The Ride - Issue #1

w w w. t h e r i d e j o u r n a l . c o m 08/09 10/11 12/13 14/15 16/19 20/21 22/23 24/25 26/31 32/33 34/35 36/37 38/43 44/45 46/47 48/49 50/55 56/57 58/59 60/61 62/65 66/67 68/69 70/71 72/73 74/75 76/77 78/83 84/85 86/87 88/91 92/93 94/95 96/97 98/103 104/105 106/107 108/113 114/115 116/117 118/119 120/121 122/123 124/125 126/129 130/131 132/133 134/138 140/142 144/146

Thanks, but I’ll ride. By Tim Woody Vélocouture. By Patrick Barber My vehicle. By Dave Anderson Blessed. By Tim Jackson Tour de France. By Ralf Hütter Meeting Gary. By Charlie Kelly Why I ride. By Alex Leigh Wheel of misfortune. By Peter Moskos The lower east ride. By Benjamin T Jarosh Dawn. By Dominic Perry Caught short. By Anja McDonald Pants. By Richard Risemberg The bicycle rockers. By Haruki ‘Harookz’ Noguchi Back to basics. By Rowley Haverly The Highway Cycle Group. By David Evans Here’s mud in your eye. By Michael Leon Steve’s cellar. By Steve Makin Critical mess. By Mikael Colville-Andersen The time trial. By Greg LeMond Leverage. By Dean Taylor One-to-one. By Victoria Pendleton The woman who asked me to choose. By Anon Map star. By Glen Johnson Chasing shadows. By Jac Strachan Bespoke. By Marc Edwards Velo Club d’A rdbeg. By Brian Palmer Born again. By Rob Warner Tokyo got f ixed. By Nicola Carignani Tour de telly. By Kevin Braddock Rollapaluza. By Paul Churchill Bike kill. By Klaus Thymann The pioneers. By Roy Sinclair Totally f ixated. By Dennis Bean-Larson Singular vision. By Sam Alison Herne Hill, SE24. By Trevor Ray Hart Going Dutch. By Da’ Square Wheelman Recycled. By Grant Taylor Winter of content. By Dan Barham The start of stopping. By Jon Meredith Nervous energy. By Philip Diprose Japanese alley. By ilovedust Paint job. By Taliah Lempert High cadence. By Dustin Klein Crystal method. By Ben Wilson Two wheels good. By Barry Scott The search. By Debbie Burton Riding style. By Sir Paul Smith Faded glory. By Roger Stillman, Marc Edwardson and James Wilson Pashley passion. By Simon Mills Life is a race. By Mike Kloser T H E R I DE

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w w w. t h e r i d e j o u r n a l . c o m Editor Philip Diprose

art director Andrew Diprose

graphics and Web design Dean Taylor

publisher Philip Stringer

sub editor Dominic Perry

sub editor Jeremy Case

The start of this journey felt a little like a night ride – take something sensible and add a dose of stupidity.

Our love of bikes is unquestionable, our track record of producing magazines is somewhat less proven.

Despite all of us having experience in journalism and publishing (some far more than I), none of us had actually created something from scratch. Exciting didn’t even come close to it.

Over Mexican food and Pacíficos, an idea began to crystallise, and soon we were joined by other like-minded people. It felt like a pro-tour peleton – everywhere we looked, we saw great talents joining us, each one of them bringing something different.

Ideas that initially seemed disparate and unconnected soon linked together, bonded by the passion of cyclists from across the globe. The concept seemed to connect with a lot of riders. Whatever their love, be it track, freeride, commuting, road-racing, mountain-biking or BMX, the depth of their enthusiasm was identical. In a world of segmentation and pigeon-holing, it was reassuring to see that we all roll the same.

As with all good rides, we felt exhausted by the time the finish line was in sight. And now that we have crossed it and the first issue is complete, we can only say how proud we are.

Thank you for joining The Ride.

Philip Diprose, Editor

The Ride wouldn’t be possible without the hard work of all our contributors. Special thanks for support: Marc and Grant at Condor, Scania at howies, Michael at Knog, Tim at Sideways, Sam at Singular, and Simon at Rapha. Also Mark and ilovedust for the fantastic cover illustration.

The views expressed in this magazine are those of real riders. Riders from all over the world and riders of all sorts of bikes. Listening to someone else’s view may make you a better and more worldly person.

Please get in touch with us. Let us know what you think of the issue. theridejournal@hotmail.com The ride is published by Own It! publishing. All rights reserved. Nothing in whole or part may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher.

The Ride is printed by Cambrian Printers on 50% recycled paper with soya-based ink. Cambrian won Print Week’s Environmental Printers of the Year 2007.

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than ks , but I’ l l ride B y T i m Wo o d y. Ph o t o g r a p h Ph i l i p Ts c h e r s i c h

ooking out of my office window into the dim, late-afternoon light of an Alaskan winter’s day, I cannot see through the curtain of snow that obscures the mountains on the edge of town. Street lights are coming on early, and I hear two co-workers murmuring about their dreaded drive home on a crowded, ice-coated highway.

I stifle a smug smile and slice my pre-ride apple. I feel no trepidation as I look forward to my commute. My snow bike is parked downstairs. I know the bike paths will be quiet, uncrowded and covered with a few inches of dry, velvet-like powder.

A few years ago, on a day like this, a couple of people would have already asked how I planned to get home. I’ve lost count of how many times co-workers have offered me rides on rainy and snowy days. That rarely happens anymore because everyone knows I’ll decline their invitations. Even my wife has stopped offering to come pick me up, unless she knows I’m facing a headwind strong enough to stop a freight train.

It strikes me as sad that people who drive to work every day have a hard time understanding why the rest of us voluntarily subject ourselves to wind, heat, rain, cold and snow – you know, the real world – instead of climbing into climate-controlled steel bubbles. I blame this on the tendency that people have to describe weather as “bad.”

One recent morning, the local newspaper carried a headline about “bad weather” putting cars into tailspins during the previous day’s rush hour. Unless it’s severe enough to wreck your house or maim your loved ones, there is no “bad” weather. There’s just weather. Some is more comfortable, and some is less comfortable.

It’s what you make of it.

A woman who sometimes chats with me briefly by the back door as she walks to her car happened to see me

gearing up to ride in several inches of new snow one night. She laughed and yelled, “You’re a madman!”

No, I’m not.

I’m not even all that tough, or brave, or any of the other things that some people call bike commuters (to our faces) when they’re impressed by what we endure. I’m just a bike nerd who likes getting exercise and having fun at the same time.

I love to pedal through busy intersections on dark, snowy days, especially when the wind is filling the air with dry, swirling snow. The blizzard-like effect makes the weather look especially nasty to motorists as I plough through the churned-up slush furrowed by all the passing traffic. As I cross in front of their idling cars, I feel the drivers’ eyes watching me through wet, icy windshields as they wait for the light to turn green.

I know they think I’m crazy. Many of them have unhesitatingly told me so. But I also know that I’m the sane one. Because as they robotically roll toward the next red light, I drop away from the street and roll down onto a dark, quiet bike path through the woods and begin to ride beside a frozen stream as I skirt the edges of quiet neighbourhoods. I often share my commute with a moose or two, and sometimes a fox, or a beaver that has surfaced through a hole in the creek ice.

Not a single brake light glows on the dark path ahead of me. No horns honk, no sirens wail and no grim news blares from a radio. I listen to my tires roll through fresh powder. Snow swirls in the amber glow of street lights when I pass under roads.

Somewhere, maybe one of my co-workers briefly thinks of me out in the snowstorm, shivers a bit and grips the steering wheel a little tighter.

Underneath the black balaclava that covers my face, I’m smiling. Crazy? Let them think so. But I’m one of the few people enjoying the rush hour.

Tim Woody. Anchorage, Alaska. Tim rides all winter and writes the blog Bicycles & Icicles. www.alaskabikeblog.blogspot.com T H E R I DE

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vé locouture B y P a t r i c k B a r b e r. Ph o t o g r a p h E l i n o r Z a c h

s a lifelong sceptic, I’m reluctant to believe that something I love is being embraced by the population at large.

But I am also a lifelong transportational cyclist, and scepticism be damned: transportational cycling appears to be reaching a tipping point in the USA. There’s evidence of this trend in some obvious and not-so-obvious places. Lance Armstrong recently opened a bike shop in his hometown of Austin, Texas. As a Tour de France winner, Mr Armstrong could reasonably be expected to focus his retail efforts on racing bikes.

But no – his shop will cater to the urban commuter.

Meanwhile, I just received the latest mail-out from REI, a US outdoor-equipment outfitter. REI sells bikes, and has its own line, but this brochure features something I don’t recall seeing in its catalogues before: a photograph of a cyclist, on a city street, in traffic, clearly going somewhere other than on a recreational ride.

In a more subtle way, an internet photo group called Vélocouture, which I started last year on the photosharing site Flickr, appears to be doing its own bit.

I started the Vélocouture group in late 2006 with no thought toward bicycle advocacy or transport. I was thinking more about fashion and style, inspired by the proliferation of street-style and personal-style internet offerings like Wardrobe_Remix (also a group on Flickr), Hel Looks, The Sartorialist, and so on. You see, along with my scepticism and transportational cycling habits, I’m also a lifelong clothes horse.

Since the Vélocouture group started, I’ve had the pleasure of watching it grow to include a wide variety of answers to that simple question: what do you wear when you travel by bike?

But even though I started this group with an eye to fashion, the photographs in Vélocouture are by definition about transportational cycling. Although in most of the world, cycling is primarily for transport, in the United States the majority of cycling is recreational and apes racing style. Bikes are tour replicas and riders dress in garishly-coloured, skintight spandex. In many places in the US, it’s seen as genuinely odd to simply wear normal,

everyday clothing while going from A to B on your bike.

