Boneshaker magazine / Issue #5 by Boneshaker magazine

issue #5

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RSE -H O Y D IL DAN CIV AN THE M S R A E HE AG RW 18; T E 8 Y 1 N B N RUN ING IM I TED ORE USH VEN NHE F P N N I S Y A , E B IT M RSE RD T TH , IN -H O WA AIS INS Y R R A B O G D G F HOB ARON RA OUN ELF OR THE AY IMS , ,B O T H N E N THE LA ED TH VA TO MIL ELL EN C S P SER H K A O T N E, M PR ICK ORS CRA AND ER R H T D D T I E Y O R IX FO KPA NS AND S, F . KIR ED ONE MEA RIE D H F Y N T M B U F E U LO EET RID GRO ROM D IS F TO HEE F H M W I H H D. R H T WIT SMI REA OUN LED K M R B E C E G A H H FT BLA NT DT THE S EN EO THI ATE FRO ON ; R E T S E AXL E H R E E OP OT ADE IS F LEV AND LS T NM GH A A N I ONG D M T L L H PE O PUT HEE ED ENC TW T W T R U F T F I R O HO IC F DA REA THE WIT , AN HAN AS THE E C L W N E C I S M THA THI PED AN VEH E D. GER ELO HE ERM E R T V G P E A F S L A D O NT AS THE EEL EEL FRO W H E H E S H W H W HIC NT REA NT E D. INC FRO R’, W G WHE ARG O E E L T H K N T R A N THI LY E -S H RDE FAR OUS ONE IN O B M Y ‘ R N LED ENO PEN CAL AS THE W O S OEEL INT WH

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Cycling l a e R : r ake al. To Bonesh it’s digit course,

o feel real, of shaker, t e this isn’t n t o p e B l c x E ier, go on a rea ur pann r hands o u y o y in t it e g hide too, ell it and ike stuff m b s t a d e n r a g it other them e make . Check s t in r p here. W t le ar ke lly bicyc r ears ta u o y t especia le ur . And to there’s o , y out here e n r u d on a jo ies. your min cast ser new pod

In the UK the phrase “On your bike!” has had bad press. Politicians and scary neighbours have been shouting it at kids ever since the first hobby-horse. It really means, “get out of my hair, you rebel soul!” But Boneshaker is here to reclaim those three perfect syllables. It will not get red-faced and wag its finger. No, instead it will seduce with the whirr of spokes and

the hum of tyres on open roads. From Africa to Goa, from New Orleans to Guatemala, from the Appalachians to the pulse of London beats, all the way to your very own backyard. “On your bike!” Issue 5 sings from the rooftops. Go with the wind in your hair, you rebel soul. Jet McDonald www.biketales.wordpress.com

Contents

Turn up the ‘oh god’ Heroes of India Bicycle-related daydream No. 1 Richard’s Bicycle Book Raiders rule OK The Malawi Mission The Bike Beatz A practicable and enjoyable aid to locomotion A brief moment of clarity 8 Expectations: The Story of La Ocho On not cycling Slowcoast soundslide Cycling caps Planting America ‘Mysterious Steel’ My beautiful bike

4 10 14 16 18 20 24 26 28 36 38 42 44 46 48 54 56

contributors

words.....sofie foldager andersen, roger levett, james bowthorpe, klas sjoberg, jude brosnan, lacar musgrove, patrick walker, dieter janssen, jet mcdonald, nick hand, mike white, matthew cortina drawings.....nick souček, adams carvalho, jim clarkson, paul farrell, jude brosnan, samuel bell, laurie rollitt, michael van kekem, matthew mills, the tree house press, senem oezdogan photos.....adam faraday, drew glaser, klas sjoberg, robin walker, christopher lane, dieter janssen, tim wheatley, nick hand, grant gardner

backpats and handclaps

fingerprint distribution, sadie campbell, ali sparror, whiteduck screenprint, rob draper, rebecca cleal, cathy olmedillas & taylor bros

copyrights & disclaimers Boneshaker is a quarterly publication. The articles published reflect the opinions of their respective authors and are not necessarily those of the publishers and editorial team. ©2011 Boneshaker. Printed on paper from sustainable sources by Taylor Brothers Bristol Ltd. 13-25 Wilder Street, Bristol BS2 8PY / www.taylorbros.uk.com Conceived by james lucas / Compiled & edited by jimmy ell, mike white and john coe Designed and published by coecreative / www.coecreative.com Inside and outside covers by adams carvalho / www.adamscarvalho.com Snow rider by drew glaser / www.drewglaserphotography.com

TURN UP THE “OH GOD” Surviving an ambush in Iran, a wombat-crash in Australia, food poisoning in India and tendonitis in both ankles, in 2009 James Bowthorpe circumnavigated the globe by bike (18,000 miles in 174 days), breaking the world record as he did so. He still rides bikes – Paris-Brest-Paris and the Race Across America are next on his horizon. He does lots of other fascinating stuff too – making geodesic treehouses and handcrafting boats from building waste, then rowing them down big rivers – and, in all this, he raises money for What’s Driving Parkinson’s, a research clinic at King’s College Hospital, London. www.whatsdrivingparkinsons.net

ILLUSTRATION © Paul Farrell 2011

WORDS James Bowthorpe

www.paul-farrell.co.uk

www.jamesbowthorpe.com

I’ll say this straight away. I don’t think I would’ve been able to cycle around the world so quickly without music. The training without my gymnasium mix would’ve been harder; there’s nothing like a little Aphex Twin to get you through an admittedly enjoyable eight mile run followed by a tedious free-weights session. Everyday during the ride itself I struggled with motivation and it was music that pulled me through. Music was a conduit to memories of my loved ones and friends, it reminded me of my reasons for being out there. It powered me over hills and across plains; most mornings it also got me out of bed. Music is the best and most beautiful apparatus I know that can prepare and carry me through long rides. Pride, desire and fear of failure all pale as motivating forces in the light of music. Give me a hill and I give you Diplo’s remix of Monkey Bee, easy. Well, easier.

fatigue and are, apparently, dependent on the attention-capturing strength of the distracting stimulus.”

Cycling and music is more than the epiphenomenon that is spin class, the laboratory equivalent of cycling up a hill. I have recently got quite involved in this pastime, pumping away on fixed pedals, battling a partially-braked static bike, watching my leader for when I should “Drop!” and when I should “Get Up!”. As group effort goes, it’s pretty absurd; we’re not even topping up someone’s discharged car battery, despite how technically easy that would be. I enjoy the headlong animalistic rush of spin, contained as it is within a clean, bright and moppable gym, but to point at spin as the synergy of music and cycling would be to miss 90% of what’s happening. The mechanical. It’s part of what’s happening when I ride uphill listening to Diplo, but it’s not the whole picture. Despite the obvious unknown variables in the marriage between music and cycling, science has had a pop at explaining things. I imagine that it’s a popular field for research because it’s probably quite good fun to do. I’ve read about several experiments where music and cycling have been combined but my favourite comes from Nottingham Trent University1. After trying out the effects of fast-rhythm and slow-rhythm classical music on cycling subjects, they conclude: “Switching to fast music during progressive exercise results in the accomplishment of more work without proportional changes in heart rate. These effects may be due to distraction from 8

I am a great fan of the scientific method, but you can see how quickly it falls short in explaining what’s happening. Describing music as a “distracting stimulus” might be the beginning of the answer, but we’re back in the spin class being “distracted” with a cattle prod. The scientists are describing the process in a way that makes it sound like magic, as though there’s free energy to be had from distraction alone. What is exciting to me about this paragraph is “the accomplishment of more work without proportional changes in heart rate”. It’s the heart, it’s all about the heart. “Near, far, wherever you are I believe that the heart does go on Once more you open the door And you’re here in my heart And my heart will go on and on.” I’ve never been a fan of her music but you can’t deny the universal appeal of Celine Dion. Music has many strange and wonderful effects on humans; it is, after all, an expression of things we can’t speak about, let alone write about2. We inhale the incomprehensible and we exhale music. Huey Lewis had surely surrendered himself to this knowledge when he wrote ‘The Power of Love’; “Make a one man weep, make another man sing”… there’s no accounting for it, you can only accept the many and different outcomes. About two months into cycling around the world I was unable to start my day’s ride without listening to ‘Happy Survival’ by Eddie Okwedy; listening to it now, writing this, fills me up. I can see reams and reams of horizon, my spine tingles and I feel complicated. To me, this song is both sides of Huey’s ‘Power of Love’ nexus; you probably have tunes that do the same thing to you if you miss someone or you’re faced with a difficult situation. All I know, this music enabled me; if I needed to weep, it helped me weep, if I felt like singing, I could sing. And it’s not about the lyrics, like it might be if Celine Dion was my inspiration, because it’s sung in a language I don’t understand. To me the opening phrase of this music doesn’t

