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ALUMNI STORIES: Elli England

Elli England

When I attended Fullerton College in 1986 – 1988, I was a member of the Cycling Club. Our members rode socially, racking up a minimum of 70 miles a week and coordinating group rides in Orange County. We recruited members, held meetings, kept each other notified of cycling events, and took turns mapping out rides down the Los Angeles, or Santa Ana River Trail, or through Santiago Canyon Road to Modjeska Canyon, and then often on to Laguna Canyon.

Our rides traditionally ended with pizza and a beer (for those old enough) and a sag wagon when one of us could con a parent/cousin/sibling/roommate to pick up half a dozen sun-burned, carb-comatose, spandex-clad "Freds" — as cyclers were called in those days.

We logged our mileage and times, practiced our pace line rules, and our peloton formations, helped fellow cyclists with flats, minor accidents and road rash, and had our own share of mishaps: the time one of us got stuck in stirrups, falling face first in a busy PCH intersection, or the time another of us, citing more stirrup issues, plowed right into the back of an OCTD bus. I'm not mentioning names.

We never officially competed as a group, but we were serious about cycling. Yet, we always had fun. Our club president was a great prankster, so on his birthday during the semester, we decided to make him believe his bike had been stolen from the campus bike rack. Of course this would require us to cut his chain off, but since we all had bike shop connections, this small act of vandalism seemed entirely worth it. But it wasn't enough to simply hide the bike, we needed to make this prank memorable.

It took a good two hours for our president to notice his bike was missing, but most of our fellow students had seen the bike as soon as they walked on campus. From the middle of the quad, underneath the old iron Hornet, our president’s bike was perfectly visible — and it was perfectly captured on the front page of the Hornet Newspaper.