Recently in Cycling Category

This Random Thursday post is going to be a little different than most, because I'm going to freestyle it, sort of like Kid Rock on the CMT Awards last night. Which, by the way, I didn't see because Debbie was off partying at the country club and didn't remind me about it, but I have viewed a few clips via the CMT website. I know most of you country music purists think that pairing Kid Rock and Hank Williams, Jr. is blasphemy, but it's stuff like that that keeps the genre commercially viable and allows the more traditional musicians to keep earning a living. That's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking to it. (Whatever happened to Collin Raye, anyway?)

Race Across America (RAAM - Motto: "Where'd that "M" Come From?") started this week (or continues to start...the women started on Tuesday, the men started yesterday, and the team race begins on Saturday). In case you're not familiar with it, RAAM is a bicycle race across...well, you know. People claim that the Tour de France is the world's toughest bike race, but I disagree. RAAM racers ride further than TDF riders, and they do it in days, not weeks. There are no rest days, no drafting, and no team support for the solo riders. Even the teams ride relay-style. The course features a horrifying 100,000 feet of climbing.

A couple of the solo women are riding recumbents. Barbara Butois hopes to be the first French woman to complete the race, and Sandy Earl is an American.

In honor of RAAM, let's check out a couple of cycling-related resources. There's something about the bicycle that makes people want to customize or improve on its style. I think it's the inherent simplicity of the basic form, and the direct connection between rider and vehicle that stirs the imagination. Here are two articles that showcase some beautiful and/or bizarre permutations.

I particularly like the model with the square wheels (in the second article), and also the bicycling monorail concept in the first article. Here's the demo video of the latter:

I've recently developed a powerful lust for a so-called cruiser bike. I'm not sure if there's an official definition of the genre, but to me it's any bicycle that exhibits a combination of mechanical simplicity, out-of-the-ordinary styling, and an emphasis on comfort over speed. It's prettier than a commuter bike and less, um, focused than a mountain bike. A single-speed is desirable; fixed gear is negotiable.

Here are some potential candidates.

• The Charge Plug Grinder meets the criterion of simplicity, with a rear hub that when mounted one direction is a single speed fixed gear and when reversed provides a single speed freewheel. You can also quickly remove the rear brake and cables to clean up the lines even more. Still, it's not the most stylish choice.
  

• The Firmstrong Urban Delux is a monstrous limo of a bike with a retro steel spring fork. I'm guessing it weighs about 80 pounds, and probably handles like a rhinoceros. But it oozes beach-cruiser style.

• Trek's District Carbon is an enigma. It costs almost four grand, weighs less than 16 pounds, and has high tech race-worthy features out the wazoo, like a handmade carbon fiber frame and 16-spoke aero wheels. But it's a single speed and sports a belt drive. (There is a cheaper sibling, the District, for a third of the cost, but its shiny aluminum frame doesn't match up.) This bike screams "richer than thou hipster."
  

• Then  there's the Nirve Cannibal, a bike that meets all the criteria. It's a mixture of high tech (front disk brake) and retro-nasty (3" rear tire, chopper-style chromed fork, and in-your-face graphics). Too bad it's currently out-of-stock.

I'd love to have the Trek but $3500 is a steep price to pay just to make a statement that most people wouldn't understand anyway. The Cannibal might be a bit too radical, and I've already got one bike that's 10 feet long so the Delux is redundant. The Plug Grinder is too utilitarian in appearance, and the Townie is a cliché.

Maybe I'll just stick with my 20-year-old Red Shred after all.

The following video will give you a great idea of what cycling in West Texas is like. Well, apart from the bike paths, trees, snow and ice, and attentive and considerate motorists...

This nine minute movie was taken in the Netherlands, where cyclists are first class citizens. The bikes are called "velomobiles" - essentially recumbent trikes with full shells. I imagine they're wonderful in cold weather, but I'd hate to think about pedaling one very far in 100° summer heat (of course, to be fair, I'm not particularly fond of pedaling anything in triple digit heat).

This does make me contemplate the idea of putting a video camera on my bike to document my usual cycling route.

