I was born and raised here in San Antonio, in the Woodlawn Lake area. I always enjoyed being outside, but I really got into bikes in high school. One morning, I was getting ready for school, and I turned on the TV to see Lance Armstrong dominating a bike race. Seeing him ride inspired me to buy a used Trek road bike on E-Bay, which I used mainly for transportation at first. About two years later, as I was zoned out sitting in class, I realized that I was thinking more about my bike than I was thinking about my classes. When I left school that day, I went on a 50-mile bike ride and decided that biking is what I wanted to do with my life.
After attending San Antonio College, I got a job at Performance Bicycles here in San Antonio, where I worked for six years during my 20s. After that, I moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where I worked at Trek Bicycles for a time. Then I returned to San Antonio, where I was a partner at Alamo Bikes before it closed just prior to the pandemic. Following a brief stint working at a Trek shop in Nashville, Tennessee, I decided to come back to San Antonio to work at Bicycle Heaven as a bike mechanic.
I really love how everyone at Bicycle Heaven has a passion for cycling and great service. A few weeks after I started, the bike company Specialized bought the business, and thankfully we are doing better than ever. We have better bike availability, and we can focus more on what we’ve always done: trying to get more people on bikes. The shop has such an inviting environment, to the point where I don’t think of customers as “customers,” as much as I think of them as fellow cyclists, and I try my best to help them achieve their goals.
I really love how everyone at Bicycle Heaven has a passion for cycling and great service. A few weeks after I started, the bike company Specialized bought the business, and thankfully we are doing better than ever. We have better bike availability, and we can focus more on what we’ve always done: trying to get more people on bikes. The shop has such an inviting environment, to the point where I don’t think of customers as “customers,” as much as I think of them as fellow cyclists, and I try my best to help them achieve their goals.
Cycling will change your life for the better. I wake up with more energy, and I love being able to just get out there and focus on the road. You can have a million things on your mind, but when you’re cruising on your bike, that’s all that is on your mind. My go-to place for biking is the “Ghost Tracks,” down by the Missions on the south side of the city, but San Antonio has tons of great places for biking.
I think working at Bicycle Heaven has helped bring me more fully into the community. I get to meet all kinds of people who cycle, and I enjoy chance meetings with other cyclists around town. Cycling has a great culture of mutual respect, and I really love the bikes too. As a group, we’re always talking about them and always working on them. The cycling industry changes so fast, and it is always improving the technology. I’m really excited about wireless shifting, which has no cables to stretch and gives you a perfect shift every time, even while climbing.
New technology is exciting, but at the end of the day, even if we’re riding different bikes, we’re all sharing the same roads. That keeps us together. When there is a new rider, we try to see how we can help out. As a bike shop, we have supported some races and even have hosted a few. For myself, I have done many races, including a few “Red Bull” races where the last person gets knocked off every lap, which was a lot of fun to do with some of the fastest bikers around.
In my spare time, when I’m not working on or riding bikes, I like to work on hot rod cars, a habit I inherited from my parents. My favorite is an ’84 custom convertible Corvette that I got in Nashville, and I enjoy working on it. Not all my hobbies involve gears and wheels though: I also enjoy camping and kayaking.
I love biking, but I cannot talk about how much I love it without mentioning Tito Bradshaw. When I was first getting hooked on cycling, one of my soon-to-be best friends, Tito Bradshaw, came alongside me and helped me get started. He was the kind of person who would give you the shirt off his back and was always ready with a big smile. Tito brought energy to every room he entered, and he contributed so much to the bicycling community in San Antonio (the bike repair shop at UTSA is named after him). He was killed by a drunk driver in 2019, and she just got sentenced last year. I just want people to be aware of the harm that can be done when someone is careless, and to remind people how much Tito contributed to this community.
Bicycle Heaven has two locations in San Antonio and does everything from bike sales to repairs and maintenance (and this author can attest that they do an incredible job). For a memorial to San Antonio cyclists killed by drivers, see Dan Rosales’s work for the Human Cyclists Project.
Story: Will Young; Photographs courtesy of Moses Flores