“ALL I KNOW, THIS MUSIC ENABLED ME; IF I NEEDED TO WEEP, IT HELPED ME WEEP, IF I FELT LIKE SINGING, I COULD SING.” 9

“JUST AS WALKING IS A CONSTANT EFFECT OF LOSING AND REGAINING YOUR BALANCE, PEDALING IS AN UNBROKEN CYCLE OF PAUSE AND FALL, PAUSE AND FALL.” just sound like someone slowly getting going on his bike, it is that. Another example… I listened to ‘All Alone’3 on every difficult day, not because I was “all alone” but because it fortifies me and it makes me feel strong, even though I am a puny human, made of flesh. I’ve never fully understood what Roots Manuva is talking about in that song, but this sounds about right;

“ We’re happy and we lonesome The lone drum the beat hot From start to finish Ten spoons of spinach The soul and the spillage The cup that runneth over We turn up the ‘oh God’” I quote the lyrics in lieu of being able to play you the tune straight from the page (one day). The music sounds like this and it describes how the music made me feel when I was riding. Yes, even though I don’t fully understand what he’s on about. Cadence in cycling is the number of crank revolutions per minute – everyone’s favourite spinner, Lance Armstrong, is famed for maintaining a cadence of 110 rpm for hours on end and winning prizes by doing so. For the touring cyclist carrying a lot of weight, high cadence will get you up hills without straining your knees, this much I know. The word cadence comes from the Latin cadentia which means ‘a falling’ – it’s the point at which your foot reaches the top of the stroke and begins to drop down, your other foot ascending in the process. In music, on the other hand, cadence refers to a brief pause at the end of a phrase within a piece of music– it’s different to rhythm, but connected, and allows for breath. This pause can also be found 10

in the act of cycling, minute as it might be, at the top of the stroke where the fall is about to begin. Just as walking is a constant effect of losing and regaining your balance, pedaling is an unbroken cycle of pause and fall, pause and fall. We take it for granted, but it’s a sequence that drives us forward by repeating itself dozens of times a minute. I’ve never measured my cadence but its easy to see this in action when you ride, especially where there is a change of terrain and speed. I always feel a psychological gathering before I hit a hill, the pause before the storm. Something not common to a lot of music we listen to is counterpoint – its mostly in classical music and Bach was the best at it. I’ve only recently got into it and I’ve done so through cycling. Counterpoint comes from another bit of Latin, punctus-contra-punctum, which means “point against point”. To my cycling-prone mind these points are the teeth of my gears. These two points or voices differ in their shape and rhythm but are interdependent, just like the drive train on my bike; the music and the bike’s motion happen through their relationship. Now when I listen to the Well-Tempered Clavicle by Bach I can see the opposing teeth on the cogs of my bike passing by at different speeds and having a greater effect combined than as individual parts. The two melodies in the Well-Tempered Clavicle are transformed from two individually quite sweet tunes into a beautiful piece of music. You can stand there holding that 48 tooth chainring in one hand and a 12 tooth rear cog in the other, but a bicycle you will not have. Only when they’re combined do you have the mechanical advantage and the music begins. I like to imagine Bach reaching for his clavichord, his

weapon of choice when faced with the incomprehensible. He died a few decades before the bicycle was invented but I imagine he’d have been a fan. The bicycle is the instrument I turn to when I want to think about things that are tough to pin down. The question that non-cyclists sometimes ask cyclists - why would you cycle when you can drive? – has lots of practical answers. Sensible reasons that are easy to articulate will answer the question, but they’re not the real reason for me. I cycle because it makes me feel different, like beer but without any of the undesirable side-effects. Just as music can unlock parts of us that other sounds cannot reach, cycling is an activity that gets under our skin. It’s a conundrum of a past time… a contradiction in motion. I’m sitting still, but I’m moving very quickly. I’m exercising, but there are no jolts. This is not a state of mind that is easily achieved otherwise. It’s interesting that Einstein thought of his theory of relativity when he was on his bike. This may have had something to do with the motion of cycling - relatively faster than walking, relatively slower than a train – and it might have had something to do with the release you can feel in your thoughts. I imagine that it wasn’t a eureka moment, but one that crept up on him; a potential idea hiding in something that he did everyday. I bet he liked music too. I always feel a bit freer on a bike, especially if I’m trundling along at an easy pace. Floating along with little or no noise, no engine but myself, my perception of the world around me changes. Everything appears to be different if not easier, the mechanical advantage of gears and wheels is channeled through the bike into a mental advantage. Even if the weather’s inclement I feel better than I would otherwise; I’m not being rained on anymore, the clouds are chasing me. Cycling transports us figuratively as well as physically and music does the same thing, with even more effect. It augments or alters our perception of things - try watching daytime television on mute, replacing the sound with any of Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock soundtracks and you’ll see what I mean. You can listen to sad or joyful music; you can set

out on your bike to have a rough ride and to hate the traffic, or you can embrace it all and have the time of your life. Of course de gustibus non est disputandum4, but all bike rides and all music are somewhere on a scale between ‘I Hate Everything About You’ by Three Days Grace (a song I found through an internet search of those words) and ‘The Sun Shines From You’ by Teenage Fanclub. This is not a prescription for either. I know there’s a school of thought that says it’s irresponsible to listen to music whilst cycling. I’m guessing the same people think that cars should be silent, open-topped and sold without stereos. Everything in moderation, just turn the volume down. Or sing.

“CYCLING TRANSPORTS US FIGURATIVELY AS WELL AS PHYSICALLY AND MUSIC DOES THE SAME THING, WITH EVEN MORE EFFECT.”

[1] J Sports Med Phys Fitness. 1999 Sep; 39(3):220-5. The effects of slow- and fast-rhythm classical music on progressive cycling to voluntary physical exhaustion. Szabo A, Small A, Leigh M. Source: Department of Life Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, UK. [2] “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” as Frank Zappa is purported to have said. [3] ‘All Alone’, Gorillaz (featuring Roots Manuva and Martina Topley-Bird), from the album ‘Demon Days’. [4] Sorry, more Latin - literally, “there is no disputing about tastes.”

by Klas Sjoberg

Roaming around India in late 2010, photographer Klas Sjoberg decided heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to buy a bike. So he started talking to all the cyclists he met, and inevitably ended up taking their pictures, too. Soon enough, he had a collection of beautiful portraits of bike owners and their splendid machines.

www.klassjoberg.com

ndia is a beautiful and fascinating country. It is also one of the world’s fastest growing economies, with ever-increasing environmental problems - including air pollution. When travelling in India’s cities, you’re struck by a cacophony of sounds: cars, auto-rickshaws and motorbikes in jams honking all kinds of different horns. If you are wearing a white t-shirt it will turn grey by the end of the day; so will your snot.

bigger cities in India and the traffic is less heavy, making it much more welcoming to cyclists. The people there are generally very friendly and they were all interested in what I was doing, taking photos and studying their bicycles.Talking with these people and learning about their bikes made me realise that they were very proud and happy to own a bike. A lot of people in India can unfortunately only dream of being able to afford a bicycle.

As a big fan of bicycle culture and design, it made me truly happy to see people in India riding their silent and beautiful bikes, often with a smile on their face. In the state of Goa the tempo is quite low compared to other,

To use a bicycle as transportation instead of petrol-driven vehicles is a small but important step towards making the world a little healthier. Here, whether they know it or not, are some of the heroes of India.

