Take one very large guy. Add booze, cigarettes, and an extreme amount of junk food. Mix in a wry, self-effacing wit. Throw in a bike. The result? Heft on Wheels, a potently funny look at turning your life around, one insanely unrealistic goal at a time. Not that long ago, Mike Magnuson was a self-described lummox with a bicycle. In the space of three months, he lost seventy-five pounds, quit smoking, stopped drinking, and morphed from the big guy at the back of the pack into a lean, mean cycling machine. Today, Mike is a 175-pound athlete competing in some of the most difficult one-day racing events in America. This irreverent and inspiring memoir charts every hilarious detail of his transformation, from the horrors of skin-tight XXL biking shorts to the miseries of nicotine withdrawal. Heft on Wheels is an unforgettable book about getting from one place to another, in more ways than one. “Mike's one of the only writers in the world who makes reading about cycling so much fun you're nearly tempted to skip your next ride and keep turning the pages.” —Bill Strickland, executive editor, Bicycling magazine “Forget Dr. Phil and the South Beach Diet. Forget Atkins and scary pills. Mike Magnuson found another, much more enjoyable way to shed pounds and get healthy: cycling.” — Chicago Sun-Times Take one very large guy. Add booze, cigarettes, and an extreme amount of junk food. Mix in a wry, self-effacing wit. Throw in a bike. The result? Heft on Wheels, a potently funny look at turning your life around, one insanely unrealistic goal at a time. Not that long ago, Mike Magnuson was a self-described lummox with a bicycle. In the space of three months, he lost seventy-five pounds, quit smoking, stopped drinking, and morphed from the big guy at the back of the pack into a lean, mean cycling machine. Today, Mike is a 175-pound athlete competing in some of the most difficult one-day racing events in America. This irreverent and inspiring memoir charts every hilarious detail of his transformation, from the horrors of skin-tight XXL biking shorts to the miseries of nicotine withdrawal. "Heft on Wheels is an unforgettable book about getting from one place to another, in more ways than one. Mike Magnuson teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and has written for Esquire , GQ , and Bicycling . He is the author of two novels and a memoir. A truck will hit me. I'm forty years old, the age of doom coming on and regret setting in, et cetera, but hey, I'm not caught up in all that. I'm happy. I'm not overweight anymore. I don't drink anymore or smoke anymore, and, imagine this, I'm not depressed anymore. I'm completely having a great time being healthier now than I've ever been and totally stronger, which is unbelievable sometimes to me. I mean, I expected, when I reached this age, that my athletic life's peak would occur on a Sunday afternoon in January, slamming pitchers of beer and eating peanuts and watching the NFL playoffs with my buddies at the sports bar, but I didn't go that way, I guess, or I didn't stay that way. Instead, a couple of years ago, I spent twenty-five hundred bucks of my professor's salary on a race bicycle and started showing up three nights a week for a fast group road ride here in southern Illinois, at Carbondale Cycle, and three nights a week the group handed me my proverbial fat ass on a platter, which stood to reason. Back then, I smoked a pack a day and drank a case or two of beer a week and did shots of tequila or bourbon or kamikazes or you-name-it regularly at the bar with my graduate students. I weighed, suited up in a skintight XXL cycling jersey and shorts, 255 pounds. Five feet ten inches tall, 255 pounds. I shouldn't have shown up for group ride in that condition. I could have been hurt. Seriously. The group was just too much, too fast, flat-out beating the crap out of me every time. It's a miracle I didn't have a heart attack or a stroke or something trying to keep up. I kept coming back for more, though, because I needed the crap beaten out of me. That's right. I needed atonement. I'm sure my associates at the bar in those days would agree. And, ah, how atonement comes with the group riding out of Carbondale on Dogwood Road into the mobile-home-littered hills and chip-and-seal roads of the Shawnee National Forest and hammering for forty-five miles, pounding over the hills, working inhumanely hard to spit each other off the back of the draftline and make each other suffer the way dropped cyclists have always suffered, like dogs. Man, back in my heavy days, I'd think if I could stay within sight of the group, even for short sections of the ride, I'd be scoring an extra-large moral and metaphorical victory. I win, I'd think, just because I'm participating. The big unhealthy man rides with the local fit fast road-bike group and gets dropped, the inspiring part being the odd truth: He doesn't get dropped as badly as you'd think he'd get dropped. I