To be fair, cyclists in the US have a different built environment to contend with than cyclists in some other countries. Most US cyclists have to cover more miles in a day than the average European in order to meet their transport needs. This is because all US cyclists live in cities or towns which have been designed primarily for the automobile, which results in urban sprawl, impractically large and spread-out street plans, and poorly graded roads. These are not insurmountable challenges, but they are challenges, and it makes dressing sharp on a bicycle a bit different for a US cyclist than for, say, our Scandinavian counterparts.

In a way, thinking about cycling in street clothes requires that you shift your thinking about why you are on your bike. Instead of being in workout mode, you are in going-somewhere-but-want-to-look-good mode: to work, on a date, to the coffee shop.

The thing I started noticing on Vélocouture was a positive feedback effect. It started inspiring cyclists to look sharp whenever and wherever they went by bike – connecting them more strongly to the idea that it is actually possible. Being on a bike isn’t always about a hot, sweaty, all-out ride. It’s often about a reasonably paced trip to run an errand or appointment.

There are a lot of great photos on the site. My favourites are the ones that feature a smartly dressed cyclist and a good-looking bike. For a long time I felt it was important that the pictured cyclist be wearing strictly normal street clothes – no cycling shoes or tights underneath shorts, for instance. But I’ve found that some people have managed to integrate cycling clothes into a genuinely fashion-forward ensemble that carries them well on the street, whether they are pedalling or not.

This is about more than photos though, or the internet. The Vélocouture group is evidence – an artifact – of something that is happening in the world.

And when cyclists use bikes for their intended original purpose – transport – and look like normal people while doing it, they inspire others to do the same.

Patrick Barber. Portland, Oregon, USA. When he is not bicycling someplace, raising chickens, or uploading to Flickr, Patrick runs a graphic-design studio with his partner Holly McGuire. www.mcguirebarber.com TTHHEE RRIIDE DE{ 11 {03

my ve h icle B y D a v e A n d e r s o n . Ph o t o g r a p h S i m o n B a r n e s

y bike is a vehicle.

It transports me both mentally and physically.

It acts as a social lubricant, a reason to go places and meet people. It is the totem of my tribe, the common denominator in the web of relationships and friendships of which I am a part.

My bike allows me to live life in glorious lo-tech 3D: a part of the life around me rather than an observer looking in. When I ride, I feel alive, I become a part of the landscape. I become aware of the weather through touch not sight. Sometimes it’s a brutal set of sensations: freezing hail biting at exposed flesh, headwinds that make progress painful. I do not need the TV to tell me it is cold outside when my face is numb.

I observe the passage of time from the saddle; note the subtle progression of seasonal change. My companions change as each year passes but the underlying geography and the contact with nature are my constants. I have come to recognise the precursors of each season and welcome the promised change. Lapwing and curlew herald the end of winter and promise dry trails to come. Swallows and swifts feeding high on the moor announce the end of summer. The browning off of Yorkshire fog is the clue I need to head to the woods to revel in leaf-covered singletrack accompanied by the heavy bouquet of decay.

Winter and I have become close friends. I make the most of the quiet trails, riding knowing that the added drag of soft ground will bring benefits to fitness and technique. I soak in the views opened up by clear cold air and leafless trees. I appreciate the fine line between skid and traction. I hope for snowfall, will it to happen even, while around me everyone awaits the ensuing traffic chaos with trepidation.

My bike brings me closer to the earth. It gives me the nearest thing to a religious experience that I, a committed atheist, will ever experience. The much-sought moment of nirvana – no wind – is one that any cyclist can appreciate. Mind blank, lost beyond thought, simply

pedalling. The moment the boundary between man and machine blurs. Not riding, not training, just being.

My bike has provided a reason to explore distant countries; a modern-day grand tour. Sampling and savouring the subtle differences of a familiar activity on foreign soil. My bike has allowed me to interact with the places I pass through. Not the isolation of the tour group or the flickering snapshot views through a car window. It provides the time to appreciate the countryside I ride in with no need for the quick fix of the snatched photo opportunity. I am instantly accessible and approachable, I see the everyday as well as the tourist fare.

My bike has provided a common language with which to make new friends during my travels. It has become a conduit to new experiences; a reason to take the path less travelled, to visit the back of beyond.

It has fed my love of mountains and taken me to the wild places I dream of when back at work. It has helped me to explore my locality until I have the same familiarity of it as I had of my childhood haunts.

I have become a part of something far bigger than my local scene. Being offered ground-level knowledge in foreign languages and repaying that by sharing my advice with visitors, like-minded two-wheeled devotees of a global tribe. I revel in the dispatches from far-flung corners as much as I feverishly explore a new local trail.

I have come to see the hints of green among the grey, my eyes attuned to the spaces where nature hangs on in cities. I can think in maps, and mentally link them together to provide an escape route from the drudgery of city life. A daydream to be realised in snatched moments. The juxtaposition of muddy bike and rider amid everyday life. Freedom in the wild that hides among the conformity, the consumerism and everything that fills me with a sense of despair.

My bike provides me with a means of transport, recreation, relaxation and of escape. My bike has allowed me to see the future. I do not fear the lack of a car. I am happy to travel under my own steam. I am independent and proud. My bike is a vehicle.

Dave Anderson. Oxenhope, UK. Rides bikes.

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ble s s e d

By Ti m Jackson.

or a young boy growing up in rural Alabama in the 1980s, cycling wasn’t considered a sport, let alone a sport worth dreaming about.

All my friends wanted to be pros in the holy trinity of baseball, basketball or football (use ‘ball’ as a suffix and they come flocking, don’t they?). But not me, I was different.

I dreamt of riding a bike in places I couldn’t pronounce; I wanted to ride over cobbles in the pouring rain; I cut out photos of exotic steel frames with names like Colnago, Guerciotti and Masi and plastered them across my bedroom walls. I think somewhere down the line I may have also wanted to be Italian.

I blame the 1979 film Breaking Away and its two main characters – Dave Stoller and the Masi Grand Criterium he rode. Although I didn’t see the film until 1982, for some reason it struck a chord with me. Cue leg-shaving, dreaming of faraway places and hanging out in bike shops.

My first bike-shop job (if you can call it that) was in 1982 at the local store. The owner hired me primarily to shut me up and put me to good use, since I was sitting in the store any time I wasn’t out riding. I sold a few bikes here and there too – even though I was only 12 years old, my passion for the sport was obvious.

Fast forward a few years and I was hopping in and out of shops, all the while still riding and racing… dreaming of becoming the next LeMond. Unfortunately it turned out that I didn’t have the lungs or the legs to make that dream a reality. I had my successes, but nothing that drew the attention of people who could help me move to the next level. And, truth be told, I always enjoyed riding more than training, which somehow always negatively impacted my results. As I got older, I left the bike industry a few times hoping to find a career that would interest me. The only problem is that the only thing that really ever makes my soul content is cycling.

In 1996, I made the leap from being a shop rat to working on the inside for a manufacturer in the industry. I had made it… I was now moving up the bike-industry food chain! After nearly five years, I moved on again and left the industry for a time, only to fall back in again: I returned to the womb that had nurtured me for so long.

Over the years of working in the industry I’ve made many friends and great connections. The bike industry has been called incestuous for many years, and for good reason – there’s something of a revolving door for those of us who are lifers. I’m a lifer, big time. There is no doubt that I love the cycling industry with a passion and have worked hard to stay in it. And now, with the help of friends, I’ve managed to find my perfect job.

To cut a long story short, two industry buddies of mine were working at Haro at the time it was looking to recruit a brand manager for the Masi range it was about to launch. Both knew what a total road nerd I am and recommended me for the job.

When I got the call to come in for the interview, I was practically hyperventilating; a chance to work for the brand I’d loved since childhood was the Holy Grail for me. The one glitch – just three days before the interview, while riding my bike, I was knocked off by a car in a hit-and-run and was less than pretty.

In fact, I was still limping, covered in scabs, and had difficulty talking due to my two busted lips. I wasn’t the picture of the ideal candidate. But even while the scars were forming, my passion shone through.

The first day of the job was fantastic – I had to fly to Las Vegas for the Interbike show. Just three weeks after being hit by a car, I was standing in a booth in Sin City representing the Masi brand in its early phases of rebirth.

I was in pain, but in heaven.

For more than three years now, I’ve been living the dream. I’m blessed… and I know it.

Tim Jackson. USA. Tim is brand manager of Masi Bicycles and a lifelong bike nerd with absolutely no hope of ever changing. www.masibikes.com TTH HEE RRIIDE DE { 15 {03

tour de fra nc e

By R a l f H端t t e r.

Gr aph ic Joh a n n Z a mbr y s k i . Phot o g r aph A SO

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{ L’enfer du Nord: Paris – Roubaix La Cote d’Azur et Saint Tropez Les Alpes et les Pyrennees Derniere etape Champs-Elysees Galibier et Tourmalet En danseuse jusqu’au sommet Pedaler en grand braquet Sprint final a l’arrivee Crevaison sur les paves Le velo vite repare Le peloton est regroupe Camarades et amitie # The hell of the north: Paris – Roubaix The Cote d’Azur and Saint Tropez The Alps and the Pyrennees Last stage Champs-Elysees Galibier and Tourmalet Dancing even on the top Bicycling at high gear Final sprint at the finish Flat tire on the paving stones The bicycle is repaired quickly The peloton is regrouped Comrades and friendship { Artwork and lyrics donated by Ralf Hütter. Germany.

