Bicycling’s Bill Strickland features Mike “Meatball” Friedman as the “Bicycling magazine intern and lunch ride legend” in this personal profile of the “kid who once tried to sooth a saddle sore by mashing a banana into his chamois…”

Strickland continues: “He was better than any of us in that indefinable yet unmistakeable way, but no ever knows how far that goes.”