Life in the Bike Lane : Exercise and ecology are a few reasons that more people are taking up cycling. Many enjoy the social aspects of clubs.

He swaggers on two wheels, fighting head winds that howl through the Santa Susana Pass, chomping on PowerBars for quick energy, thumbing his nose at Father Time.

Barry Wolfe is a swashbuckling 62-year-old who conquers hills on a bicycle the way GIs attacked ammo dumps in Operation Desert Storm.

His idea of leisure fun is getting up early on Saturday mornings and keeping fast company on his bicycle from Chatsworth to Simi Valley and back--a punishing, 60-mile round trip that a fellow rider long ago ghoulishly nicknamed the Barry Wolfe Memorial.

His companions in the Warner Velo cycling club of Woodland Hills (115 members, including 85 licensed racers) worship him as a patron saint of the fast lane, the patriarch of bicycling in the San Fernando Valley.

“He’s the oldest member of our club--but in many ways, he’s the youngest,” says Steve Burton, 39, a founder-director of the club.

“A legend in my own mind,” Wolfe wisecracks at his North Hollywood engineering firm, in an office filled with 30-odd years of trophies and other memorabilia from competitive cycling.

It’s not surprising that Wolfe scoffs at so-called recreational cyclists--including virtually all 550 members of the San Fernando Valley Bicycle Club and most of the estimated 99 million Americans who, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Bicycle Federation of America, an advocacy group, ride for fun, exercise, sociability, environmental appreciation and even to commute.

“All they do is ride to eat--and eat to ride,” Wolfe says. “They’re basically tourists. They go from McDonald’s to McDonald’s--Tour de McDonald’s.”

To which they retort, “Good for us!” They say they’ll take fast food over the fast lane any time, thank you.

“It’s important to stop and get something to eat and drink, even if you’re not hungry or thirsty. You’re burning up calories, even though you may not feel tired at all,” says Maria Fribourg, 52, of Woodland Hills. She’s the president of the San Fernando Valley Bicycle Club, which offers weekend rides (round trip: 25, 50 or 100 miles) with such names as the Woodland Hills Wiggle, Masochists’ Mirth on Mountainous Mulholland, Ring Around the Rose Bowl and Pig Out at Paty’s (a Toluca Lake coffee shop).

“And if you don’t eat,” Fribourg adds, “you do something we call ‘bonking’--which means you have no energy left and you have to get off your bike and stop. If you’re a runner, it’s like crashing into a wall. You feel like lying down and taking a nap. . . . You just need some sugar and carbohydrates, and you’re fine.”

Such are the kinds of choices that make bicycling so appealing.

It’s a pastime that lets the young and the young at heart choose their own paths. It’s for loners and joiners, families and friends. It’s a trip around the block, a race across America. It’s a statement against air and noise pollution, against stress brought on by clogged arteries--in people and in traffic.

It’s for the enthusiast who keeps it simple--pedaling a department-store bike with a standard steel frame for, say, $200, in T-shirt and jeans--or the one who opts for extravagance: a 21-speed with a titanium frame and $400 shocks, $200 headlights, a $100 handlebar-mounted computer to monitor speed and mileage and myriad other bells and whistles that can drive some bicycles from a pricey $2,500 to a very-top-of-the-line $5,000.

And when you tally up Styrofoam helmets ($25 to $75), padded-crotch stretch shorts ($25 to $50), stiff-soled shoes ($40 to $75 pair) and dazzling, neon-colored jerseys ($30 to $70) of porous, synthetic fabric that “breathes,” it’s clear that bicycling is a tour de force as both sport and fashion.

Still, for spenders big or small, happiness is simply a bike path with a see-forever view, a whoosh of mountain air in the face and cold swigs from plastic bottles or tubes attached to backpack containers called “CamelbaKs.”

*

“There are days when I just like to go out and pedal slowly--I don’t have to ride hard every day,” says Shanna Hadlock, 38, of Calabasas, a mother of three and an international racer who trains by riding five days a week--150 miles a week in winter, 250 in summer. “If I rode hard all the time,” she adds, “I wouldn’t enjoy it.”

To Steve Burton, a Woodland Hills attorney who helped organize the Warner Velo club, cycling offers not just the rush of competition but a way to “meet people from other walks of life--people I’d never have met otherwise.”

For Jamie Griffis, 39, manager of the Canoga Park shop Bikesport and co-leader of a women’s club called LA FORCE (Female Off-Road Cycling Enthusiasts), bicycling enables her to “get in touch with my child self again. And you see so much more on a bike at 15 miles an hour than you do in a car going 40 miles an hour.”

And to Maria Fribourg, who gave up running (“My knees started to hurt because of all the pounding”), cycling brings “joy to my life--and as you talk with those you ride with, the miles go by so much faster. . . . It’s the exercise and the social life combined. The two of them are unbeatable.”

About all these devotees ask is that we call them “cyclists.” To them, biker dredges up not fanciers of sleek Univega or Mongoose bicycles but devotees of high-decibel Harleys, leather jackets and tattoos.

“It’s the same mentality, but a different instrument,” says Doug Benedon, 38, a Woodland Hills civil-appellate attorney and founder-director of the Warner Velo club.

*

Los Angeles, he adds, offers far more than just an ideal year-round climate for bicycling--a sport, incidentally, long pursued by Mayor Richard Riordan.

