Features
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June Trivia: Giro d’Italia
The month of May’s big event on the European professional calendar is the first Grand Tour of the season, the Giro d’Italia. The event has a special place in the heart of Northwest riders thanks to British Columbia’s Ryder Hesjedal incredible and exciting victory last year. It is also the 100th running of the Giro and the 25-year anniversary of American Andy Hampsten’s historic win in 1988. Thus, it is only natural that we focus on the race for the Maglia Rosa (Pink Jersey) of the Giro. Read More
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Truths of Year-Round Commuting
By Stephanie Noll, Deputy Director of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance National Bike Month in May corresponds with the time of year when I feel like everyone in Portland is moaning, “It’s still raining!” So with approximately two more months of intermittent rain ahead before the magical sunny summertime arrives, I’d like to share: My top 10 personal truths of year-round bicycle commuting. Read More
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The Race Across America - Riding the Line Between Endurance, Beauty and Time
By Laura Kindregan & Chad Moore Any athlete preparing for a big event feels the adrenaline rushing, the excitement flowing and the trepidation of the unknown during the months and months of preparation colliding into one race. For athletes competing in The Race Across America (RAAM) Powered by Trane, it is more than just a race, it becomes a part of them forever. Read More
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Young Phenom from the Northwest Races in Europe ... at age 15!
By Dave Campbell Bicycle racer Sam Rosenberg, who usually sports the colors of Hutch’s Eugene / Slocum / Co-Motion / CLIF Bar from Eugene, Ore., has had quite a spring. The sophomore at Churchill High School scored a top 10 finish at the Junior Cyclocross National Championships in Wisconsin at the beginning of 2013, then went on to win the Dirty Circles Series in Woodland, Wash., over a field of the region’s top category 1/2 Senior men. Read More
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A Bike Snob Abroad
By Darren Dencklau Eben Weiss, more widely known as BikeSnobNYC, has been putting his satirical brand of humor on the state of cycling culture for quite some time now. What started out as an anonymous blog by some unknown smartass from the big city has become a social phenomenon, and his popularity — much like cycling — has skyrocketed in the past few years. His latest effort, Bike Snob Abroad, is a lot less about categorizing and poking fun at tattooed skintight-jean-wearing fixed gear riders and heavily bearded uber commuters who live and sleep in yellow rain jackets and cheap bike shorts. Read More
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The “Coffee, Canals and Clerkenwell” Tour of London
By Peter J. Marsh In January of this year, I found myself back in Greenwich, England, where I was born and raised, with my trusty Bike Friday, exploring the streets I last rode in 1972. Since I had lived in the Northwest for 40 years and not visited England for 25 years, London had changed enormously in my absence. So I looked on the web for a local cycling club that might have casual group rides further afield. I found that Greenwich Cyclists were strictly non-competitive with rides every month — the next was billed as a “Twenty-mile jaunt across the River Thames.” That looked interesting because I had never biked much on the north side of the river. Read More
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New Common Sense Building Features ViaBike Cycle Club
By Darren Dencklau People state numerous reasons for not making the commitment of commuting by bicycle. A lack of bike parking, security, not having a place to change clothes or no shower access are typically high on the list, and rightfully so in some instances. Seattle’s ViaBike Cycle Club is looking to curtail those excuses. Read More
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May Trivia: The All-Time Greats
By Dave Campbell In the last few years and indeed the last few weeks, we have had the great fortune of witnessing the exploits of riders who are already being counted amongst the all-time greats. Belgian Tom Boonen and Swiss Fabian Cancellara’s achievements in the Northern Classics, Belgian Philippe Gilbert in the Ardennes, and Spaniard Alberto Contador in the Grand Tours all come to mind. Surely young phenom Peter Sagan of Slovokia is already on his way to such status as well. This month’s column celebrates the all-time greats. Oh, and as no one will dispute that Eddy Merckx is the greatest cyclist ever, he is featured in only one question! Read More
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The History of Head Tube Badges
By Paul Johnson, Classic Cycle Bicycles have personalities. Some bikes develop theirs over miles and miles (like a notched headset that pulls to one side). Sometimes they take on the personal style and behavior of their owners such as the battered and grimy commuter or the sleek racer. Other times a bicycle is born with a personality tattooed to its forehead — a head tube badge. Read More