[Video from David Hembrow's "A View from the Cycle Path" blog; link via The Recumbent Blog]

This is the time of year when bicyclists in Texas start getting cabin fever. Sure, there are six more months of subzero winter days for all the Yankees, but we've had our full quota of freezes (8) and snowy days (2) and indoor workouts (23 - OK, it's dark out there!), and we're ready to ride, baby!

And if we can't actually ride outside, yet, we can at least read about riding. Better yet, we can read about epic riding, the kind that takes a special type of obsession (don't confuse it with craziness; well, OK, if you insist) to pull off. The kind that causes an apparently otherwise sane woman to decide to ride from sea to shining sea on a recumbent bicycle, and not just ride, but race. As in, ride as hard as you can for as long as you can or until your front tire dips into one or the other of the oceans that's opposite from where you started, whichever comes first.

"Oh, there's no one who would do that sort of thing," I can hear you thinking. (Not really. We respect your thoughts here at the Gazette and would never - hardly ever - appropriate them for our own uses.) But you probably haven't heard of Sandy Earl, of Eugene, Oregon (State Motto: "Noah Was A Wimp"), an employee of Bike Friday (they make the cutest little bikes that you can fold up and put in your Hummer's glove box) and Officially Obsessed Person of the Recumbent Persuasion. Sandy is in training for the Race Across America (Event Motto: "Lose Weight on 14,000 Calories a Day!"; Event Sub-Motto: "Fudging Our Acronym Since 1982") which will take place in June. Her goal is to become the first woman to ride RAAM on a recumbent bicycle, and she's blogging about her preparations.

You don't have to be a cyclist to enjoy her journal. She's a very entertaining writer, and is approaching her upcoming ordeal challenge with humor and grace. I recommend bookmarking her blog, or adding it to your feed reader, or whatever it is you do to keep up with websites of enduring quality and deep wisdom. (Remind me again why you're here reading this?)

RAAM has always been a event of mythic proportions for me. I've never ridden more than 106 miles in one day (106 agonizing, demoralizing, hallucination-engendering miles, but that's another story), and I'm frankly in awe of anyone for whom that distance is a before-lunch training jaunt. Plus, my preferred bicycle is a recumbent so I can relate to the position if not the exertion. Anyway, some amazing stories of courage and achievement come out of every edition of RAAM, and I'm guessing that Sandy's will be added to that history this year. Give her some love, won't you?

We spent the last few days in scenic Weatherford, Texas (if that sounds like sarcasm, you need to drive through some of the neighborhoods south of I-20 and you'll see that I'm serious. But be sure to pack a GPS.) and thus haven't been attending to bloggerly duties. Here's some stuff I hope will make up for that.

• We don't live far from Carlsbad Caverns, in New Mexico, but I've never seen the bats emerge from or return to the caves. I'll bet you haven't either, at least not like this:

This post at the Freakonomics blog cites a Canadian study that found that 90% of accidents involving bicyclists in its sample were caused by "clumsy or inattentive driving" by motorists.

The only surprise about this is that the author is apparently surprised, writing: When it comes to sharing the road with cars, many people seem to assume that such accidents are usually the cyclist's fault -- a result of reckless or aggressive riding.

Really? Perhaps he runs with a cycling crowd with a heightened feeling of invincibility or an enhanced death wish, but pretty much every bicyclist I know hits the road with the fear that it and its motorized occupants will hit back. In addition, that 90% figure stated above is probably accurate with respect to the accidents leading to cyclist deaths in our area. Many of them occurred on flat straight roads with no visibility issues; the drivers just veered over and struck the cyclists from behind.

Findings like these are all the more reason why a safe passing law is needed in Texas, especially if accompanied by an education campaign.

An interesting footnote to the study is the finding that the third leading cause of cyclist accidents in the study was from drivers opening their car doors in the path of the bicyclists. I find this interesting because I don't personally know of a local bicyclist who has experienced this. I guess it's a function of cycling in a heavy urban area with lots of on-the-street parking. On the other hand, I suspect that at least a few of these "accidents" were actually caused by frustrated drivers stuck in gridlock who noticed cyclists moving through the line of cars.

Ran across a few interesting links I think you might enjoy as you contemplate the wonder that is Friday.

• Now, about that cover... is a post from the author of the book by the same name, and it deals with how the quite striking cover of his book came to be. The photo shown on the front cover depicts a book that has been soaked in water and the pages arranged into a striking organic shape. This technique is the brainchild of Houston-based photographer Cara Barer, who is quick to point out that no valuable books are harmed in the making of her pictures.
  