MMILLS.TUMBLR.COM

Roger Levett Adam Faraday

In the dank and dreary depths of a drizzly February long ago, I glumly sold the carcass of the car I could no longer afford to keep running for £55, which I spent on my first adult bicycle.

ith a total absence of enthusiasm: where I grew up - Coventry, Britain’s Detroit, booming with car factories - bikes were for kids, embarrassing jolly spinsters and a few sad old codgers clanking along in the gutter. I decided I’d better learn how to maintain this unappealing combobulation of pipework, wires and clockwork which henceforth I was going to depend on to get around. Riffling along a bookshop shelf of dreary, pedantic manuals was confirming my sinking feeling that cycling was for masochists and people who wanted to spend every weekend tinkering with oily bits of machinery. Until, opening Richard’s Bicycle Book at random, I read: ‘Lay bike down on one side with newspaper or white rag under the headset. This is to catch falling ball bearings. There are many different headsets, and no way for me to tell you how many are in yours. So don’t lose any.’ And a bit further on: ‘Pedals lead a hard, dissolute life and need cleaning and regreasing every six months, more often if you ride a lot or favour wet weather’. Followed by detailed instructions for how to do it, with a lot of emphasis on catching the ball bearings in a jam jar and ending with: “TROUBLESHOOTING • Pedal is tight to crank but askew. Bent spindle. Replace immediately. • Grinding noises, hard to turn pedal. Try routine adjustment as above. No? Something is probably broken. Disassemble as above and replace defective parts…” I was instantly captivated by the brisk common sense, the succinct clarity of the instructions, the way Ballantine distinguishes simple stuff everyone should do routinely from jobs that require some care, emergency fixes and things best taken to bike shops. Above all, by the way he credits his reader with a brain and a sense of humour, and the blithely stoical, capable attitude he radiates. Stuff happens, he says; but I’ll show you how to deal with a lot of it, and how to get help with the rest. And as a general existential principle, if you can keep a-hold of all the ball bearings, you’re half way there. I thought ‘This is the one for me’ – and ever since, a copy of Richard’s Bicycle Book has been one of the innermost handful of possessions that makes me feel at home in the world. The detailed maintenance and repair manual are only half the book. The other half gives good, thorough, sensible advice on choosing, buying and setting up a bike, the thrills and spills of urban riding, and how to enjoy touring. Again Ballantine’s vigorous, positive take on life shines through. He commends good quality simple, durable, adaptable kit. His bracing advice for dealing with bullying motorists is ‘If they give you the horn, give them the finger’. But this assertiveness is balanced by a strong sense of responsibility:

‘In my view, any user of the road, whether on a lorry, bicycle, roller skates or pogo stick should pass a test. Getting about on roads is a serious business which if it is to be done safely, and with consideration for the rights of others, requires that you know what is going on. Further, your equal status and rights are an important protection which can be maintained only by obeying the same rules as everybody else...’ His biggest message is joy. The touring chapter is magnificently permissive: ‘There is no ‘right’ way to tour... you can have a plan, or absolutely none at all... Touring is a call to adventure, beauty, new sights and experiences.’ And there’s more to this than hedonism: ‘Consciousness, self awareness and development are the prerequisites for a life worth living. Now look at what happens to you on a bicycle. It’s immediate and direct. You pedal. You make decisions. You experience the tang of the air and the surge of power as you bite into the road. You’re vitalised. As you hum along you fully and gloriously experience the day, the sunshine, the clouds, the breezes. You’re alive! You are going some some place, and it is you who are doing it. Awareness increases, and each day becomes a little more important to you… An increased value on one’s own life is the first step in social conscience and politics. Because to you life is dear and important and fun, you are much more easily able to understand why this is also true for a Vietnamese, an Eskimo or a Tobago islander. Believe it. The salvation of the world is the development of personality and identity for everybody in it. Much work, many lifetimes. But a good start for you is to get a bicycle!’

“ If you only have two tyre irons and need a third, scrounge something up. In the country a flat rock or a stick. In the city a pencil, a beer-can opener, or something from the garbage. At any hour there will be something” Heady stuff in 1977! Richard’s Bicycle Book didn’t only teach me to maintain my bike and to enjoy riding it. It related the personal and the political in a fresh, optimistic way that caught many people’s imagination, and planted important seeds of what we now call sustainable development. It helped make the world in which bikes are not just the sensible way for many people get around, but also tools of health, vitality, conviviality, good humour and good relations with other people and the planet. In other words, it helped make Boneshaker’s world. There can, of course, be no higher praise. 19

ARTWORK / www.samuelbell.co.uk

THE MALAWI MISSION

words: Sofie Foldager Andersen illustration: jimdesign.co.uk

THE BICYCLE IS AN INVENTION WITH A SURPRISING ABILITY TO CHANGE LIVES. IT IS A REMARKABLY SIMPLE MACHINE WITH AN EQUALLY SIMPLE PURPOSE. IT IS A MEANS OF TRANSPORTATION, NOTHING MORE AND NOTHING LESS. IT HAS BEEN AT THE HEART OF PERIODS OF RADICAL SOCIAL CHANGE, THOUGH IT’S NOT SOMETHING ON WHICH YOU’D NORMALLY SPEND MUCH TIME REFLECTING.

or all the joy it brings, it’s also a means to fight disenfranchisement, to fight inequality, to move in the world – and move upwards. It’s a lot easier to keep people in their place if you can keep them in one place, but a bike is easy to ride, it’s a one-time investment, and it’ll get you places. Real revolutionaries ride bikes. It’s little surprise, then, that at a time when bicycles are regaining territory in all their plurality – as a means of transportation, of course, and as a sport, a hobby, a culture, a political statement, and, above all, as a work in progress – people are taking to their bikes in order to make a point and try to do a bit of good. Case in point: the charity ride. There are many kinds of charity rides. Some cover ten kilometres around the park. Some will take you from London to Brighton, or all the way to Paris. They all have their merits – but let’s be honest: so far, so usual. A charity ride might go anywhere you choose it to go, given the right level of dedication and, of course, the time to do so. And if you should so choose, you might even take it where the money is going. Like Malawi, for example. Malawi, for those of you unfamiliar with the geography, is a landlocked, sub-Saharan country of some 120,000 square kilometres and 15 million people. Though it has made giant steps forwards in recent years – youth literacy has risen to 82 percent – its population faces a disaster of proportions all too well known: more than 10 percent of its adult population (almost a million people) are living with HIV/AIDS. There are many more eminently quotable numbers that might impress upon the reader the sheer scale – 10 percent (how much the disease is expected to lower Malawi’s GDP in 2010), 68,000 (the number of deaths per year), 250 (the number of new infections per day), 5.8 percent (how many of the country’s farm labour force have died so far) – though these numbers obviously miss the personal tragedy of each death. These are the sorts of tragedies that kill off entire civilisations, and the situation in Malawi is desperate. You might be forgiven for feeling a little helpless in the face of this; most people do. And there is, admittedly, not much

that any one person can do that will move more than a few decimals here or there – even if those decimals may well have an effect on hundreds, or thousands, of lives. The question of where to begin remains. Which brings us back to the simple act of getting on your bike. Now, you may well decide to cycle to Brighton – depending on where you live, the trip to Brighton could be quite a long one – and getting on your bike at all, for any good cause and for any distance, is surely a commendable thing. Les Pratt, a BBC producer from Manchester, UK, took things a little further. “I moved to Manchester in 2002, which was a huge life change, and it made me reflect on things – it motivated me to act,” he says of the process that would be the start of a charity ride quite out of the ordinary. “I had two cousins who both participated in fundraisers at the time, and one of them cycled around Vietnam for charity, which inspired me to do something a bit like that.” Les, however, was not content with merely picking a charity at random, going to some equally random place and cycling a few hundred pre-planned miles, and jumping merrily on someone else’s boat. He wanted to do something different. He knew that he wanted to raise money for HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa where the emergency is greatest, but he was by no means content with just sending a cheque. Les wanted to get involved: “I didn’t want to do something in one place and have the money go somewhere else, because it does seem that there’s never any real connection with the place the money is going – but I wanted to meet the people, and see what I was raising money for.” Having made that decision, he began his journey by trying to take the well-known course of simply signing up to something worthwhile, but he quickly ran into a bit of trouble: there was nothing to sign up for. “There was nothing on the market, so to speak – there were no fundraisers for HIV in Africa that actually happened in Africa,” he says. “So I thought: why not do it myself?” Why not indeed? Most people might have protested 23

that organising a fundraising bicycle ride through one of the poorest countries in the world would not be the sort of thing that you just do yourself, but if Les had such concerns, he never pursued them, acting instead on the impulse to set up the Mission Malawi ride. He did, however, have the good sense to make some new friends with a bit of experience in that particular field. “I’d watched something about their work on BBC Breakfast, so I phoned ActionAid and told them my idea, and they basically helped me set it up,” he says.