Ralf is a founding member of Kraftwerk and an avid fan of the bicycle. www.kraftwerk.com

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m e eti ng gary B y C h a r l i e K e l l y. Ph o t o g r a p h G a r y F i s h e r

t may well have been inevitable that Gary Fisher and I would run into each other. There just weren’t that many hippie bike freaks attached to rock bands, and Marin County is not that big a place. Whether or not the history of cycling hinged on that meeting, my personal story certainly did.

I went out briefly with a ‘DeadHead’ girl named Rose.

We weren’t really made for each other, but before we parted company, she mentioned a kid she knew who hung out with the Grateful Dead. She knew him as Spider and said he was so much like me – a long-haired bike fanatic – that we were sure to be friends if we ever met.

One spring day in 1971, I was riding along and saw two guys. One was all arms and legs, with hair down to here and riding a nice bike. His companion was a little guy with equally long hair and an even nicer all-Campy bike.

One had to be Spider. So I rode up and asked if he was.

The answer was complicated, but what came out of it was that his name was actually Gary.

Gary introduced his friend as Marmaduke but said that his real name was John Dawson. He told me that Marmaduke had just recorded an album with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, and they were on their way to the Grateful Dead office to look at potential cover art.

Fifteen minutes after the chance meeting, Gary and I were seated at a table in the Grateful Dead office, looking at photos and drawings along with two members of Marmaduke’s band, the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

The unreleased record was on the turntable, and it sounded pretty good. In fact, it turned out to be a minor hit. The two band members asked Gary and I for our thoughts on the artwork in front of us, as though our

opinions mattered to them. When the album was released a month or so later, we saw that the cover art was chosen from the pile we had looked at, and that the images we had selected as our favourites were actually used. I hesitate to say that the two hippie bike riders, strangers to each other and unconnected to the band, had chosen the cover art, but it sure looked that way.

The New Riders of the Purple Sage went on the road, and Marmaduke let Gary watch his house, which was right on the main bike route. I got into the habit of stopping by when I passed, to round up Gary for rides.

A couple of months after meeting Gary, I bought some furniture at a flea market for my rental cottage. I was looking for a way to get it home, and I ran into Gary, who had a truck. We loaded my goods and he promised to bring them by, but I didn’t see him for a week. Just when I figured he had ripped me off, he finally showed up.

As he helped me bring in my stuff, he looked around and asked who shared the place. His timing was good, because my roommate had just left, and Gary moved right in, bringing his bike collection with him, which included a pile of old ‘ballooner’ frames.

At first, the idea was that we were going to make a couple of one-speed, balloon-tyre town bikes, so we wouldn’t have to run errands on Italian racing bikes.

Then we took our town bikes on a local trail, and things got out of hand.

Seven years later, Gary and I opened a little shop in a rented garage a block from that cottage. In that shop we assembled our new kind of bike, which didn’t have a name yet, so people started using our business name to describe them, and the name stuck.

We called our little shop MountainBikes.

Charlie Kelly. Marin County, USA. Charlie organised the Repack Downhills, starting in 1976. It has been downhill for him ever since. www.sonic.net/~ckelly/Seekay T H E R I DE

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why I ride B y A l e x L e i g h . Ph o t o g r a p h S t e w a r t P r a t t

y wife and I have an agreement; she doesn’t lament my continuing absence from all aspects of child-rearing and I don’t wince when the credit-card statements drop heavily onto the mat.

In essence, I ride and she shops. And for each of us, our chosen passion is the antithesis of the other – for me, major root-canal surgery edges it when offered up against, say, five minutes in a shoe shop. And that’s without anaesthetic.

So, one day, to be posed with the question: “What’s the best part of the ride then?” rather threw me. It’s akin to me asking the difference between court shoes and moon boots while actually caring about the answer. Stunned into silence, I blew my chance to justify why riding round in a circle on ludicrously expensive bits of metal is such a fantastic way to spend my time.

But it got me thinking, and I’ve realised it’s a little more complex than it may first appear. Of course we all love the adrenaline rush, that goes without saying, but there are other more complex reasons as well.

Anticipation: A real candidate this, especially if marinated in alcohol the previous evening. Tomorrow’s potential experience will play like a slide show in your mind: the weather, the bravery, the poise, the balance and the technique all coming together to deliver the perfect ride. Empirical and historical evidence never gets a look-in of course; just because you have been rubbish for the last year has absolutely no bearing on how fantastic you will be tomorrow.

Preparation: Related to the above, the oft-forgotten pleasure of a mechanical once-over on your favoured steed, while not strictly necessary, offers a placebo for your head and reassures you that everything will be OK. Climbing: This, like calculus, is something only to be enjoyed by those seriously starved of entertainment. And yet, there is something secretly pleasurable about going up – straining every sinew for power and testing every technique for traction and maybe, maybe, this time,

cleaning that section that until today has seen you lose face or, more likely, land on your face.

Freedom: Or more accurately, freedom from responsibility. Or more accurately still – it’s probably nothing more than like-minded riders abandoning restrictive social convention and that feeling that you’ve found a sport that keeps you fit, makes you laugh, scares you silly sometimes, and has nothing whatsoever to do with golf clubs.

Crashing: Parting company with the bike and plunging head first into the flora is like being beaten up in the park after school. Except you are cheered like a conquering hero whether you escape unscathed or eat your next six meals through a straw.

Warming down: By which I don’t mean a quick spin on the turbo trainer – I mean sitting in the pub spinning yarns. Food tastes better, the grass is greener and the sun shines brighter as you park yourself, knackered but worthy, regarding those less fortunate than you with their beer guts, miserable-looking spouses and fractious kids. Even their dogs look unhappy. Not for you the absurd, middle-class, suburban world they inhabit – oh no, you’re a mountain biker (until you have to go home to the miserable spouse, fractious kids, etc).

Cleansing and toning: Even cleaning the bike has a certain satisfaction, apparently. I derive very little pleasure from this aspect of it, but there are friends of mine who truly believe the path of the righteous man is littered with sponges, polish and some bizarrely shaped brushes, the use of which will remain a mystery to me.

And then there are the rest of us who see this for what it really is – the rantings of delusional madmen. Although I’ll grudgingly admit that a clean bike is a happy bike.

Of course the reality is that there’s no definitive list that describes what biking means to me. It is, as the old adverts used to say, more than the sum of its parts.

Short of naked female mud-wrestling, I’m struggling to think of any outdoor experience getting close.

Alex Leigh. Chiltern Hills, UK. Rides lots, talks more.

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w h e e l of m i s fortune B y Pe t e r Mo s ko s . I l l u s t r a t i o n b y M a r k L a z e n b y.

y bike died yesterday.

Or maybe not.

A few days ago I noticed a creaking sound when I pedalled, but it wasn’t coming from the pedals.

It seemed to be caused by some motion when I was on the saddle, so I assumed the seat post had become dry and crusty – that makes bikes creak. So when I got home, I relubed the post. I also took apart and reassembled the bottom bracket cartridge, just for good measure.

But riding to work yesterday, the creaking sound was still there, perhaps even worse. At Lex and 60th, I stopped at a red light and examined the frame. There, like a chasm in front of me, I saw a crack. The ragged line girdled the bottom lug of the downtube on my beloved Bianchi Alfana.

I carried on to work but decided it would be stupid to ride home. I caught the N Train at 57th and 7th and took the subway back to Astoria. I went to the last car because it’s normally the emptiest. In the back, I stared at my frame, feeling melancholy. Here I was, with my beloved bike, knowing I may never ride it again.

I had half an hour to ponder. I’d never had a bike die of use and old age before. I was sad, but not angry. What if the bike had been stolen one day earlier? Then I’d have been pissed off. But really, what’s the difference? Either way, the bike had been taken from me.

Maybe it can be fixed – after all, it’s only steel. Tomorrow I’ll take it to my man at the Bicycle Repairman Corp and see what he says.

With boats, they say the only defining characteristic is the line: from profile, the curve on the top of the hull.

Everything else can be fixed, welded, repaired and replaced. But you can never change the line.

The frame is the line of the bike. Everything else can be replaced, mended, modified or changed. The frame is the bike. This frame has been with me for 12 years, through bumps and speed and curbs, plus a few spills.

I’m a heavy guy who rides a skinny-tired road bike to

commute to work in New York City. Maybe the bike is just the victim of my return commute on 58th Street, one of the worst in Manhattan. It’s one I often take because, well, it’s not 57th or 59th Streets. Or maybe the crack started back in 2005 when I wiped out on the Triborough Bridge.

The frame crack is natural in a way. Organic. A fatal flaw, but also just a wrinkle of old age. It’s hard to be angry, the bike has been good to me, probably better than I’ve been to it. That’s the beauty of bikes: a bike is there for you no matter what, like a loyal dog. But I’m allergic to dogs; all I’ve got is bikes.

Do I want a new bike? No. But I still can’t help but think maybe things could be better. I mean, my shifters don’t really work well any more in temperatures under 40ºF; the chain ring is no longer perfectly true; 650B wheels would let me put full fenders on the wheels...

But these are bad thoughts I don’t want to think – it feels somehow unfaithful.

Along with the real loss, what is so horrible is the anticipation of dealing with the life afterwards.

Shock replaced with feelings of loneliness, soldiering on, the future, and replacement.

Guilt is a factor when one contemplates loss that hasn’t even happened. After any great loss, life will almost assuredly be filled with joy eventually.

Thinking of that too early seems to trivialise things.

A couple of years ago I had to deal with the idea that my wife might die. The thought crossed my mind. To cut a long story very short, she didn’t.

My wife, hell, any person is more important than a bike. I don’t like personifying machines. You can’t buy love. But I can buy a new bike because I live a rich life in a rich country.

Yet the feelings I have for the loss of my beloved bicycle remind me of the sadness of human loss. It doesn’t even come close in terms of magnitude or degree, of course, but in spirit, in the nature of loss, sadness cares not for the source.

