America’s Bike Rider-in-Chief Demonstrates Pedaling Prowess

President Bush doesn’t remember the first bicycle he rode as a boy, but he’s on pretty good terms with the Trek mountain bike he uses to grind his way over rock-ridden gulches and prairie grass trails at his spread near this Lonestar State whistlestop crossroads.

“Some guys go on their ranch and ride horses,” he explains. “I like to ride my ranch on a mountain bike.”

Struggling to keep up with him on a 17-mile ride one hot August morning, I found myself recalling my own early biking days, pedaling a creaking red Huffy weighed down with 120 copies of the Richmond Times-Dispatch – in the pre-dawn darkness long ago.

True, my old paper route didn’t take me through stands of live oak and pecan trees or down sycamore-shaded canyons brimming with whitetail deer, wild turkey, and fox. Still, humping papers over the fall- line topography of my youth was good training, it turns out, for the pumping and wheezing required to keep up with the Bike Rider- in-Chief, an avid and aggressive mountain biker who recently hosted a handful of reporters for an off-road tour de ranch.

An insider’s view of Peleton One left this lifetime bike rider tipping his helmet to the pedaling prowess of the Prez.

“We ride pretty hard,” Bush warned as our pad-and-pencil posse saddled up. “And the reason why is I like to stay fit. I think you can do your job better if you’re fit.”

AT 59, BUSH ranks in the 99th percentile for fitness among men his age. He’s 6 feet tall, weighs 192 pounds, and his resting heart rate is an athletic 47 beats per minute — though it’s said to tick up to the opening strains of “Hail to the Chief.”

Bush credits biking, which he took up two years ago after decades of jogging had ravaged his knees. His ranch ride is no walk in the park. On our two-hour spoke-and-sprocket stampede, his heart rate averaged 139 beats per minute, peaking at 177 on one extended climb, and he burned 1,493 calories, by the monitor he wears when he rides.

“Exercise for me has been good preventive medicine,” said Bush, who works out six days a week — on his bike, lifting weights, or running on an elliptical machine.

His passion, though, is mountain biking on his Prairie Chapel Ranch, a 1,660-acre parcel he calls “a little slice of Heaven” halfway between Austin and Dallas. Since taking office in 2001, he’s made 51 trips to the ranch, where, as of Friday, he’d spent all or part of 346 days — about a fifth of his presidency — according to CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller, the undisputed source for such things.

Rule one for riding with Bush: “You don’t pass the President,” the executive order decrees.

“If I wasn’t leading, I’d be following,” he shrugged. “I don’t like to do that.”

EIGHT YEARS younger than Bush and a regular cyclist on my 12- mile commute to work, I had a problem keeping up with the blistering pace he laid down over uncertain terrain that included steep slopes of caliche — gravelly limestone — and perilous slides through creekside mire as thick as Texas crude.

Bush may be a conservative, but that’s not how he rides. “Facial strawberries,” as he puts it, are a regular consequence of his Remember-the-Alamo approach to cycling; “Achilles Hill” is what he calls an especially treacherous grade where he once took a spill, opening a cut above his heel that took three stitches to close. He was compassionate, however, pausing now and then to let foot- draggers catch up and to point out the natural splendor of the presidential ponderosa.

He takes a homesteader’s pride in showing off a 90-foot waterfall in a cottonmouth-infested canyon, and you can almost hear the palomino hooves splashing through the creek bed when he criss- crosses the Bosque River fork meandering along one low-lying stretch. True Grit on a knobby-tired Trek.

Unscripted downtime offers clues to a President’s personality seldom glimpsed in the Oval Office. Clinton vacationed in Nantucket, Papa Bush liked Kennebunkport, and Reagan favored Santa Barbara. Those places are easy to like. It takes a special guy to appreciate someplace where even the rattlesnakes seek shade when the sun blazes down like a branding iron, a remote part of Texas some find about as inviting as rusted barbed wire against a bare shin.

“Oh boy,” was the reaction of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a frequent guest at the ranch, when she first saw the property six years ago. Bush, though, clearly loves the place, which he claims will be his home when he comes to the end of the presidential trail in January, 2009. If he has his way, he’ll be riding the range on two wheels even then.

“I hope to be mountain biking for a long time,” Bush said. “It brings out the child in you. And I think it’s okay for a 59-year- old guy to still chase that fountain of youth.”