“...YOU GET SUNBURNS AND SCRAPES, AND SOME DAYS ARE JUST REALLY ROUGH, BUT IT SEEMS LIKE SUCH A SMALL PRICE TO PAY FOR WHAT YOU’RE DOING” While the prognosis for someone infected with HIV/ AIDS in the west may have improved dramatically in recent years – a rigorous regime of antiretroviral drugs will lengthen the time span before HIV turns into AIDS to an average of twenty years – the same cannot be said for someone living with HIV in the developing world. The drugs are patented and prohibitively expensive, well outside the reach of most of the populations in any part of sub-Saharan Africa. The best way of limiting the spread of the virus is education about how to avoid contracting the virus at all – especially to women, who remain the most vulnerable. ActionAid runs workshop programmes in several countries, and funds campaigns to make the medication more widely available. “The good thing about doing it with them, of course, is that they’ve got so much experience with this,” he says of his collaboration with ActionAid. “They’ve done it before, and they let you come out and see their projects when you’re there, so you see what you’re working for. I still had to recce all the routes and figure out the cost of everything – and then recruit as many people as I could for it.” And so, the work began. The trek was scheduled for March of 2004, and Les had a year and a half to find support, funding, participants and, not entirely irrelevantly, figure out how to organise a 500-kilometre bike ride around a country not commonly known for its superior infrastructure – you’ll almost certainly want to leave the carbon-fibre road bike at home for this one. By his own admission, he didn’t always find it easy, and convincing people to leave the comforts of home to ride a bike around Africa under difficult conditions and in occasionally extreme weather was sometimes more than he thought he’d manage. “The first year, in 2004, there were 10 of us,” he says – but his Mission Malawi grew rapidly. “The second year, the trip in 2006, it had grown to 35 people from all over 24

the place. Each year, we get more new people – you get to meet so many different people doing this. Over the years – Mission Malawi was repeated again in 2008 and 2010, and another is scheduled for May of 2012 – they’ve raised more than a quarter of a million pounds for ActionAid’s projects in Malawi, and covered several thousand kilometres by bike, visiting remote parts of the country and seeing for themselves the work that’s being done, and how much still needs to be done. An impressive feat for a man who admits to not even owning a bike before deciding to ride one around Africa, but it was not without a few hardships. “Sometimes it’s difficult to keep people motivated. You get 18 months to do all the training and fundraising, but it’s not always easy,” says Les. “There’s definitely a reward at the end of it, though. Not just the ride, and seeing a beautiful country, of course, but actually seeing the projects, and the meeting the people who benefit from the money you’re raising – that makes it all worthwhile.” The rides themselves are not exactly a walk in the park, though Les will tell you it’s a relief to finally get to go and do what you’re meant to be doing after all the long months of training – even if Les does say he doesn’t train nearly as much as he used to these days: he knows what he can do now – and planning and fundraising. “Of course, you get sunburns and scrapes, and some days are just really rough, but it seems like such a small price to pay for what you’re doing,” he says. “And I’ve only had six punctures in all the years I’ve been doing it.” A small price to pay indeed. A bi-annual charity ride is, of course, only a very small step towards a permanent revolution. It is, first and foremost, a small step towards reversing the catastrophe threatening the people trying to preserve their entire societies and communities from a vicious illness. It is testament to the power of a bunch of good folk and their

bicycles (an altogether more friendly machine than any other invented for the transportational convenience of humankind) when they get it into their heads to go the long way round, and raise a bit of cash for a worthy cause. www.missionmalawi.co.uk

A B I C Y C L E W H E E L L I E S H O R I Z O N TA L O N T H E G R O U N D , B E I N G SPUN WITH FINGERS AND THUMB . AROUND ITS HUB AND RIM ARE

DANCING

WAV E S

MADE

LOOPS, OF

TINY

PAPER

CYCLING AND

FIGURES

WIRE

AND

BREAKING

PLASTIC

AND

A L L S E E M I N G LY P O S S E S S E D B Y M A G I C . T H I S I S . . .

A friend of Boneshaker recently sent us a link to a video of it in action, and we just had to find out more. Turns out the cunning bike wheel animation machine is the brainchild of Tim Wheatley, a first year student in Digital Animation at University College in Falmouth, UK. We got in touch and he told us his story.

camera that films at a slow speed (12 frames/second) to record it, and spin the wheel at such a speed that every 12th of a second, (every time the camera records a new frame), the wheel has moved on by one image. This creates an illusion of animation happening on the bike wheel, but it can only be seen through the video camera.

“My most recent project was a brief set by a tutor to create a short piece of experimental animation using a new technique that didn’t rely on computers. I had been looking at the work of various artists and animators and decided to take inspiration from one of my favourites, Jim Le Fevre, who creates zoetropes using record players. At first I wanted to do the same, but couldn’t find a record player – so I started searching for something else I could get to spin at a steady rate.

This first film (watch it at the link below) has just been an experiment to see what I can do with this bike wheel. I’m now working on a few other projects with the technique – the main focus is a longer film to enter into the animation and film festival circuit. I’m also attempting to attach a camera to my fully working bike so it will film my wheel as I cycle, as a joint project with sound artist and musician Lee Chapman. Lee’s creating a soundtrack for the piece and is using his bike to record sounds and make music. The project is well underway and should hopefully be complete before the end of the year.”

I have always cycled and always liked the idea of fixing up old bikes, so I’ve had an old bike sitting in the garden with broken gears and a rusty chain that I’ve never got round to doing anything with, so immediately it seemed the perfect solution. I detached both the wheels and started experimenting with bits of plasticine and cardboard to create my own zoetrope. The Cyclotrope has a cycle of 18 images spread evenly around the wheel, split up by the 18 spokes. I use a video

LINKS http://vimeo.com/21016797 thecyclotrope.blogspot.com www.timwheatley.co.uk www.leechapman.net

BIKE BEATZ Here is my hip hop playlist, full of tracks I feel are bike related. For the record, I would like to state that I don’t recommend you plug yourself in as you ride as that’s dangerous. Plus it’s really selfish: grab yourself a ghetto blaster and balance it on your shoulder retro-style for all to hear. Drawings and music selection / www.judebrosnan.blogspot.com

HILLTOP HOODS / THE HARD ROAD I think the hardest road to park your bike on is the road I work on. In the winter it’s fine, I can get a spot right outside the office but as of last week the fair-weathers have nabbed them all. I can’t complain about this or my boss will tell me to stop rocking up so late. Whatever, the only reason I go to work is because I like cycling there. Hilltop Hoods are a regular feature as the music behind loads of BMX stunt videos on YouTube. As if they weren’t cool enough. ICE CUBE / RACE CARD I hate it when someone goes through a world of trouble to get right up on your back tyre to overtake you. Then, once in front, slows down to a pensioner’s pace. I had this epic back and forth one afternoon last summer near Vauxhall Bridge with some floppy haired dude in a creased suit with a backlight sellotaped to his helmet. I eventually got so annoyed I screamed ‘DUDE, IT’S NOT A RACE’. He looked back triumphantly. That dude was the bumbling posh boy Mayor of London, ‘Boris Johnson’. BEASTIE BOYS / SLOW RIDE Adding some Beastie Boys bad-assness to the ‘War’ track ‘Low Rider’. Harmonicas and hip hop, who could ask for more? I was originally going to tell my Boris story to this track but didn’t want to use the word ‘Ride’ anywhere near his name. SLICK RICK / BEHIND BARS I’ve spent most of my life behind bars. MY HANDLE BARS. Ha ha… sigh. Seriously, I’ve never even returned a library book back late. Check out the video for some seriously creative animation. KURTIS BLOW / THE BREAKS Hands down one of my favourite tracks of all time. I was going to come up with some anecdote about bike brakes, break dancing and breaking bones but I’ll just give you a break. GRANDMASTER FLASH / WHITE LINES Some dudes were touching up the road markings outside where I used to work and left a massive puddle that I obviously accidentally rode through. My bosses were so not impressed with the white lines I left EVERYWHERE. I used to love dancing around to this song as a kid. I would abruptly stop at the word ‘FREEZE’ then resume at ‘ROCK’. Ah what a vision of innocence, a little girl dancing around to a song discouraging the use of drugs, sung by a bunch of coke heads. SNOOP DOGG / STOP LIGHT You should always stop at red lights. It’s the right thing to do, it gives you a chance to have a breather and if you don’t you could get a fine. The police don’t let 2 wheels break rules. Nor do they laugh when you tell them you live at ‘123 Letsbe Avenue’. KELIS / GLOW This playlist needs a girl on it to stop it becoming a massive testosterone fest. As I’m a girl who is more than a bit obsessed with fashion, it can be hard being stylish on a bike. I’m not prepared to enter a world of lycra. My bike has destroyed and robbed me of many pairs of wicked shoes. ALL my trousers have a black splotch on the inside right leg. Don’t even get me started on helmet hair. However, I sacrifice style for safety every time. Remember, cyclists ‘should be seen and not hurt’ so hi-vis up and ‘GLOW’.