My bike is dead. I love my bike. I am sad.

Peter Moskos. NYC, USA. Peter rides a bike in New York because it’s fun, really. www.astoriabike.com / www.marklazenby.co.uk T H E R I DE

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THE Lower east ride Phot o g r aphy by B e nj a m i n T Ja ro s h

“My bicycle showed me another way to express myself.”

Husani, NYC, 2008

“My brothers got me into it.

I really didn’t want to ride at first but my oldest brother passed away and riding got my mind off things at the time. My other two brothers pushed me into riding more and it became an everyday thing so I stuck with it. Now things are good, riding is a big part of my life and I wouldn’t give it up for anything.”

“We stayed up late into the night building ramps before the Animal Jam. Muffin Man and a few others slept on benches so they could be the first ones to hit them in the morning.”

Benjamin T Jarosch, NYC, 2007

John, NYC, 2008

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“I don’t exactly live in the best neighbourhood. Most of the people who stay in this environment end up becoming drug dealers or dead.

My parents love me, but they don’t approve of me riding a kid’s bike, because I’m constantly coming home covered in blood. Every single person who comes up to me, from the girls who say, ‘Wow, that’s cool’, to the ghetto kids who say, ‘Wow, do that again before I jack your shit’, inspires me. If it weren’t for my friends, most likely I would not be doing what I do. It’s simple, really, I just love to ride.”

Alexandros, NYC, 2008 Benjamin Jarosch. Queens, NY, USA. Portrait and reportage photographer.

Bjarosch@nyu.edu T H E R I DE

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DAW N B y Do m i n i c Pe r r y

allowing in a drowsy slumber, I’m suddenly shocked from sleep by a plaintive cry from the next room.

Jerked awake, heart racing, I peer blearily at my watch: 5.58am.

Two minutes before the alarm was due.

I drag myself away from the magnetic pull of the duvet and hurry into Felix’s room to do the dutiful father routine. With bottle plugged securely into child I sit in the cosy darkness of his room and wait for him to drift back into milk-filled sleep. I stay like this for a while before depositing him back in his cot.

After the slow, careful movements of moments before suddenly it’s action stations as I fight my way into my kit and out of the house. I’m out the door and into the garage, dragging the singlespeed out. I head off into the first hints of dawn light, crunching through the frosty grass of the green, just as the church chimes seven.

I go up the Rookery climb, my legs feeling pretty ropey thanks to a hard ride home last night and the fact that I’m not warmed up yet. A momentary lapse of concentration near one of the top steps means I fail to clear the climb – never a good start. Nonetheless I carry on along Wolverns Lane, lungs and legs trailing some way behind.

As I sweep through the carpet of leaves, rabbits burst into the bushes on helter-skelter courses as I pass, and deer, the first of the morning, spring in white-rumped bounds though the trees.

The frost is deeper here – the mud is frozen into corrugations that my tyre scrunches over and the puddles have a coating of crackly ice.

At the top of the trail, I pause and silence descends.

As I stand there, my breath curling away into the morning like golden smoke, I realise silence is such a misleading word to use in this landscape: every bush rustles with foraging birds, squirrels scramble up and down tree trunks and from the distance comes the mournful sound of a train horn. I punctuate this with two spring-loaded clacks as I clip back into the pedals and groan my way up the last of the trail. Bushes whip painfully at my legs and arms, and more agonisingly, my cold ears. It’s been like this all morning – I think 04

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nature might be picking on me because of my invasion.

Soon I’m climbing a wide, rocky track up to the cricket pitch and here I stop again, this time to use the camera – wooden fingers fumbling with the buttons as I attempt to photograph some frost-whitened roots that, to me, resemble ribs sticking out of the ground.

I’m not sure the pictures capture what I see, but they’ll do and I feel better for having tried – there’s nothing more frustrating than going for a ride with an SLR in your pack only to ignore everything because you feel that it would ruin the flow.

This attitude pays dividends 30 seconds later as I come into the open and the Sussex Weald is spread before me illuminated by the rising sun, just emerging above a cloud. It’s breathtakingly lovely – mist hides in the hollows across the flat vastness in front of me, strangely purple in the morning light. I happily snap away for ten minutes before glancing at my watch and realising that time is pressing and I’ve not done any riding yet.

From here I belt up the final bit of the climb to the tower and manage to clean it, much to my surprise.

Another photo stop, this time hampered by a bonechilling wind that reduces my hands to immobile stumps, and I’m off again, down a host of favourite trails that I haven’t ridden for months. I even do the cheekiest of cheeky trails and it’s still great – flicks, roots, corners that beg to be carved and a covering of russet autumn leaves. Perfect.

Approaching the end of Waggle Dance, still an ace trail that I don’t do enough, I get an extra morning treat as a tawny owl swoops through the trees in front of me, perches itself on a nearby branch just long enough for me to contemplate getting the camera out, before it glides off silently again, out of the way of prying eyes.

More photo stops, more sleep-fuddled incompetence and more deer are the themes on the final leg back to the house: I just have the fleeting, flat-out pleasure that is Dog Shit Woods before I’m back in the village.

I creep through the door to be greeted by a still silent house. I put the monitor to my ear and listen for a few moments to my son snuffling through his dreams.

Then I sit down on the sofa, cup of tea in hand, and wait for the rest of the house to wake up.

Frankly, they’re missing the best part of the day.

Dominic Perry. Surrey, UK. Juggles bikes, family and work, and tries not to drop any of them.

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Caught s hort B y A n j a Mc D o n a l d . I l l u s t r a t i o n D e a n Ta y l o r

hen I came to the UK I only brought three pairs of shorts with me: one fairly worn pair, bordering on transparent, from my local shop back home, and two pairs of New Zealand team shorts – black, with the silver fern down the left leg and the name of my country down the right. They’ve certainly proved to be a conversation starter out on the trails and have probably contributed to the loss of my anonymity within Scottish mountain biking circles. When I wear those shorts, I can’t pretend I’m averse to racing.

It’s true; I came to the other side of the world to get a taste of cross-country competition at international level. I’ve had my eyes opened to the life of a top athlete and all that goes with it – the obsessive attention to detail, commitment and determination. So, I was quite taken aback the other week when, after finishing a local race and chatting with one of the organisers, he made a passing comment regarding my presence at the event. “It’s not every day we have a world-class athlete turn up at our race,” he said.

I had to think to myself – at what point did I become world-class? Unfortunately it was the shorts doing my talking for me – without my realising it, they’d propelled me to the level of Gunn Rita Dahle and Julian Absalon.

I suddenly, albeit momentarily, felt distinctly conspicuous in my otherwise stealthy black shorts.

Why was I feeling like a fraud all of a sudden?

My travels have taken me to some amazing places to ride. But most memorably, I’ve been lucky enough to ride with some fantastic people. People who always have some kind of story to tell, who have had an unfathomably long love affair with mountain biking, people who have managed to mould their entire lives around bikes or

biking in one form or another. These people are rare, but all of us will know of at least one such person.

And the thing is, you can recognise them without the aid of a pair of shorts to point them out.

In my book, these are the people that are worldclass – just by being around them you can feel their deep and abiding love for life on two wheels.

I’ve spent some time lately with a few of these people and I’ve actually had an epiphany with regards to what I want to do and where I want to go with racing and riding bikes in general.

Since I left New Zealand, I’ve begun to question my monogamous relationship with 27 gears and lightweight groupsets. I’ve witnessed the simplicity of one-geared bikes, the cult of the fixie, over-sized or odd-sized wheels, road bikes for riding off-road, titanium, scandium, steel, vintage and custom-made.

My horizons have been extended in all directions by these people’s enthusiasm and willingness to dole out their passion for bikes in unending quantities.

I guess what has happened is that although I’ve had a taste of the sharp end of elite cross-country racing, and taken it all relatively seriously, I still don’t feel like I fall into that world-class bracket. I’m just another keen cyclist – one who picks a full complement of gears and feathery light bits over heftier builds and fewer speeds. But, all the same, I share the love as much as the next person.

So, I’ve decided that the next thing I’m going to purchase will be a pair of sensible plain shorts; something a little more anonymous that will let my status – world-class or otherwise – slip back into ambiguity. But it will mean, without my nationality emblazoned down one leg, that I’ll once again be back to answering that same old, inevitable question: “So, whereabouts in Australia are you from?”

Anja McDonald. Glasgow, UK. Anja loves to ride with world-class friends and happens to race for her country too.

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PANT S

B y R i c h a r d R i s e m b e r g. Ph o t o g r a p h R o g e r S t i l l m a n

he universe is a perverse entity, with a wicked sense of humour. Otherwise I don’t see how a fellow like me, with a distaste for marketing and not much interest in buying stuff for himself, should have found himself in possession of several hundred pairs of wool pants, or trousers or breeches as you Brits call them, which I am proceeding to sell to innocent cyclists worldwide.

There are but two saving graces to the situation: I designed the pants myself, and also had them made; and they are intended to facilitate bicycle commuting for folks who haven’t the inclination to wear skintight Lycra or faded jeans, but would just like to look nice when they’re out on the bike, and not get their trousers caught in the chain.

Well, of course, there’s more to it than that.

I’ve been a cycle commuter on and off, but mostly on, for more than 40 years. I rode an awful old three-speed my father had picked up at Sears until my high-school years, then proceeded to obtain a series of Peugeot road bikes. I didn’t particularly want to buy a series of them, but they were popular enough that they kept getting nicked; after the third one vanished, I gave up for a while and took the bus.

Over the following years I dallied with motorbikes, until the final one broke down once too often; I bought another cheap 10-speed, until that was stolen from work; I briefly toyed with driving a car and only riding to places where I knew I could safely leave my valuable bike.