Opinions
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Defensive Riding
By Maynard Hershon I’m riding with two guys, one I’ve ridden with previously named Dan, the other a thirty-ish dude neither of us had met. We’ll call him Will. We ride down one Denver bike path to another, this one headed west toward Morrison and the foothills. I sit at the back at first, half a bike length behind Dan, Will behind me. At some point on the bike path, we pass a few other riders. Will finds himself in front of Dan and I. Read More
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My Pump is Crap, He Said
By Maynard Hershon So I’m on this ride, my buddy Justin and I and 15 friends we don’t know. We’re somewhere on an unfamiliar bike path when a guy gets a flat. Justin and I have been hangin’ out at the back so it takes us a moment to figure out why we’ve all stopped. I groped around inside the guy’s tire searching for puncturing agents, as we say in flat-fixing superhero circles. I found nothing. The guy kept up a steady line of patter as I went about fixing his puncture. He told me, poor guy, that he’d borrowed a pump because his is crap. Read More
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Building Bicycle Valhalla
By Joe Kurmaskie Speaking around the country about all things bike-related has given me a few insights about where our communities stand in the evolution towards bike friendly Valhalla — we’re talking scalable, livable places where anyone can roll two wheels out the front door without fear ... or requesting combat pay. Places where a mix of biking, walking, bus and train coexist and find close to equal footing with the car. Read More
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Be Here Now
By Maynard Hershon I’m on 29th, headed west out of Denver toward Golden. I’m stopped, first in line, at the light at Federal. The light goes green, I start across the intersection and as I reach the other side of Federal, a city bus comes alongside me, evidently passing me. Read More
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The Art Of Getting Back Up
By Joe Kurmaskie The world can feel unfathomably large, random and knock the life out of you for no apparent reason. That’s what happened to Doug Markgraf a few years back. What happened next is the important part, the meat of life and what keeps me humble, inspired and in the saddle. My role in this story has been to provide some guidance and gear as Doug took on the monster-sized task of piecing his life back together one mile at a time. Read More
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Three-fer
By Maynard Hershon You can take your bike into the Denver Bicycle Cafe and have it repaired. A service tech who works full-time at a major bike shop works part-time at the Bicycle Cafe. I’m told that the shop has managed to keep the waiting period short. I stop at a trail junction, unsure of which way to continue. As I turn my bike around in the trail, I hear a scraping noise. I look down and see that one end of a piece of rusty wire, heavier than coat hanger wire, has twisted itself around my front axle just inside the fork tip. The other end has been bouncing and scraping along the ground for miles. I untwist it and stare at it. Read More
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Before My S.U.B. Was A Status Symbol
By Joe Kurmaskie Who among us touring cyclists hasn’t been mistaken for the homeless? What with hauling our worldly possessions from town to town, putting our show on the road for weeks at a time ... OK, maybe it hasn’t happened to you. Perhaps your gear is always showroom new, showering and shaving is a regular part of your routine and the lycra across your back has people thinking sponsorship rather than soup kitchen, but the rest of us, with our broken rain jacket zipper we’ve been meaning to fix, we’ve pretended not to notice the faces of sympathy or disgust as we pedal along. Read More
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Dysfunctional Cycling Club, and Why You Should Quit
By Maynard Hershon I believe that the good group training ride, perhaps especially the good club training ride, is where the heart of road cycling beats. It’s where riders are formed, where technique is learned, where friendships are made, where cyclists learn to look after one another. If you’re not learning anything, if your crew is ragtag and it’s everyone for himself, or if you are not making friends or learning how to take care of each other, you’re wasting your time in a sadly defective training routine. Read More
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The Mother Of All Tailwinds
By Joe Kurmaskie Riding one hundred miles in under three hours on a bicycle is akin to breaking the three-minute mile on foot. Maybe the pros do it all the time, but I’m not one of them so I wouldn’t know. If you don’t have a resting heart rate below 50 and a fat to body mass index of five percent, charging past the century mark in three hours is a pipe dream... Read More