2-PAC / STARIN’ THROUGH MY REAR VIEW I got car doored last year because some idiot in a suped-up 4X4 wasn’t starin’ through his rear view. Luckily I was fine (helmets save lives) and my bike only suffered minor damage. As he got out to check I hadn’t marked his car with my face I put a gypsy curse on him. THE PHARCYDE / PASSING ME BY A few years back, I was in Nicaragua where cycling is a pretty big deal. You often see whole families balanced on one rickety bike. There is some kind of unspoken competition where they try to get the most random cumbersome things balanced on two wheels. You soon get used to bikes passing by with carpets, book cases, cages of chickens. As I was leaving I finally saw a guy passing by on his own riding his bike normally. I admired him for his trend-setting ways. As he went ahead I saw he was holding a baby under his arm. Naturally. BLUE SCHOLARS / FREEWHEELING. There are loads of cycling events/ festivals and freewheels going down around town. They are a great way to meet other cyclists, learn new things about bikes, and see some old school bikes like penny farthings, unicycles and some seriously pimped out rides. I’m thinking up a way to attach a boom box to my handle bars so I can blast out these tunes as I blaze past. LUPE FIASCO / BREAK THE CHAIN Bike theft is a major problem for cyclists. It seems as quickly as locks and chains get more high-tech and bad-ass the bike burglars evolve and find ways to break them. Scum. To counteract their craftiness, get your bike registered. I have my own anti-theft system. I ride a cheap girl’s bike covered in ‘Hello Kitty’ stickers with only one working gear. No man alive would want to touch it and we all know girls don’t steal. ZION 1 / COASTIN’ I love cycling and many things contribute to this, like the blasts of fresh laundry smell you get coasting past a dry cleaner’s on a cold day. Coasting down a hill on a sunny day taking in a picturesque scene. That’s why you’d never catch me on a fixie. 29

words illustration photography

Lacar Musgrove Laurie Rollitt Robin Walker Christopher Lane

Let’s go ride bikes. My brother and I and whatever other kids were around, used to tear around our wide concrete driveway in circles, popping wheelies, jamming the pedals back to skid the tires on the cement. I was an acrobatic child, and soon after I learned to ride a bike I began experimenting. First no hands, then feet propped on the handlebars. Then standing on the banana seat. Ta da! One leg extended, arms outstretched. Circus tricks. We set up obstacle courses and ramps, occasionally careening off our bikes and scraping our knees and elbows. A little hydrogen peroxide and a band-aid later, we were back at it. The little store a mile up the road was a destination ride to buy candy and fountain drinks. Sometimes we’d just go riding around the neighborhood, seeing how fast we could go. We jumped potholes and cut loops around cul de sacs. We rode on the handlebars. We rode with no hands. We rode for the sheer joy if it.

WE RODE ON THE HANDLEBARS. WE RODE WITH NO HANDS. WE RODE FOR THE SHEER JOY IF IT. The bicycle, through its usefulness and grace, adds a new dimension of possibility to human life. My childhood wouldn’t have been the same without it, and my life in this downtown New Orleans neighborhood called the Bywater wouldn’t either. The popularity of cycling in New Orleans is due in large part to geography. The city is flat and compact, dense with small streets. The Bywater in particular is a neighborhood where the bicycle seems particularly entwined with the lifestyle. After living here a little while anyone would notice that the place feels like an island. Many of its denizens are convinced there is no other place on Earth in which to live what could properly be called Life, find little reason to cross the borders, and are loathe to do so. The Caribbean architecture, dominated by Victorian shotguns of pastel-painted clapboard, and the damp subtropical air fragrant with jasmine combined with the ubiquity of bicycles on the narrow streets serve to heighten the illusion. People of a range of ages and lifestyles, from the young and single to parents with attached baby seats or kiddie trailers to the grey-haired ride cruisers, road bikes, tall bikes (a bicycle with a double-stacked frame), mutant bikes, and kids’ bikes for both pleasure and practicality. The neighborhood was built mostly in the nineteenth century when the invention of the streetcar - powered first by horse and then by electricity - allowed people to live out of practical walking distance from the old “walking city,” as historians refer to it. (In New Orleans,

that means the French Quarter, also known as the Vieux Carre, or “old town.”) Thus was born the suburb, which, unlike the crowded original city, allowed for free-standing houses with modest backyards in which to grow vegetables and keep chickens. The new settlers – Germans, Irish, Italians, and Creoles mostly working in the booming cotton trade on the river – didn’t have to rent cramped tenant housing in the city but were able to buy homes for their families that they could pass down to their children. Besides elbow room, the suburbs afforded independence. When the car came into prominence in the middle of the twentieth century, the streetcar tracks through the Bywater, as in most early American suburbs, were torn up. What’s left is a neighborhood where the distances are slightly too far to make walking practical but close enough to make driving unnecessary – if you have a bicycle. By bicycle, you can cross from one end of the Bywater to the other, between the Industrial Canal and Franklin Avenue, in five to ten minutes, depending on how much of a hurry you are in. A lot of people who live in the neighborhood are artists and musicians who make a living in the French Quarter, either from their art or in the service industry. The walk to the Quarter from here would take at least forty-five minutes, and the bus you’d have to take runs only once an hour. But on a bicycle you can be in the Quarter in fifteen minutes. Even if you have a car, driving into the French Quarter is a poor idea, because then you have to look for parking, which, depending on the time, could take half an hour, and then you can only park for two hours. Depending on where you find parking, you might have to feed the meter. But on a bike you can glide past the traffic on Decatur Street, lock to any number of available posts and leave your bicycle there for as long as you want for free. (Unless you leave it too long and it gets stolen, that is.) Thanks to the bicycle, you can live easily in the Bywater without the financial burden of owning a car. And freeing oneself from financial burdens is an essential principle for people who would rather spend their time producing beauty than wealth, people for whom life is meant for enjoyment over toil, people who, rather than try to make as much money as possible, strive to live on as little. Bike-riding in the Bywater is not only a matter of convenience but a part of the culture. The bicycle, like backyard gardens, is celebrated as a measure and symbol of independence, rejection of the excesses of capitalism, and environmental friendliness. The architecture is quaint and the location charmed, but the sweet flavor of life in the Bywater seeps from its gregarious mood. Through all the festivity run streams of alcohol. The bars are playgrounds for the grown-up neighborhood kids. And the bicycle offers the perfect mode of bar-hopping, avoiding both muggers and drunk driving. This is not to say that people don’t get mugged on bicycles, but walking at night is a good