Years later, when bike security had improved sufficiently, I began riding for transportation again.

The more I rode, the more I liked it, and the less I could tolerate cars. Also, in the intervening period I had lived in Paris for a while, and come to learn the joys of a pedestrian-friendly city. With that came an understanding that car addiction was turning America’s cities and towns into monuments of banality, frustration and inefficiency. I began to think about and study the urban form, and to understand the part the bicycle could play in reversing that trend.

This slowly drew me into the world of pressure groups and then into publishing – in the loosest possible sense – a bike advocacy magazine. With the advent of the internet this morphed into a website and I began handling articles from other people. Slowly this changed from just being about cycling to encompass the whole subject of urban regeneration.

All this time I was working in the camera retail business, first as a counter monkey, then as webmaster and general online marketeer. But I began to despair over the obstructions that store owners generally put in the way of me helping photo-equipment buyers. Even though I was generally the top salesman in any store where I worked, it was not good enough if I didn’t screw the clientele. I began to look for a way I could make an honest living on my own.

As well as the publishing, I was becoming irritated with the apparent necessity of wearing special and rather peculiar clothes simply to ride to work or to the local grocery store.

So, after a considerable amount of prodding from my wife, Gina, I decided to try my hand at designing clothes that bicycle commuters could use for journeys in the bigger world, where parading around with your genitals outlined in skintight plastic might cause a bit of discomfort, if not for yourself, then perhaps for the rest of the general population.

I ride my bike every day, and I ride everywhere I go, so each of our products gets a good road test from me and my dear Bottecchia fixed-wheel commuter. And, small though our operation is, we are making just enough profit that I have been able to devote myself full-time to the business, and to improving and expanding the editorial content of my online publications – Bicycle Fixation and The New Colonist – all the while providing well-made, elegant clothing that makes it easier for people to ride their bikes for transport in the everyday world.

We need not wait for the powers-that-be to change our cities for the better; we can initiate change ourselves – or at least change our trousers.

Richard Risemberg. Los Angeles, USA. Has been commuting by bicycle for more than 40 years, and has a special place in his heart for fixed-gear commuter bikes. www.bicyclefixation.com T H E R I DE

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the bicycle roc kers Phot o g r aphy by H a r u k i ‘ H a ro ok z’ No g uc h i

Steve Romaniuk, hip table, Oregon Coast, USA.

“This is one of the gnarliest street lines I’ve ever seen attempted. T-Sage was the first rider ever to tee it up. After his crash, three top-level BMXers gave it a go, but also failed.”

Taylor Sage, California, USA.

Ben Boyko, Corkscrew line: curved wall to table drop, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Opposite: Kyle Strait, ditch hip tuck, California, USA. Haruki ‘Harookz’ Noguchi.

Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Photographer, rider, surfer, T H E R I DE { 03 boarder. www.harookz.com

Bac k to Bas ic s B y R o w l e y H a v e r l y. Ph o t o g r a p h M a r i e H a v e r l y

ometimes you need your prejudices ground into the dirt in order to open your eyes to what you’ve been missing.

I only realised this recently when a new face joined us on our ride last weekend and my initial feeling was one of disappointment.

It wasn’t from the change in ride dynamic, or a fear of the unknown, but the root of it was my prejudices speaking loud and clear: my dismay was caused by his bike and kit.

Surely he couldn’t be any good on a 15-year-old Ridgeback and a weird combination of ski and gym wear?

Inevitably, it turned out I was wrong; the guy could ride. Oddly, it was the most enjoyable outing I’ve had for a long time.

A few days later I re-watched Billy Savage’s homage to the birth of mountain biking, Klunkerz, and it confirmed to me what I have suspected for some time about my relationship with this chosen hobby of mine.

The pioneers in the film talk of a golden era where riding out with your friends in the hills on a bike only just up for the job, supping a couple of cold ones and shooting the breeze were all the ingredients needed for a perfect day out. Those sentiments rang true with me as well – that’s how I remember my fledgling days off-road.

My dad originally planted the seed back in 1989.

“Have you read about those guys who rode across the Alps on a couple of bikes?” he asked one day. My reply was dismissive, my thinking being that they were just big BMX bikes with gears and therefore just a shortlived fad (already that prejudice was kicking in). Dad wasn’t convinced by my argument and soon a new Marin Pine Mountain arrived. I had to admit, particularly stacked up against my dowdy Peugeot racer, it looked the very essence of cool.

One night I borrowed it: veering off the road to ride on the grass verges at speed in the light of the moon was a thrilling revelation. I had to have one of my own.

Luckily, my 21st was looming and I was fortunate enough

to receive a Marin of my own. It was instant love. It was perfect: from the Teflon paint on its frame, to its neon lime forks and bars, to the tiny Stars and Stripes sticker on the top tube, I loved every inch. The fact that it came from a company based in mountain biking’s heartland sealed the deal for me.

My bike and I became inseparable and I rode at every opportunity. Such was my enthusiasm that I managed to convince friends to take the leap of faith and buy bikes of their own. Every chance we got, we were out playing – it was like a second childhood, but one where we could drink beer and stay out as late as we liked. Our main area of exploration was the New Forest. This was before the restrictions on access had any effect on where we went, so we were free to dart off down any vague path we fancied, crossing streams, jumping ditches – where one dared to go, the others would blindly follow.

During this whole period we were poorly equipped; Converse trainers and cut-off jeans were de rigueur in the summer and Dr Martens boots and bandanas tied over our heads and ears were the required clothing when it got cold enough for water to freeze in our bidons. To us, it didn’t matter what we wore or what we looked like – we were out doing what we loved.

We felt as if we were trailblazers, like the guys a decade earlier on the other side of the Pond.

So how and why did it all change? Why, when we were so happy making do, did we become so kit-obsessed?

I now have a garage full of bikes that, if I was honest, I can’t afford to own, and clothing for every conceivable weather condition, but have a lifestyle that gives me less time to use any of it. But having the latest piece of kit isn’t going to make the world a better place.

Now I think back to those days when we went out with bikes that didn’t quite work and clothes that were not so much functional as makeshift, and wonder if we haven’t lost something along the way.

I need to strip it all back to basics and recapture the glorious days of innocence when being outside doing what I loved was all that mattered.

Sometimes less is more.

R o wl e y Ha v e r l y. So u t h a m p t o n , U K . Tw o w h e e l s g o o d .

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t h e h i g h way cycle group B y D a v i d E v a n s . Ph o t o g r a p h s H M E v a n s a n d D G E v a n s

he Highway Cycle Group pedalled gently into existence almost as soon as my mother, post-separation, had given my father’s decrepit 1960s sit-up-and-beg roadster to a passimg rag-and-bone man. Many of his other possessions had met a similar fate over the years, garnering no reaction from my father, but the death of the useless roadster was the excuse he needed to get himself a new bike. In the mid-1980s, it was drop handlebars or nothing and the brilliant-white, 10-speed tourer he bought rapidly became his pride and joy.

My own steed was a black, heavy, five-speed ‘racer’ bought from a secondhand shop in Devizes after my father had bamboozled the assistant into parting with it for a third of the asking price. I cannot recall the maker’s name, but the word Elite was displayed optimistically on the frame. With its nylon panniers, nasty red-rubber bar tape, kickstand and white plastic pump, it lacked the grace of my father’s ride, but I loved it greatly.

Soon we started striking out on regular rides with family and friends from his house in the tiny North Wiltshire hamlet of Highway: down the long straight track of Highway Common, over the junction at the Bushton Road, perhaps picking up more riders from nearby Hilmarton or Spirthill, so that a ride might start with two people, and end with seven or eight. If there was no pub stop there would be sandwiches in the panniers, or a stocking up at the Spar in Broad Hinton. Sometimes we would ride only three miles, sometimes 30 or more.

The roads were quiet and convoluted, weaving over the chalky landscape – five miles as the crow flies could be drawn out to 12 by the meandering lanes and switchback turns. The hills we attempted defined many of the rides: Charlcutt Hill, Snow Hill, walking up the steep monstrosity at Broad Town, the slow winding climb up to Bradenstoke… and then the exhilaration of hurtling down to Witcomb Mill, squinting into the rushing air, grabbing handfuls of brake, or even dragging feet along the road when the suicide levers couldn’t cope with the descent.

Gradually things became more organised. An official shirt was adopted; blue and white stripes edged with

green, bought in bulk from C&A in Swindon. A set of badges appeared, handmade by my father at a school fête.

Ultimately, we started cycling abroad. Glorious holidays riding through France, Holland and Belgium, a baguette always slung across the rear rack of my father’s bike.

There is one ride I remember well, not long before he left Highway; I rode the three miles from Hilmarton to meet him, and we headed out for the Marlborough Downs. The insistent whirr of the chains powering the hubs mingled with the continuous drone from the propellers of the planes flying out of RAF Lyneham.

Going up the awful hill at Clyffe Pypard, we were out of the saddle, weaving over the road in an effort not to stall.

At the top I felt lightheaded, and my father, riding next to me, handed over his water bottle. The roads were almost empty as we headed up towards The Ridgeway. As we reached the intersection with the Marlborough road, we were at the highest point for miles, and there seemed to be nothing in front but startling blue sky. Wordlessly we turned the cranks, pulling the horizon towards us.

My father’s move to Swindon effectively called a halt to the regular rides. His bike remained in his shed and in 1994 he became very ill with prostate cancer, dying at home in 1995 not long after his 50th birthday. It was more than 10 years before his wife Helen extracted the now rusted, white, 10-speed from the shed and took it sadly on its final journey to the recycling centre.