  I feel compelled to note that my wife has at times created this effect by nodding off in the bathtub with book in hand.
  
  
• And speaking of bending paper to your will, check out these amazing origami creations by Won Park. Given the value of the dollar lately, this is as good a use as any for a bill.
  
  
• I'm a sucker for panoramic photography, because I can't figure out how to do it myself. Here's a great example, taken at Shoshone Point in the Grand Canyon National Park. If you have a fast internet connection and faster computer, click the "full screen" link to get the full vertigo-inducing effect.
  
  
• And, last but not least, I was happy to see that Texas Governor Rick Perry garnered Bicycling Magazine's "Wheelsucker of the Month" award for his veto of the Safe Passing bill at the end of the last legislative session. Perry claims to be a cyclist, and, indeed, recently injured himself during a ride, so you'd think he'd have more empathy. But he's a politician first and foremost, and thus can't be counted on to do the right thing. Anyway, BikeTexas, the state's cycling advocacy group, has an online petition urging passage of the bill (while simultaneously expressing displeasure at the veto). If you're a Texas cyclist, pedestrian, farm equipment operator, or "concerned motorist" (which should pretty much encompass all of us), please consider dropping by to sign the petition. It may not accomplish anything more than making me feel better, but this is, after all, all about me.
  
  The more perceptive among you may also notice a large button on the right side of this page that links to the petition, in case you weren't able to read this far.
  

I didn't know there was such a thing as an Indoor Cycling competition, but it's an amazing thing to behold. What's even more impressive is that the girls in this video are doing these stunts on full-sized bikes instead of the little BMX-style bikes you normally see used for such cycling "gymnastics." (If they want to truly impress me, though, they'll switch to recumbents for the next competition.)

Link via Levi Leipheimer, who happens to be a pretty fair cyclist himself.

The Tour de France starts this weekend and the overarching storyline is whether Lance Armstrong can win an eighth yellow jersey at age 37. If he can pull it off, the victory would not only make him the oldest TDF winner in the 100+ year history of the race, but it would extend his record victory total. No one else has ever won more than five times.

He's not the experts' odds-on favorite; his Astana teammate, Spaniard Alberto Contador, is favored along with last year's winner, Carlos Sastre. But Sastre at 34 is no spring chicken himself, and he doesn't have the team firepower that backs Contador. In fact, from the team perspective, Astana stands head and shoulders above the rest (despite questions as to whether the Kazakh team can meet its payroll). In addition to Armstrong and Contador, the team also has American Levi Leipheimer, who is podium-capable, if not an actual challenger for the yellow jersey.

It's never that simple, of course. Having too many powerful riders can be a problem as well as a blessing, especially if the talent comes with equally oversized egos. Team manager Johann Bruyneel will need to have superhuman diplomacy and nerves of steel to discern which of his stable is the rider most capable of overall victory, then somehow convince the rest of the team to buy into that premise. The Tour is unique in that regard: it's a team effort wrapped up in individual achievement...or vice versa. I never can decide. Why I do know is that at some point during the race, each teammate will be asked to sacrifice his own prospects of winning in order to help the Anointed One to victory. Most of us have never been asked to make that kind of professional sacrifice and so we can't imagine the psychological and emotional forces at play.

But back to Lance. I don't doubt that he's still got the competitive fire to do great things in the TDF. And despite his assertion that (1) he's a team player and (2) he's come out of retirement primarily to raise awareness for cancer research, he's still approaching the race like someone who intends to win it. He's spent the past week out on the actual course, riding the key stages as he does the tedious prep-work that sets elite riders apart from the peloton. It really comes down to whether his body will cooperate - and whether luck (or fate or God's blessing or whatever else that intangible force might be that makes your tires stick to the wet pavement when everyone else is going down, and keeps at bay the stomach bug that's decimating the rest of the pack, and stops that wobbly chain link from snapping until just over the finish line) is once again his friend.

Am I pulling for him? As a fellow Texan, I should say so. But not just because we share state citizenship. If the only reason you root for Lance to win the Tour de France one more time is the spirit embodied in this commercial, then that's plenty reason enough.