THE BOHEMIAN VIBE OF THE BYWATER RESTS ON A SENSE OF INDEPENDENCE AND DO-IT-YOURSELF SPIRIT. bit riskier than speeding past one’s would-be assailant on two wheels. And riding a bike with a good buzz going carries its own joys. The Happy Talk Band, those celebrated bards of the Bywater, make life in the neighborhood the subject of their lyrics. That, along with musical and song-writing talent, contributes plenty to their popularity in this self-obsessed place. Their most recent album includes a song called “Ramona’s Wild Ride”: “Ride through the raindrops, Ramona,” croons Luke Allen, “Ride your bike to the bar / Watch out for the potholes Ramona / The drunks and the muggers and the cars / God speed my sister Ramona / The front tire looks a bit low / The bicycle’s fuelled by good whiskey / I can tell by the way your cheeks glow.” And so forth. The Bohemian vibe of the Bywater rests on a sense of independence and do-it-yourself spirit. On the corner of Marigny and Decatur Streets is a warehouse of copper-colored brick, referred to as The Ark, which houses the Plan B Community Bike Project. Although Plan B is technically just outside the Bywater, in the upriver Marigny neighborhood, it’s a resource important to and well-used by the cycling folks of both neighborhoods. Besides the bike shop, The Ark also houses an anarchist bookstore called the Iron Rail and artist studios on the upper floors. The idea of the bike shop, which is run by a loose collective, is that they provide a space, tools, parts – mainly recycled – and assistance for people to fix their bikes. Use of the shop is free; it’s expected that you pay something for the donated parts. Volunteers spend time rebuilding bikes, so if you need one you may able to just go in and buy one. Or, you can go in and choose from the stacks of broken frames in the back and rebuild one yourself. You can leave the bike in storage while you’re working on it and, when you’re finished and ready to ride off, what you pay for it becomes a matter of negotiation with a volunteer. The love of bicycling got its start in New Orleans during the 1880s, when cities all over America were experiencing a bicycle craze. As early as 1881, The Daily Picayune was reporting on the New Orleans Bicycle Club. According to a news item in June of that year, the club was making regular Sunday runs from the corner of Commercial Alley and St. Charles streets, in what is now the Central Business District, to Spanish

Fort on the road along Bayou St. John, which was considered the best in the city for cycling. According to its charter, the club was officially organized on May 15, 1884. By then they had adopted uniforms of blue jackets and knee britches. The charter states the purpose of the club as “the mutual enjoyment of its members in the pursuit of bicycling as a pastime” and also “the promotion (by force of example) of the use of the bicycle as a practicable and enjoyable aid to locomotion by the general public, and the use of its influence for improving ad keeping improved the public roadways.” At the time, bicycles were still fairly new, having been invented in France a mere fifteen years earlier, and enthusiasts contended with detractors over the right of the bicycle to public roads. The aims of the NOBC were not only social but political, and the charter states: “It is distinctively declared that the general welfare, and not the individual profit of the members, is the object for which said Club is organized and incorporated.” The bicycle club was a formal organization. The charter lays out the structure of the club with officers, procedures for admitting new members, and the rules and protocols of the runs. Elected officers included a President, Vice President, Secretary-Treasurer, First and Second Lieutenants, Bugler, Guide, and a Board of Trustees. Members paid dues and became part of the national organization, the League of American Wheelmen. Formal meetings were held and, in a hardbound volume of lined paper, detailed minutes and accounts were kept in sharp columns, written in a neat and looping pencil script. The Sunday rides, as described in the charter, were regimented affairs. The rules of the club stipulated that while visiting guests may join the runs, any city residents not members of the club would not be permitted to ride “under any circumstances.” Members were to stay in rank formation and pass vehicles on the same side – if meeting, on the right and, if passing from the rear, on the left. If a man were to take a spill, 35

the captain would be informed and everyone would dismount. Other rules of order, safety, and courtesy included giving proper space to other riders and vehicles and never riding on the sidewalk. Most of the club members rode high wheelers, with some front wheels over four feet high, a saddle mounted just above it and a much smaller wheel to the back. Bigger wheels meant faster speeds, and more danger, and the height of a rider’s wheel was a matter of bravado. At the start of each run, the cyclists formed a line with small back wheels against the curb, members taking position according to the size of their wheel with the smallest to the right. The riders, dressed in their matching jackets, knee britches and caps, stood at the right side of their wheels, “with the left hand on the cantle of the saddle, and right arm hanging by his side with his third finger touching the seam of his britches,” anticipating the call to mount. The bugler, at the cue from the captain, sounded the piercing command, and when the ringing of the last note had died, the riders would together execute a flank movement, and the man on the far right would start running beside his wheel, hop onto the pedal with his right foot, and swing his left over the saddle in time to start pedalling before the wheel lost the momentum to keep it upright. Once the man on the right had mounted, the others followed, and off they raced to try to beat last week’s time.

WEAVING AROUND EACH OTHER, CATCHING UP AND FALLING BACK, LIKE A SMALL FLOCK OF BIRDS. On New Year’s Eve 1885 the Club took advantage of the asphalt along the grand oak tree and GreekRevival-mansion-lined St. Charles Avenue, to put on a celebratory ride, donning full uniform and discharging Roman candles and other fireworks. That event, though noted, paled in comparison to the fairy spectacle in 36

February 1887. That cold night, a crowd such as had never been seen lined St. Charles Avenue for twentyfive blocks, from Lee Circle to Louisiana Avenue, to witness a procession of lanterns floating like a swarm of fireflies up the darkened street. Behind a bandwagon came the costumed ‘Romeo’, and behind him ‘Mikado’, and parasols and umbrellas fringed round with multicolored lights, a ship with its signal lights burning, a page, a soldier, a tandem, its large wheel interwoven with gold and silver sun fish, topped with a Chinese pagoda fourteen feet across, fifteen feet high, graced with six dozen lanterns in crossing arches. Behind them came Mephistopheles astride flapping wings of red, a man dressed in black with a figure of a human skeleton outlined in white, devils, jockeys, princes and harlequins, silk, velvet and glitter all lit by crescents and rings of lamps suspended from around a hundred bicycles. When a bicycle tourist known as Mr. Drew visited New Orleans in 1881, he declared the city streets the best in the country for cycling. These days many grumble over bike-riding conditions in the city, rough roads and a lack of dedicated bike paths, but the recent marking off of bike lanes on the larger boulevards, including St. Claude Avenue, the boulevard at the northern border of the Bywater, represents some effort by the city. A proposed greenway through the heart of the city would include a three-mile bike bath, and the parks service has already built a bike path along Bayou St. John, the old route of the New Orleans Bicycle Club. Plenty of people love where they live, and for different reasons. The people who chose the Bywater neighborhood in New Orleans as home enjoy a collective quality of life based on the joy of shared experience. I might call up a friend on a nice day to suggest, “Let’s go ride bikes.” Gliding up the street, we hold conversations, sometimes in threes or fours, weaving around each other, catching up and falling back, like a small flock of birds. Even by myself, I get a kick out of cruising the neighborhood, tilting around corners, standing up on pedals and stomping on them to race faster, wind in my ears, coasting with my arms spread out like wings, the purr of the free wheel as I pedal backwards to maintain balance. Ta da!

Illustration Michael van Kekem // Studio M www.michaelvankekem.com

I have one of the best jobs I can think of. I work at an independent bookstore. A lot like cycling, this job can be at times blissful and fulfilling, at other times simply torturous. It all has to do with what I bring to work with me. How are my actions and attitudes affecting me and how are they affecting the people around me? This is the question I find most important to be asking myself. The time I have outside of work I am either running or riding my bike. I do this as a way of refocusing myself after a heavy day, or fine-tuning my focus to be prepared for the day to come. On my rides for the past month or two, my bike has been very noisy and seemingly angry at me, creaking and making all sorts of frustrated bike sounds as I ride along. I usually ride with really loud music which unfortunately means I don’t hear what my bike is telling me. Instead of hearing what it wants from me, I feel what it needs from me. This is not really the best way for me to approach the relationship I have with my bike. I only feel the bad things on the bike when they are nearing catastrophe. For a month or two I have been riding with my iPod, not hearing what my bike is trying to tell me. Three or four days ago I rode to work and forgot my music. I finally got to hear everything my bike had been trying to tell me and my bike was pissed. I freaked out. I thought I was going to have to get all sorts of new parts for her. I was lost in my head taking her apart and rebuilding her. “Shit, I need to get new tools. I’ve been wanting these new parts for a long time, I might as well just get them now. What new ratio do I want, climbing or mashing? Do I really want to do all that custom work on my bottom bracket again? Should I get new wheels? Maybe this will inspire me to learn to build them. Dura-Ace or Phil Wood? I am running one Phil already, should I get rid of the Aerospoke? Shit, I should just sell her and save for a month or two to finally get my dream bike. What I should do is take out another credit card and buy the bike now!” Then I ran with all the thought of drowning in credit card debt all over again after I’ve gotten this far out of it. The next day was my day off so I wanted to ride. I put my bike up on the stand to look at it and figure out what was wrong. I went through all the possible big problems over and over again, rode her out front and she was still creaking and yelling at me. I thought, “That’s it, I need a new bike. She’s retired.” I took my bike back inside to tighten and clean literally one part before I took her on what I thought would be her last ride. I suit up, saddle up, and she is PERFECT. Seriously perfect. After all that madness of what was wrong, after going through all the new shit I need to get to make my bike “perfect”,