Now, I find it nearly impossible to remember whole rides with The Highway Cycle Group, but occasionally, when I am out on my bike, a memory will rush forward, triggered by a feeling or a sound: passing alongside train tracks, the chirping of crickets, the ticking freewheel of a bike left on its side on a grass verge or the call of a buzzard circling ahead. A time when I had no concern about clipless pedals, average speeds, sports drinks, Lycra, carbon fibre or fitness. When it was enough just to ride.

I still enjoy group outings, pootling down country lanes in good company, exploring the verge while someone checks the map or fixes a flat. But sometimes, all I want is to ride on my own, with just the cadence, the drone of the chain, and the feeling that there might be someone else riding next to me, matching my pace, ready to hand me his water bottle when I feel lightheaded.

David Evans. Rode, Somerset, UK. Will ride anything – from shoppers to choppers. www.highwaycyclinggroup.wordpress.com

here’s mud in your eYE

By M ichael Leon

t’s 9am. Standing to my left at the start line is a mum on an old Stumpjumper, dressed in cut-off jeans and a T-shirt. Directly in front of me is a 280-pound guy dressed like a bicycle cop. I glance down at my clothes, wondering if I look like an asshole for wearing actual cycling gear. I console myself by trying to look serious.

I had never raced a bicycle before: long, slow road rides through the Portland hills were the pinnacle of my training for a race that’s 45 minutes at maximum heart rate, jumping logs whilst carrying a bike. Racing is not something I would have considered – that is until I heard about cyclocross.

The overall race vibe is more like a backyard BBQ than an athletic challenge. It’s cool to fixed-gear types, it’s cool to road jerks, and chicks dig it. So I spent the summer collecting parts on eBay, salvaging miscellaneous stuff at Portland bike shops and utilising whatever bits dropped off my road bike in favour of some new carbon component.

The starting horn sounds... ‘Mum’ immediately cuts me up and disappears towards the front. I’m stuck behind the cop and I can see a steep hill coming up.

At this point I’ve not yet crossed the start line and I have to dismount and run with my bike up the hill.

I watch most of the field disappear into the woods as I jump back on my bike, slip off my pedal and bang my shin. Whatever, I’m focused... click... go.

Back on, I dart through a gravel section and make a quick right onto narrow singletrack. This takes me down a hill where the path opens out into a field full of spectators. I can see that I’m not doing so well and I’m fresh enough to make up the time, so I gun it just as the magic ‘people are watching me’ burst of adrenaline kicks in and my ears are filled with the sound of cheering wives and cowbells.

These four seconds are the highlight of the race.

I hit the grassy field and then experience something I was completely unprepared for – extremely jarring

bumps. These are so bad that I can barely hold onto the handlebars. I continue as fast as possible, more concerned with getting past the crowd than the bumps themselves. But unfortunately the crowd is getting bigger as I struggle on, and as my front wheel slips out from under me I understand why – mud.

Having never raced cyclocross before, I am rather surprised by my natural reaction, which is to try not to get dirty. But mud is the fun part, right? Well now I have no choice – I am on the ground. And once the bar tape that you wrapped the night before gets muddy, you soon stop worrying about the bike. At least it isn’t white – that would’ve been more even embarrassing than the new kit that I’m wearing.

The ‘people are watching me’ juices kick in again: I jump up, run through and get back on. A green flash blows past me and I’m surprised to see another guy in cycling gear. Then it dawns on me – I’ve just been lapped.

No time to think about how pathetic that is, so I push harder. Here comes the second big hill. A row of people running up it with bikes on their backs tells me I will have to do the same. I clip off, put my bike over my shoulder, start running up the hill, stop and think about throwing up.

I use every bit of focus I have left on my throat muscles to prevent myself from puking. I’m not doing well, but that would have been so humiliating that I might have just left my bike there and walked home.

So I pick up my machine again, walk up the hill and roll through the forest for the time remaining, managing four laps in all.

Surprisingly, when I give up any hope of doing well, it’s actually pretty fun. I meet other competitors who, to my amazement, had started the race without any pretence that they would smoke the competition and jump up two classes by next week. They had begun with the same mindset I have inadvertently stumbled into. This is the new perspective I need, and I readily adopt it.

That is until next week, when I plan to learn from my mistakes, show up on my muddy (experienced) bike, and qualify for the C class.

Michael Leon. Portland, Oregon, USA. Wear-testing raincoats. www.nikeskateboarding.com T H E R I DE

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st eve ’s ce l la r Phot o g r aphy by S t eve M a k i n

Door Lock My bike cellar is my place, only I go down there. It’s my version of the potting shed, except there’s no illicit sherry stash, just GT85. The granny ring lock is simple and effective and has given another life to a piece of worn-out kit.

Salsa Bell from Mikey We went to California to ride bikes; we heard bears, we bought bells. Mikey broke mine and replaced it with a Salsa special. When I ring it, that simple stupid noise makes me smile and remember that week.

Singlespeeding We’ve all got a huge collection of chainrings and sprockets suitable for every occasion. Riding in Scotland?

You’ll be needing a 32 x 18 combo. Thetford ? That’ll be a 34 x 16. Come on, we all do it, don’t we?

Delamere Mud My favourite bike is broken – there’s a crack in the weld around the bottom bracket and sooner or later it will fail. Until that happens, though, I decided that I would still use it, but only in a specific place.

Delamere was where I first cut my off-road teeth

20 years ago; it’s flat and muddy, it’s got some of the twistiest singletrack (once you know where to go) and it’s just perfect for night rides. The mud you see here is from the final night ride of last year, our annual Sideways Cycles/Shak Xmas ride.

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Turbo CHARGED Admit it, we all have them, don’t we? I mean a turbo trainer that gets used once or twice a year. Whoever would have thought that sitting on a bike sweating your bollocks off going nowhere was a good idea?

CONFESSION The real truth is that I just like fiddling around with bikes, fixing them, changing components, swapping forks – hell, I even like mending tubes. It’s what I do and have done ever since my first job in a bike shop when I was 12 years old.

You can never have too many forks That’s no lie. I regularly swap between them – suspension for when the trails are rock hard, rigid for the soft winter ground. Whichever I’m riding, I’ll think they’re the best, only to switch and be like, “Oh no – these are the future!”

A tool for EVERY occasion I believe in using the right tool for the right job, unless of course it’s eight o’clock on a Saturday night and all the shops are shut. At that point, I know from bitter experience that I should just use another bike.

Steve Makin. Cheshire, UK. Bike-addicted since birth, he keeps on turning circles and doesn’t expect to stop anytime soon.

critical m E s s B y M i k a e l C o l v i l l e -A n d e r s e n

P r o p o s e d D e s i g n F o r Po c ke t Tu b e M a p C o v e r B y Je r e m y D e l l e r

y all accounts, we are gently rolling into the new age of urban cycling. Bike-sharing initiatives abound across Europe and American cities are slowly but surely investing in infrastructure and urban planning.

However, there is still a slight incline and a stiff headwind before urbanites across the globe can enjoy a lifestyle as good as in those shining examples of bike culture, Copenhagen and Amsterdam, but it is coming.

It’s time to get more bums on saddles. So how do we elevate urban cycling from being the preserve of geeks and weirdos – as outsiders see us – into something that is considered normal? How do we go about winning over hearts and minds?

Much has been said and written about Critical Mass.

It’s a brilliant concept: democratic to the core and reminiscent of how most bike clubs in the early 20th century were founded – on socialist or communist principles. I fear, however, that Critical Mass is, as the saying goes, ‘sooo last century’.

The reason I don’t think that Critical Mass, and other movements like it, are effective anymore is that they are not out to win hearts and minds. They want to take back the streets for themselves, but not for Joe Everyman.

A confrontational and anarchic approach serves little purpose in convincing motorists – potential cyclists – that cycling is for everyone and that it is enjoyable. An arrogance that is usually reserved for right-wing fundamentalists is counter-productive.

In my eyes, the participants rarely look happy, and it’s bloody difficult not to look happy on a bike.

There is a more effective way to move steadily towards a culture that can be enjoyed by everyone. It’s something I call, somewhat revolutionarily, ‘riding your bike’. A normal bike. Wearing normal clothes. Just like the way that hundreds of thousands of people in Europe – from Ferrara, Italy in the south to Trondheim, Norway in the north – do. Will it work? Indeed it will.

Enter Joe Everyman. An unlikely superhero if ever there was one.

Joe is an average citizen in a car-based society, driving to work each day. Like the vast majority of the population, he is not an environmental activist and

he never, ever will be. The only thing that is likely to force him out of his car is the increasing price of fuel.

What does Joe think when he sees a hardcore cyclist on a specialist bike or a fixie speed past his car? He might well think, “Hmm, I could ride my bike to work too...” It’s unlikely, however, he’ll see himself reflected in the image of the cyclist. What he’ll probably see is a member of an often militant sub-culture, wearing different clothes to anything he would wear and riding a bike so far removed from any that Joe has ever owned.

Joe will believe that riding his bike would mean infiltrating an elitist subculture, investing a lot of money in specialist gear, streamlined clothes and a fancy bike. Worst of all, Joe would find himself making a statement by riding. Joe Everyman doesn’t wish to make a statement. He just wants to live his life, not climb onto a soapbox. If Joe’s route home is blocked by a bike protest/demonstration/celebration, he’ll just get pissed off and we’ll lose him.

Now let’s imagine Joe Everyman in traffic seeing another chap ride past in a shirt and tie and a briefcase on the back rack. He’s not out to break land-speed records and the only gear on him is trouser clips and, if you like, a helmet. Just taking it easy and practising risk management instead of risk taking. Oh, and the man’s bike resembles the one in Joe’s garage.