“Everyone thinks of L.A. as nothing more than Disneyland, smog and congestion,” Benedon says. “But in L.A., we’ve got the Santa Monica Mountains, and you can ride into the canyons and see coyotes. You get to see a part of L.A. that most people don’t know about.”

Bob Winning, 58, of West Hills agrees.

“L.A. bashing is very much in vogue at the moment. Yet for me and thousands like me, Greater Los Angeles is the best urban bicycle-riding area in the world,” Winning writes in “Short Bike Rides in and Around Los Angeles” (Globe Pequot Press), a newly published handbook. He adds that “some of the most fascinating territory is in the Santa Clarita Valley and Canyon Country, part of a bicycle rider’s Los Angeles but outside of its political definition.”

Half a century ago, bicycles were bulky contraptions with balloon tires, pedal brakes, fenders and mud flaps--ridden almost exclusively by schoolchildren. But along came lighter, European-style three-speeds equipped with hand brakes, then state-of-the-art 10-speeds popular in the 1960s.

Today, Valley-area riders continue reinventing their wheels in concert with America’s fitness explosion. They cheered this country’s winning cyclists in the 1984 Olympic Games, watched bicycle-themed feature films “Breaking Away” (1979) and “American Flyers” (1985) and more recently joined the hordes of get-away-from-it-alls who now buy mountain bikes (sturdier frames and heavier, knobby tires) instead of the more traditional road or touring bikes (lighter with skinny tires) by ratios as high as 9 to 1.

The popularity of the sport has surged so far that when Winning began riding in 1967, he couldn’t have felt lonelier.

“If you saw an adult on a bicycle,” he recalls, “he really stood out in a crowd.”

Back then, local cycling buffs would converge on the Encino Velodrome, built in the early 1960s, where riders competed during weekends, and America’s 1968 Olympic trials took place.

*

Now, the Veldrome--at Oxnard Street and Louise Avenue--offers more during its spring-summer season: Saturday night racing (March 26 to July 9 and Aug. 13 to Sept. 17) and instruction on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings, using so-called track bikes specially equipped for the Velodrome’s banked, oval, concrete track measuring .17 mile.

It’s not unusual, says Velodrome operator Rick Denman of Sylmar, for cyclists to learn to pedal at competition speeds of 40 m.p.h.

And as bicycling for both fun and trophies continues to boom, it spawns a subculture with its own parlance, such as “drafting” (riding in single- or double-file to cut wind resistance) and “sweepers” (those who bring up the rear), as well as a literary presence.

Winning’s handbook tracks cycling roadways such as mountaintop Mulholland Drive, interweaving them with morsels of little-known history. He writes, for instance, of Lankershim School in North Hollywood, where in 1938 a child named Norma Jean Baker won a high jump and the sobriquet “Norma Jean the jumping bean.” Norma Jean grew up to become Marilyn Monroe.

Later, he refers to lovers-lane vistas on Mulholland where “L.A. police and private patrols have put a crimp in the romantic goings-on, but at times it’s still hard to find a parking place at the better scenic overlooks.”

But bicycling sometimes rumbles over rocky roads. Now and then, cyclists clash with joggers, hikers, backpackers and equestrians--each group battling for space as Greater Los Angeles becomes increasingly crowded.

And even the most skillful, experienced cyclists point out that their sport can be hazardous, particularly in heavy traffic or on roads with ruts, rocks or potholes. Although state law requires protective helmets for cyclists who are 18 and younger, Barry Wolfe and other veterans strongly recommend that all adults wear them to guard against head injuries.

Riding in packs of 30 to 100, Wolfe says, demands painstaking concentration.

“These people who wear headsets and listen to music while they ride are absolutely dumb,” says Wolfe, who suffered a broken hip in a 1987 spill, after a stick accidentally spun into the spokes of the bicycle in front of him.

“All it takes is one guy to screw up,” he adds, “and you’ll have 100 guys on the pavement.”

*

Bob Winning’s forehead was skin-grafted after a recent accident in traffic. “My helmet saved my life,” he says.

The San Fernando Valley Bicycle Club, which Winning serves as secretary and editor of a bimonthly newsletter, offers a symbol of valor to members who suffer a fracture while cycling: the Broken Bones Bicycle Brigade Patch, fittingly a purple heart.

But, the club’s 1994 handbook points out, only one patch can be awarded per member. “If you break two bones, you get one patch. If you have a second or third accident and break more bones, it’s tough, but you get only one patch.”

So, let everyone be warned: Bicycling is not for wimps!

After all, as club members are advised, they can’t just writhe in pain or black out and expect to wear the coveted Broken Bones Bicycle Brigade Patch. They must immediately collect their wits and make every effort to alert Allen Kessler, the honcho in charge of awarding patches.

“As you are lying in the road, if you are certain that you qualify for the patch,” the handbook advises, “give the paramedics Allen’s name and phone number along with any other information they may request.”

So You Want to Be a Cyclist?

If you’re a beginner, experts at one San Fernando Valley bicycle shop suggest acquiring what they consider a moderately priced bicycle and other essentials:

Univega mountain bike $450

Protective helmet $50

Jersey (synthetic, porous fabric) $50

Shoes $50

Padded shorts $35

Gloves $16

Tire-repair kit $50

Plastic water bottle $15

Bicycle license (required by city of Los Angeles) $6

Total: $722

Source: Bicycle World, Canoga Park (818) 992-4058