“ I finally got to hear everything my bike had been trying to tell me and my bike was pissed.” after all the preparing to go back into debt to get the new super bike, I had lost myself and forgotten the essential daily maintenance. The simple cleaning and tightening of one overlooked part made all the difference. I had been so distracted by what the bike doesn’t have, by what I don’t have, I had been ignoring the beauty of what is right in front of me. I had been not treating her properly whenever I took her out. That was what she was trying to tell me. I took her for a beautiful ride and began to think about that experience. I started to notice the parallels with that and my life. I started to make a personal inventory about what I have been doing on a daily basis. Have I been doing all I can to be the best person to myself and to others? No, I absolutely have not. I have been caring more about the outside maintenance of myself instead of the inside maintenance of myself. I have not been listening to what the voice inside my heart has been telling me. That voice is the one I need to be listening to, way more than the voices in my head. It is my truth. I distract myself from it. It hit me hard. It is way easier to look good on the outside than to feel good on the inside. I need more balance. I need my outside to be more of a reflection of my inside. So, here is my question to both myself and to you... what parts of us do we need to clean and tighten to be the best people we can be? Am I willing to clean it and tighten it now, or do I need to wait a little bit longer and feel like I do when I hit the near breaking point when I keep treating others the way I currently am? I’m not saying I’m some kind of emotional monster constantly hurting myself and other people. I’m not that at all. I have simply found through riding and fixing my bike that I am at a place where I can look inward and make small adjustments to be better to myself and other people tomorrow than I was today. That is clarity. That is one of the beauties that cycling brings to my life. Patrick Walker lives and cycles (obsessively) in Pasadena, California. He manages Vroman’s Books and posts his writings at www.specialtease48.blogspot.com 39

The story of La Ocho, a revolutionary figure-of-eight velodrome

50 55

Design Team: Dieter Janssen (DJA) with JonathanChan, Michael de Jong and Jonathan Gotfryd www.dieterjanssen.com / Nadir Olivet, La Carrera Cycles. www.dieterjanssen.com/projects/la_ocho.html

70 B

30 25 A

La Ocho is a thing of great beauty. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also a work in progress. A meticulously engineered figure-ofeight race track, it was due to be unveiled at the 18th annual international Cycle Messenger World Championship (CMWC) 2010, a ten-day flurry of high-speed thrills that draws riders from all over the world to test their lungs, legs and lust for glory.

La Ocho would be a 200m outdoor circuit, carefully designed so that riders can maintain a steady pace around the optimal racing line. Despite incorporating seemingly straight sections, there is a constant line of curve, meaning no speed-change jolt as riders transition from bend to straight and back. Where the two loops of the eight converge, one dips gracefully under the other. The maths (we wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t try to explain them here) made sense.

tion

“As the competition start date approached, a biblical downpour washed away roads, buildings and several sections of the town.”

eometry of only the Cote d’Azur in three dimensions. To ote d’Azur into a ribbon.

iderization in ribbonization: the Cote d’Azur must always lie e ribbon must be continuous; and the ribbon must be inclined ce acting on cyclists.

T with width t, we define its boundary; interior points are undary points. Let T(x) be the equation of the Cote d’Azur in d’Azur, there is a unique two-dimensional plane, S, whose )|p. Coordinatize this plane with orthonormal vectors u and nd plane and w points up.

T

Tp p

(dT/dx)|p

c, then define the boundary, T, of the track, T, at p to be

The diagrams and models looked right. The Toronto-based

)}

CMWC organizer, La Carrera Cycles, gave their full

ral at a distance L along the spiral,Dieter then define the with boundary support and architect Janssen graduates

from

the architecture faculty and the Institute for Aerospace

/LS) sin p), (t(L/LS) cos p, t(L/LS) sin p)}

Studies at the University of Toronto had put in months of painstaking calculation, planning and construction.

ular Arc

Anticipation was high. But when race day came, there was no La Ocho. Why? Well, the host town for CMWC in 2010 was Panajachel, Guatemala. And boy can it rain in Guatemala. As the competition start date approached, a biblical downpour washed away roads, buildings and several sections of the town – including both the original w

and the alternate proposed sites for La Ocho. CMWC

went ahead: there was trial and triumph in equal measure.  p1

p2

(0,0) The event had theu full support of the community and Track Profile at a point on the Euler Spiral -t(1-L/LS) sin p2

cos p2

pressing ahead with it helped the town a great deal, as all that rain had also devastated the local economy. But La -t(1-L/LS) cos p2

Ocho didn’t get the glorious debut it deserved.

t at all points, we have the geometry of the track. We set t story the doesn’t endofthere - interest e track. ToFortunately, specify , wethe consider physics a cyclist on

in the

project is growing from all sides, and team La Ocho are still very much on the case, determinedly pursuing their dream of seeing cyclists speed around those sweet, seamless curves. 42

I am on a container ship in the middle of the Persian Gulf. It is March 2010; Civil war is ahead of me, earthquakes behind and pirates in the middle. And yet I am pedalling, pedalling for all I am worth on an exercise bike in the corner of the ship’s recreation room. Through a porthole I can just see the ocean and, owing to the up-down-side-to-side motion of pedalling, it feels like this ocean is moving in jumps in time to my own knock-kneed revolutions. In other words I am powering a 75,000 tonne container ship as it chugs through the Middle East. But in reverse. The exercise bike is pointing in the opposite direction. And I can’t stop. I can’t stop pedalling. For the past ten months my girlfriend and I have been cycling across Europe and the Middle East to India from the UK. We arrived in Bombay, cycled another 2000km and now it’s time to go home. We are on a freighter ship packed with the products of cheap labour, stacked like building blocks in metal containers; plastic tat, frozen goods and foil wrapped tea on its inexorable journey to our supermarkets. And then, tucked away in the corner, there’s ‘Billy’ and ‘Bertle’ – our battered touring bikes. We left Bombay in a flurry of ferries, bribes, plastic bottles and masala curry and now find ourselves on an air-conditioned tub with twenty crew and nowhere to cycle and everywhere to go. It’s hard to explain what it feels like to cycle eight hours a day, five days a week for months and months and months. It’s even harder to explain what it feels like when you stop. What stopping most feels like is ‘not stopping’. This is where the brain and the body have a major fall out. The brain goes “Look mister, enough with the cycling. You are on a boat in the middle of nowhere, read a book, eat a schnitzel, watch a film, cut your toenails, trim that terrible hippy beard – but just stop cycling.” Basically – chill out. But the body is having none of it. “Listen mate,” it says, “these muscles have been cycling continuously for the last ten months. We don’t do stairs. We don’t really do chairs. Certainly not chairs with backrests.” And so I find myself circling the exercise bike. Or rather 44

it circles me. I can hear it whirring beneath the guttural diesel turbines of the boat. And before I know it I’m on a shiny plastic seat pedalling nowhere and everywhere at the same time. I have become the air-conditioned hamster in a cage I was trying to escape all those months ago. Is this really true or am I just unwinding the spool I wound over all those months? The word ‘unwind’ is wholly a verb, it hints that stillness can be reached only by its opposite, that is ‘not cycling’ by in fact ‘cycling.’ The further East we go the more time slips. A tinny tannoy announces “All crew please note clocks go back half an hour” and “All crew please note clocks go back an hour.”And, as if by magic, all the ships clocks retreat by the same amount, connected by an invisible network behind the plywood panelling. This only adds to the sense of unspooling what has already been spooled, day after day, mile after mile, click after click. Our ‘real’ bikes, Billy (named after a goat) and Bertle (named after a Bert), have been lashed by a Philippine sailor to a metal pipe. They too travel backwards and riderless. The sailor is bemused as I fuss over the pedals so they don’t lean into each other’s spokes or chainset. Most if not all ‘ordinary people’ (read ‘non-transcontinental cycling’) have been bemused by this anxiety. When the bikes have not been cycled (i.e. strapped into some other form of transport) I always find myself in a demented shouting match with its owner. In Bombay we had eight taxi drivers, four pushing from the back, four pulling from the front, trying to ram our bikes into the back of a cab. It’s difficult to be assertive when you’ve had a forty hour train journey and landed in one of the most populous cities on earth at midnight, but there goes the derailleur twanging against the top of a taxi seat you’ve been told definitively does not fold down. In India bikes are just oxen – one-speed wonders that can carry ten times their weight and get you places, not in style or even much comfort, but they get you there. This is laudable in a Western cycling culture where many bikes have become fetishised like fashion items, the latest titanium stallion