Moments later, a girl passes by on a cool sit-up-andbeg bike with a wicker basket, wearing a skirt and stylish shoes and listening to her iPod. Joe Everyman might think, “I could do that. It’s only 15 kilometres. That guy looks like me. And that girl makes it look easy...”

Joe would see his own reflection in these cyclists. In order to ride to work he would only have to drag his bike out of the garage, pump up the tyres, buy trouser clips and a helmet. In far less time than it takes him to drive to work, he would be ready to ride. He wouldn’t have to make a statement. He would just be another cyclist on his way to the office, blending in to the urban landscape and doing something good for the planet and himself with nary a loud hailer in sight.

At the end of the day, it is Joe Everyman and his mates who will end up saving the planet, if only they’re given the chance. And it’s up to all of us to choose to inspire him – instead of alienating him.

Mikael Colville-Andersen. Copenhagen, Denmark. Filmmaker and bike advocate. Has never owned Lycra and never will. www.copenhagengirlsonbikes.blogspot.com / www.jeremydeller.org T H E R I DE

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the tim e trial B y G r e g L e Mo n d . I l l u s t r a t i o n A n d r e w D i p r o s e

f you’d asked me four or five days before the final stage, I’d have said: “I don’t think I have much of a chance.” Then three days before the last time trial, I won the stage, and my legs were fresh again.

A couple of nights before, I started thinking seriously about the time trial: I was considering using triathlon bars but it was a whim, not part of a grand plan. I’d done no studies on them, just picked them up.

I also thought about the time trial I had done against Laurent Fignon in the Giro d’Italia earlier that year. It was 50-plus kilometres but I took a minute and 21 seconds out of him. It gave me the confidence the day before to start calculating how many seconds per kilometre I could claw back. That’s why, when people asked me then if I could win, I was confident.

I had had a horrible Giro that year; I almost quit cycling completely in that race. I had this yo-yo effect after my hunting accident. I came into it in average shape; first day I lost eight minutes, midway through I lost 17 minutes on a mountain stage and that was my breaking point. But my wife convinced me to give it until the end of the year and told me there was no pressure.

On the Tour I lost a minute-and-a-half on Fignon on Alpe d’Huez and then a little more the next day and I ended up three days to go with a 50-second deficit. But that didn’t seem unreasonable to me.

For the rest of the peloton on the stage the day before that final contre la montre, the race was over, so it provided me with another day of recovery. Fignon came up and patted me on the shoulder and congratulated me on my second place. It’s funny though, because he and I have had the same coach and one of the rules he drummed into us was that the race is never over until the finish line.

I took 10 seconds out of him in the first kilometre.

I knew I had to be really wound up, and that from the first 100 metres I had to be at full pace. When I was riding the course that morning, my legs felt like I had just started the Tour.

It was a fast course – extremely fast. I came back after the practice run and requested a bigger gear. I remember saying to the mechanic: “I want a 55 on, and I’m going to win it!” He thought I meant the stage, but I meant overall.

I went back to the hotel three or four hours before and had my meal. I tried to take a nap but I was going over in my mind what I had to do, how I was going to warm up, to take off, to ride the turns.

The only time I’ve ever asked for splits in a race is when it’s further than 70 kilometres – up to 50, if you’re doing it properly, you should be at your maximum from the first kilometre. At 26 kilometres, I think Fignon hurt himself getting splits. There’s a point in a time trial where you’ve paced yourself to ride at your limit, and he was getting told that he kept losing time. He was out of the saddle – usually a bad sign if you’re doing that on the flats. He probably pushed himself over the top halfway through it.

I took the turns as fast as I could; I only remember one where I took it too wide. I was feeling so good, there was no pain. The first sense I had that I was doing well was when I came on to the Champs-Elysées. I could hear over the loudspeaker that I was at 40 seconds, 45 seconds.

I turned from the Champs-Elysées and sprinted from there to the finish.

It was fun to win the Tour in that great, dynamic way.

I think it should always finish with the time trail – it’s much more dramatic. Eight years, maybe nine years later, I had a conversation with Fignon. He told me that, psychologically, that defeat finished his career.

Greg LeMond. Minnesota, USA. Greg won the Tour De France three times and is the founder of LeMond Bicycles and LeMond fitness. www.lemondfitness.com. As told to Andrew Diprose.

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leverage B y D e a n Ta y l o r

o, it can’t be. Not now.

Not when I’m doing so well. Why is it only at this moment that I feel that fish-tail shimmy, that sideways slip-grip-spit of a deflating tyre? Why is it now that my inner tube and spirits are deflating in equal measure?

Racing isn’t a natural pastime for me. I tend to get distracted by the view or want to stop to turn to the next rider after a fun section of singletrack and suggest looping back to ride it again. This is not the route to the podium, but I sell it to myself as a race against the last time I rode here.

That and the little duels that arise keep it interesting; on this occasion the guy in red who I can just about catch, then pull away from, in the singletrack before he stomps past on each fireroad climb.

Anyway, the fire in my belly has now been extinguished, as my flat tyre has killed whatever enthusiasm I had and given me the barely needed excuse to take it easy. I jiggle the wheel out and hoik my elastic band-gripped pump, tube and lever from my back pocket. Most tyres don’t need the lever, but these particular ones are a little more stubborn than most and anyway the lever has become a bit of a totem.

I make a little cairn on the trail of removed valve cap and threaded nut and slide the lever blade (is it a blade?

Maybe hook describes it better?) under the bead and remember that I really rather like this tyre lever. It’s often pulled out of the pocket or bag in an angry rush, but just as frequently used as an excuse to stop and chat and look around at the place we flashed through moments before with nary a glance to the left or right. Bright yellow and easy to find, there’s a lot to like in what seems such a simple and cheap object: the width – exactly that of one finger joint so it fits just-so in the hand; the bas-relief logo giving the right amount of purchase; stiff, but with the tiniest amount of give; and, of course, that perfectly shaped blade.

I haven’t entirely forgotten that this is supposed to be

a race, so I jam the lever under the bead and strain.

Unfortunately, I push too hard against the initial resistance, the lever slips and my knuckles rasp against the spokes. It’s worked though, and I quickly pop the bead off the rim. In doing this, my hands are now caked in the claggy mud that was adhering messily to the tyre.

The dead tube lies ashamed in the wet gravel as I run fingers slowly around the inside of the tyre; eyes de-focused as I concentrate on finding the offending intruder. If it’s still here, that is. A short thorn drags across my index finger and is carefully pushed back through the tyre with the flat bottom end of the lever.

I remember to pop the thorn into a pocket for luck – the sort of luck that stops it falling back in to where it has just come out, that is. The inside of the tyre is now also full of mud – I shake out as much as I can before hastily inserting the fresh tube and wrestling the bead back on, frowning at the irony of the ‘tubeless ready’ logo printed on the side wall.

A friend who I’m normally behind when we race, but who’s struggling today, rolls up, “You OK?” he asks. We chat for a bit, summing up the last few hours’ fortunes in a couple of staccato sentences, then he’s off. “You’ll catch me in no time,” he offers over his shoulder as he spins away.

I quickly pump the tyre back up, trying to gauge whether I’ve put enough air in to prevent snake-biting it immediately or whether I’m currently wasting my time by making it ever-harder. A quick pinch twixt thumb and forefinger tells me that it’ll do.

I gather everything up, including the now graveland-mud-stippled tube, and jam it all back into pockets, yanking the bike off the ground and running beside it before leaping on. Race-mode successfully re-entered, cap’n.

I stand tentatively on the pedals, winding through the singletrack trying to figure out if all is well in rear-tyreland and that there isn’t another thorn present, lurking unseen. All seems well, and while I’m not likely to catch my friend, it’s going to be fun trying.

Oh, I did pick up that lever, didn’t I? Dean Taylor. Chilterns, UK. He rides to eat and eats to ride.

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one- o n- on e

By Vic t or i a Pe nd let on Phot o g r aph E l i s ab et h Hof f

he sprint event is the hardest discipline in track cycling because it is pure one-to-one combat.

The margin for error is minuscule… a mistake could be anything as small as blinking, or looking over the wrong shoulder for a split second. Do that and the race will be over.

In my experience, the person who makes the least mistakes wins. You have to watch your opponent so closely and analyse every slight movement, every twitch, as an indicator of when they are going to make their move. And that isn’t easy. There is so much pressure, you have to concentrate really hard, and remember you don’t do it just once – you have to do it as many as 12 times in a day. It’s a best of three race at some stages and if you lose a heat you are gone, simple as that.

Do races get physical? Well, they shouldn’t, but they do sometimes. There are elbows that can touch, a little bit of leaning over, some people will try anything to get some tiny advantage or to put you off your rhythm.

It’s the psychological part that is probably tougher.

Before a race, everyone walks around in the warm-up area like they know exactly what they are doing. I always think of it like that swan thing, in that up top you have to be completely calm and cool, but underneath you are paddling frantically with nerves and excitement.

Everyone is always staring at each other. Sometimes people will do it on the sly; they check out your legs or how you are breathing, looking for a weakness. Others will look at you directly and try to stare you down. Then you get some of the Eastern Europeans, the really butch ones with moustaches, who will actually spit at you to try to wind you up. Basically, what I try to do is to walk about with my head up and my shoulders back, telling myself: “Yeah, I’m the best. Look at me… I can beat you all.”

The good thing for me, though, is that having been triple world champion in 2007 and a double world champion in 2008, everyone looks at me differently. Not only does it give me confidence, but they also know I’m the number one – I’m the girl they’ve got to beat. I love that. When you know your opponents are looking at you and thinking: “Oh shit… do I have to ride against her?”

Before a race, I listen to music to get psyched up.

