on the paper (or screen, in this case). So I feel privileged that I’ve known nearly all of the people I’ve written about in this column, including those who live (or have lived) in my current hometown.

Boulder, Colorado, as I hinted last week, has been one of the most influential places in expanding the sport this side of the Atlantic. Among the reasons for its influence — besides it being the home of the long-departed Coors Classic — are the great cycling terrain and the great cyclists in this relatively small town of 100,000 (a big chunk of whom are students at the University of Colorado).

This week, I want to take a pause in the history-recording aspect of my column to share with you some thoughts about the people and places, sights and sounds of riding through Boulder and its mountains on my birthday last Thursday morning. Each year, I ride the number of miles equal to the years in my birthday, adding one more mile each time — even though my mother says I should be now taking a mile off each birthday. But challenges are good, and I felt stronger this year on a ride that climbed (and descended) about 5000 feet in its current 62-mile format.

This Thursday was special: It was 05.05.05, the fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth year in the 21st century. And the official time of sunrise was, yes, 5:55. So, naturally, I had to start my birthday ride at 5:55 on 5.5.5. It was going to be a great day.

The top of the sun’s redness peeked over the distant line of the prairies behind me as I left home and pointed my bike (steel frame, carbon fork, double chainrings, nine-speed cassette) toward the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. My North Boulder neighborhood is home (or has been home) to a number of cycling personalities. In the first mile and a bit of my ride, besides seeing a field of goats (including three new kids this spring), I pedaled past the streets where Clark Sheehan, Ron Kiefel, Henk Vogels, Hugh Walton, Susan Eastman and Louis Viggio all have homes.

Sheehan, whose pro career highlight was a gallant stage win at the Tour DuPont, is now the organizer of the local Excel Sports stage race, which this year finishes at North Boulder Park. Kiefel, who now runs the busy Wheat Ridge Cyclery, was the first American to win a stage of the Giro d’Italia — a race that former Boulder resident Vogels was about to start for his Davitamon-Lotto team.

Former Canadian pro and world masters road champion Walton recently revived the bike-clothing division of Descente; and Eastman, his wife, was the Coors Classic press officer and a feature writer for Winning magazine in the 1980s before helping found Inside Communications, parent company of VeloNews. And Viggio, who was a Coors Classic volunteer and once had a lodger named Raúl Alcalá (the 1987 Coors Classic champion and the first Mexican to win a Tour de France stage), now runs Graham Watson’s photography business.

Though a 71-degree high was forecast Thursday, temps were in the brisk low 40s as I headed north on U.S. 36 — which between Boulder and Lyons must be the most-cycled highway in North America. Luckily, winds were light and blowing from the southwest on this quiet May morning, so without a wind chill I was warm enough in shorts and a thin rain jacket over my favorite white “Fausto Coppi” racing jersey, which was a present from friend Viggio on my 50th birthday.

The capricious Boulder winds once played a big part in the local stage race’s time trial on a 5-mile stretch of U.S. 36 from the Green Briar Inn to Boulder. The women were faster than the men because the wind changed 180 degrees from a tail wind one day to a head wind the next. Also on this stretch, a year before his DuPont stage win, a fierce crosswind picked up a metal cattle trough, which flew across the road and knocked Sheehan from his bike as he set out on an early-season training ride.

The wind wasn’t much of a factor today after I turned left at the Green Briar and headed into the hills. The ensuing 21-mile climb up Left Hand Canyon to the wacky old mining town of Ward — once home to Alexi Grewal, America’s first (and still only) Olympic men’s road champion — is a mix of false flats and steeper pitches climbing past the creek where it turns into white rapids. The last mile into Ward defies gravity. The former Coors Classic tech director Don Hobbs dubbed this climb “the Beast” when he ran a charity ride up the canyon a few years ago.

Thursday morning, I felt that the Beast was clutching at my legs as I just kept my bottom gear of 39x26 turning as I climbed toward the promise of a brownie and coffee at the Ward General Store. But the store, home to the grandly named Colorado Coffee Company, was closed. Too early to be open, I guess. The town’s only other shop was open, though, and a buck-thirty got me a chocolate-chip cookie and a “help yourself from the vacuum flask” mug of coffee.

I promised to call my wife on reaching Ward, but my cell phone was out of network, and the shopkeeper told me the nearest phone was up on the Peak-to-Peak Highway — but not in the direction I was planning to ride. The phone call would have to wait.

The caffeine boost (I rarely drink coffee) made the next 15 miles to Nederland, starting at around 9400-feet elevation, seem to fly by. The sun was getting high, my jacket was off, and there was virtually no traffic on this amazing stretch of road that dips and climbs around the forested ridges stretching out from the newly snow-covered peaks of the Continental Divide.

Even though I was heading south rather than north, I imagined I was riding with Alcalá and Grewal on their winning two-man break along Peak-to-Peak at the final Coors Classic in 1988. I found a nice rhythm on the first long uphill, and let out a euphoric scream on one swooping 50-mph descent. Cycling doesn’t get any better than this.

To make up my birthday distance, I headed out of Nederland, past the house Tyler Hamilton lived in after graduating from a CU, up to the village of Eldora. This brought back memories of riding the Mike Horgan Memorial Hill Climb (I still have my race numbers) to the Eldora ski station, before I returned to Nederland for an early lunch at Whistler’s Café (“no alcohol served before 11 am”).

The extra weight of an excellent “veggie scram” and a drink of hot chocolate surely helped me on the half-hour, 3000-foot drop down Boulder Canyon and back into town.

This time I rode past the ends of the streets where Andy Hampsten, Felix Magowan, Len Pettyjohn, Connie Carpenter, Davis Phinney and Michael Aisner all live. Hampsten, of course, remains America’s only Giro winner. Magowan founded Inside Communications with Eastman and me in Boulder 18 years ago. Race promoter Pettyjohn, who was Grewal’s team manager leading up to the ’84 Olympics, is currently looking for a successor to his Saturn Classic road race. He lives on the hill where Moreno Argentin attacked to win the final stage of the 1986 Coors Classic before the Italian went on to win the world’s in Colorado Springs.

As for Carpenter (first American female cyclist to win an Olympic gold medal) and Phinney (first American to take a road stage of the Tour de France), they’ll soon be back in town after a year or so living in northern Italy, where (like Hampsten in Tuscany) they run successful bicycle trips and camps. Aisner was featured this Sunday in the “25 years ago today” column of the Boulder Daily Camera, pictured at the press conference he gave with Celestial founder Mo Siegel (another Boulder resident) to announce the first (1980) Coors Classic.

A last little climb took me up to Wonderland and its panorama over this beautiful city, its mountain backdrop still fringed in white from last week’s snowfall, where cycling and cyclists are alive and well. Including this one.

Maybe next week I’ll write about two Coors Classic winners who clashed at the world’s in ’82….