Words Jet McDonald www.biketales.wordpress.com

Illustration The Tree House Press www.tthp.org

“ I N INDIA A BIKE IS JUST A BIKE AND IF SOMETHING BREAKS THERE’S ALWAYS A HUT ROUND THE CORNER TO SLOT IN A REPLACEMENT FOR THE PRICE OF A CUP OF TEA.” gathering dust in a garage or whipped out on a Sunday for a hot pant jaunt. In India a bike is just a bike and if something breaks there’s always a hut round the corner to slot in a replacement for the price of a cup of tea. The downside of this is that our touring bikes, the friends that have carried us 10,000 km, are treated with the same workaday shove. “It’s only a bike,” think the eight bored taxi drivers, “why is he shouting so much?” The back of Billy’s mudguard breaks but the chainsets, remarkably, survive unscathed. Indians love to fiddle with the gear levers, argue over the role of pannier racks and, most often, squeeze the tyres – the equivalent of a carpenter giving a piece of wood a knock to see if it’s sound. But bikes, generally, are at the bottom of the transport pile. Every night it was a battle to get them locked inside or anywhere near our rooms. “They’re just bikes...” Yes but they’re just our bikes. In South India we had to give a ‘tip’ to a porter to load Billy and Bertle safely into the luggage compartment of a train. Half an hour later we see them on the opposite platform, unlocked and leaning against a lamppost as a hundred other passengers walk by. Billy and Bertle have been carried on ferries, trains, taxis, cranes, boats and once in a fisherman’s canoe (after a monsoon had washed the road away). But not once have they been scorned as much as they have been on a British train. Too many times I have had some franchised conductor foulmouthing my bike and I for ‘holding up the service’ as if bikes were somehow the new ‘leaves on the track’ of Network Rail. Once I saw John Grimshaw, ex-head of Sustrans – the UK’s sustainable transport network – being bullied off a carriage by a stream of commuters as he tried to wobble his bike onto the platform. Back in India, bikes may be at the bottom of the transport ladder but at least they are accorded a rung in the climb. Sometimes in Britain it feels as if they don’t deserve to be there at all, as if a bike not being cycled is not a cycle at all, it is an encumbrance. Here I sit on my exercise bike ‘not cycling’, unwinding to a more mundane existence, and what surprises me is just

how boring this ‘not cycling’ is. It reminds me that the actual act of revolving your legs round and round is dull, dull, dull. There is an endorphin hit, yes, but with nothing to see and no handlebars to steer, what is there to do? I find myself revolving my legs and flinging my hands in front of my chest in the open-palmed gesture of a rapper in full flow. Here I am on a boat in the middle of the Persian Gulf rapping to a ‘Safety First’ poster as my legs go round and round and round. But the paradox is that this ‘not cycling’ makes me realise what cycling actually is. It’s not about the muscles, the kilometres, the kilojoules. It’s about the steering. It’s about being in charge of your own destiny, the control that all other transport systems try to wrestle away from you. More than that it’s about seeing the world, really seeing the world. Not behind a windscreen or a seatbelt or a porthole or a flying metal tube but out in the big wide open. Fast enough to get places, slow enough that people can reach out and touch your shirt, offer you a “Salaam” or a “Namaste,” give you some fruit, ask you to stay, argue about the cricket, give you a carton of cold milk, discuss the weather, or just sit in the midday shade with you, waiting for the heat to go. Some may see cycling as a lonely occupation, man and machine against the mountains. But it is supremely social: it weaves into other peoples journeys, it opens up the world by opening up individual worlds. It is in fact ‘microtourism,’ meeting other people face to face, an antidote to the armies of mass tourism and their sausage factory experiences. But before I get too righteous, too indignant, I must remember I am sat on the plastic seat of an exercise bike on B deck of CMA CGM Wagner, sweat dripping off my nose and a bit of an ache in my right knee from too much ‘unwinding’. ‘Overuse,’ I think they call it. There is a time and a place for cycling and ‘not cycling’. Balance in all things. That’s what I should have learnt when my Dad first took the stabilisers off and I went freewheeling down the hill, my hands juddering on the grips, trying to wrestle control. 45

Paul Smith On cycling When I set out to cycle around the British coast, I had one or two heroes in mind to meet on the way. I took a little detour into London to meet my friends at Innocent drinks and to go to see the band Wilco play at the Troxy. While there, I phoned Paul Smithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s office to see if he might have some time to meet. They called back to say Paul was off on holiday the next day, but would have ten minutes free that same afternoon. As it turned out Paul gave me as much time as I needed (as well as a nice chunk of the office Friday chocolate cake). This is what he had to say. Nick Hand, slowcoast.co.uk

My passion for cycling started when I was eleven years of age and my dad bought me a racing bike. The racing bike was bought from a guy at the local bike club and he said if you ever want to come out for a bike ride, you can join us at the weekend. What was really interesting going out as an 11 year old was suddenly not being with my parents and not being at home, and being in Derbyshire for four hours with a load of blokes. I thought ‘this is quite interesting, I’m not with my parents, and I’m eleven and that’s nice’ At the age of 12, and through the Beeston Road Club, I started racing as a schoolboy. We had an Olympic bronze medalist in the club and we had a few lads who were doing quite well at road racing as well as track racing. So I got into racing from the age of 11 until I was 17 which is when I got up to the junior class. Then I had a bad accident and ended up in hospital. I was out training and broke my femur, collarbone and other bits and pieces. When I came out of hospital I met a load of people in the pub where I was meeting some mates. They turned out to be from the art school, they were fashion designers, graphic designers and architects and that’s how I got into the game I’m in now. For several years I really lost touch with cycling and then it just quite naturally came back. In fact today I’m still riding my bike. I’m going to Italy tomorrow and I’ll be riding my bike every day.

I don’t quite know how, but I’ve been kept in touch with quite a lot of the people who are doing well in cycling, I’ve become quite friendly with Mark Cavendish and Bradley Wiggins, Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton and Nicole Cooke. They often pop in and see me, wear my clothes. And during the Tour de France I was in contact with Bradley and Mark almost every day and followed their progress. So it’s been a very nice association. You meet so many people who love cycling and are involved. Well I think cycling is and has always been quite dangerous. I know two people who have died on bikes and, as I said, I had quite a bad accident. I’m not sure, but it doesn’t feel any worse in Britain than in other countries. But certainly some countries, especially if they have wider roads, manage to provide cycle lanes. But you know, with mobile phones these days it’s so dangerous on the bike, because so many people cheat all the time. They’re on the phone, texting. Previously it was the cigarette, drinking coffee. I even see motorists shaving as they’re driving along or doing their makeup. I think there have been twenty–nine people killed in London already this year. You’re very vulnerable; apart from your crash helmet, you’re not protected at all. I think the whole world would agree with you that we need to slow down. Everyone’s on email and texting all the time, nobody has time to do anything. It makes you wonder why. Where are we going? You know, why are we trying to cram so much in, when in fact conversation and observation and the love of life are far more important than any of the other stuff? 47

Illustration Senem Oezdogan www.electricpapersite.com

BIANCHI Famous for their traditional Celeste color, Bianchi was founded by 21-yearold Edoardo Bianchi in Italy in 1885. What started out as a small repair shop in Milan has now become one of the world’s leading and most popular bicycle manufacturers. Bianchi – ahead of his time – can be credited for a concept called the “Reparto Corse” in which he used the real racing environment to test his products and innovations.

CANNONDALE

MAVIC

Founded in 1971 by Joe Montgomery in

Having made history with their innovation

Connecticut, Cannondale successfully

in wheels, MAVIC has paved the way for

made the transition from backpack, bicycle

modern wheel design.

trailers and camping goods to high-end bicycle manufacturer.

Just a few years after producing their first aluminum rim in 1926, MAVIC wheels were

After introducing their first touring

successfully used in 1930’s Tour de France,

bike in 1983, Cannondale has successfully

which the company has officially

created racing and mountain bikes