Albert Barajas is a great customer, a business mentor, and a close friend. I've spent countless hours talking bikes with him on the phone, I've sold him umpteen frames, and once I flew to California for a springtime mini-training camp with him. I'll never forget that trip, it was like a highlight reel of southern California cycling -- one day it was the legendary Swami's Saturday morning ride, the next was big-ringing it through Camp Pendleton and hammering well into Orange County, another day took us to Mt. Palomar.

My life and Albert's have long seemed to take rather parallel paths. He and his beautiful wife Erika had their first child less than a year before I had mine. He razzed me during my wife's pregnancy, assuring me -- at that point one of the most pitiful Cat 2's in the history of the USCF -- that I'd never have the time to seriously train again.

Then he and Erika had their second baby, just a year before my wife and I had ours. Jokes about shrinking mileage and our joint relegation to the world of Wednesday night criterium racing were a staple of our weekly talks.

But when Erika became pregnant with their third, the joy and the laughs weren't there, they weren't there at all. Not but a few weeks into the pregnancy she was diagnosed with an aggressive strain of breast cancer. I can't imagine the anguish they felt back then -- the agony of the choices that confronted them.

As the pregnancy developed, so did the cancer. By the time she gave birth the untreated disease had exploded inside her. The last 18 months have been a period of chemo and trips to Mexico for non-FDA approved treatments, and an assortment of other options now exhausted.

As I sit here writing this on a laptop next to my wife -- now pregnant with our third child -- I don't dare put myself inside Albert or Erika's mind. Thinking of them and saying the simple word family paralyzes me. I envision their faces and I become possessed by that stiff muteness seen in scared men who prefer not to cry. Theirs is one of the saddest stories I know of in the whole world.

Perhaps it's not appropriate in the least to segue into bike talk from this, but I mention their plight because we've decided to take a stand -- a small, humble one, but it's a stand nonetheless -- in modern medicine's fight against the horror of breast cancer. How? We're following the lead of Chris King, maker of the world's finest headsets.

Chris King is producing a small run of pink anodized headsets to coincide with National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Pink, as many of you know, is the color many breast cancer survivors wear to display their solidarity with other survivors, and to show their determination to find a cure for the disease. King's pink headset is their way of showing their respect for the cause. King will donate $2 from the sale of any pink, Pretty and Strong item to their local Susan G. Komen Foundation (Oregon Chapter).

How are we taking part? It's simple. We're selling the pink version of their Nothreadset and 2Nut threaded headset for $149.99 -- that's $20 more than the regular retail price of a NoThreadset. We're donating that extra $20 to the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund of Setauket, NY, and we're matching that $20 donation ourselves, which means a total of $42 of each pink NoThreadset sold goes towards the fight against breast cancer.

The Pink King headset is a completely standard King in all ways. Their surgical grade stainless steel cartridge bearings are made in-house at King, and they're fully serviceable. The constant contact seals are easily removed to allow for user servicing, yet provide an impervious barrier to the worst grit and grime of riding. King seals protect the bearings so well that we commonly hear of King headsets that are 10, and even 15 years old, that have never been serviced and still run like new. It comes with a 10 year warranty. We are offering them in the 1-1/8" NoThreadset, 1" NoThreadset, and 1" 2Nut threaded.