I also have a mental warm-up strategy, where I go through how I am going to do in the race, boxing off the negative thoughts and focusing on the positive elements. I also run through how I am going to race – what tactics I’m going to use against a specific opponent, and also what options are available if a different scenario unfolds… basically a Plan B. Of course, it helps that most of us know each other. We have detailed reports and videos of the other competitors, so I always know how someone will ride, what their strengths and weaknesses are. It really helps to know if your opponent likes to blast off early, or if they prefer to hang back and counter-attack. You only need to look at their splits to know if they’ve got a great jump and a crap finish. And then you try to ride them the opposite way.

What makes me laugh is that loads of people watch the sprint on TV and think: “What the hell is going on?

They aren’t sprinting!” But that is the initial cat-andmouse phase. When we really go for it, then they get it.

And don’t forget the sport has changed in recent years…

There was a time when two cyclists would ride up the bank and just stop. In those days it felt like they could stall up there for hours! Now you can only stop for 30 seconds and if you don’t move, you can get disqualified.

At the end of the day, though, it is one against one, and I’m the top dog. Come the Beijing Olympics, I aim to prove that once and for all.

Victoria Pendleton. Manchester, UK. Victoria is an English world champion track rider. www.victoriapendleton.co.uk.

As told to Paul Henderson.

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th e woma n who as ke d me to choose

By A non

ell she didn’t, actually, it was me who chose.

Although, to admit an inconvenient truth, I used bikes as an excuse to choose.

In fact, to admit the whole of an even more inconvenient, frankly deplorable, and confessional truth, I used bikes as an excuse to choose another woman.

Without name-dropping, but at the risk of sounding distinctly like a hanger-on, most of my friends at the time were either bike journos or something in the industry. People at work were mere acquaintances with whom I had little in common. Looking at the lifestyles of my journalist mates, I was disgruntled at the apparent lack of biking I did compared to these people with time to ride the latest models, wear the latest lifestyle accessories, and travel to exotic destinations (all industry-funded junkets, naturally). I mean, one of them even spent a few weeks each year living in the bike nirvana that is Moab. It. Just. Wasn’t. Fair.

Of course, this perfect lifestyle was all in my head.

These friends rode less than I thought – they had to make the time to ride with me as much as I had to make the time to ride with them. In reality, while I was sat behind a desk at work, they too were sat behind a desk, writing.

Admittedly, they were dragged out on fewer trips to the local DIY store than I was, but the truth was that they didn’t really ride much more than me – although when they did, it tended to be in exotic locations, on better bikes and wearing newer kit (actually, now that I think about it, the bastards had it plenty better).

Not realising that the cracks in our relationship were already there on both sides, I blamed my ex-partner for the lack of time I had to spend racing, touring and just generally messing about on bikes. I resented having to justify spending 20 quid on a pair of tyres while she would happily spend £60 on a mudpack that I was getting for free most weekends. I was fooling myself, though: looking back with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, it is clear that I was riding more than I convinced myself I was.

Even so, the riding I was doing totalled less than the random figure I’d generated to represent the ideal amount. But it wasn’t her stopping me: she was so sick of

me, she’d have gladly got me out of the house more often.

Rather, it was my own inability to get my sorry arse out of a self-indulgent funk and do something exciting on my bike instead of grinding round the same local loops.

So when I was tempted by another woman, I used bikes as an excuse. I don’t get to ride as much as I would like, I said, and blamed it all on her. She knew why I was doing it, and she told me I was wrong, but to fool myself, and to salvage my conscience, I stubbornly stuck to my claim. There. I’ve said it. What a bastard, eh?

And I chose the other woman, though I would just like to set the record straight here that there was no overlap.

Then I was hoisted by my own petard.

In giving up a long relationship I also had to downsize considerably, and I’m not just talking bikes (I had to give up three of those, but what does that matter in the bigger scheme of things?). The worst thing was the loss of some of those biking friends who disapproved of what I’d done, and have rarely spoken to me since, and even then rather awkwardly if we meet at a bike event somewhere. Others told me I was a fool, said their piece, realised they weren’t going to change my mind, and didn’t let it get in the way of the friendship. To those people, I am eternally grateful.

So I got together with the new woman. After three weeks we went on a tandem holiday to the New Forest.

I proposed. She accepted.

Two months later we went on honeymoon to Scotland.

We took the tandem. Some of you may have heard the tale of the tandem that rode the Fort William World Cup downhill track. It’s no myth, and only the flat batteries in the digital camera prevented there being photographic evidence of my new wife’s first experience of SPDs. As time went on, my wife allowed me all the room I wanted to ride bikes and, you know, I no longer feel the need to. I now realise that one of the reasons I wanted to ride my bikes way back then was to get out of the house and a failing relationship. I still need to get out and ride when I’m in a funk for any reason.

So seven years on and still happily married, I ride even less than I did all those years ago. Bikes are not the be-all and end-all. They make poor wallpaper over the cracks in a relationship, and they’re a piss-poor excuse for ending one. To my ex, wherever you are now. Sorry.

But it worked out best for both of us in the end.

Anon. Somewhere in the North, UK. Too young to die, too old to be happy.

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map star

B y G l e n Jo h n s o n

When safety advocate group Bike Pittsburgh (Bike PGH), creative consultancy DeepLocal and I started working on the Pittsburgh bike map, we gathered up examples from all over the country. We figured our best approach would be to see what worked best, and then to improve on it.

The Chicago map was one of our favourites. We liked the architectural-illustration-like drawings demonstrating bike safety. On any project I work on, I try to challenge myself to do something different with the design. I always think that narratives are much more powerful in conveying information, so I decided to turn the disjointed diagrams into something more like a story.

The most logical format to do this was a comic-book structure. One of my favourite comic artists, who also happens to be from Chicago, is Chris Ware. His approach

to drawing seemed to fit best with how we wanted the bike map to communicate.

Creating the narrative was a collaborative effort.

Everyone involved was an avid biker and a proud citizen of Pittsburgh, so it was a great bunch of people to work with, because it was a project that we all had fun with and wanted to do our best.

I hope that people like what we have done, and that someone like myself, in another city somewhere in the world, can draw inspiration from it as well.

Glen Johnson. Pittsburgh, USA. Illustrator and designer. www.bike-pgh.org

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c has i ng s hadows

riding falls, fatigue frustration

complete

unabridged

By Jac Stracha n

adventure

adventure

the ride journal

omeone asked me recently why I ride and I was hard-pressed to come up with anything beyond: “I just do.”

That got me thinking, and I realised that there must be something that has made me want to keep getting my bike out of the shed, because it’s not always been as much fun for me as it is now.

I’m not a natural cyclist, you see. I’d really like to be, but it’s just not in me. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, I’m a chicken – I’m simply too scared of getting hurt to try a lot of things. Secondly, like a lot of female riders, I was a bit of a late starter.

I didn’t really start cycling until I was in my late 20s, but by that time, most of the friends I now ride with had already been abusing bikes for 10 or 15 years and developing all the skills and fitness levels that help them look, well, at least competent on a bike. I had a lot of catching up to do – in every sense.

Riding with boys was the problem: they are, generally speaking, quicker, more competitive and more aggressive, which made rides a bit of a trial. Constantly being dumped on the floor by innocuous-seeming obstacles was bad enough, but what was worse was spending most of a ride simply trying to keep up or catch up – and to cap it all, I felt guilty that I was holding everyone back.

Although I know that not everyone who rides bikes is as speedy and technically skilled, I didn’t seem to come across very many who weren’t. Part of the reason was that I was wary about riding with strangers, which created a vicious circle – I was always the slowest and wasn’t really getting any more confident, so I was always at the back… You see how it goes?

After a lot of persuasion, I plucked up the courage to go out on a ride with people I didn’t know. I was terrified in case it was the same situation all over again, but I was

surprised to find that there were other people who weren’t cycling heroes either. That’s not to say that I was leading the pack or even keeping up actually, but I finally had some company at the back.

I think that was the turning point for me: I suddenly realised that not everyone who rides bikes is liable to become a fast-disappearing dot in the middle distance.

This gave me a boost in confidence and pushed me to try new things, ride harder and in different places, with people I didn’t really know. Eventually, it dawned on me that pretty much everyone has been the slowest person on a ride at some time or other – it just becomes very hard to see that when the rest of the group has vanished over the horizon.

With increased confidence surfaced a previously hidden desire to try racing. Notwithstanding the fact that I won (due to a lack of competition), the first race was a disaster. I spent the whole time falling off, crashing and being passed by kids who tried to give me advice on how to ride bits of the course. It felt very much like being the slowest rider in the group again.

But that first race made me see that although my competitive urges are pretty mild, I like the idea of pushing myself, just to see what happens. Inevitably, this led me to endurance events. Although some people who race are out to win, most riders are just trying to beat their own personal targets. The mental struggles are still there, but it’s more about telling my body to keep going when I really just want to stop and have a cup of tea and a chat, rather than desperately trying to hold someone’s wheel.

I think it’s the social aspect that’s the key for me; I’ve met so many fun people out on bikes that it seems a shame to turn my back on all of that just because I might end up trailing along behind. Despite the falls, the fatigue and the frustration, this is what keeps me taking the damn thing out of the shed.

Jac Strachan. Edinburgh, Scotland. Singlespeeding gives her the perfect excuse to walk up the hills she doesn’t like.

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Spanish Laced

Cr ow e ’s F et

be s poke

By Ma rc Edwa rds.

Ph o t o g r a p h s R o g e r S t i l l m a n

I have always been obsessed by wheel building. I knew that you could only really become good at it through a lot of practice.

It’s that singular fact that would keep me from sleeping many, many nights, thinking of different patterns. I drew in a notepad by my bed, figuring out how one could design these unconventional and some might say ‘dark’ configurations. ak

e

Marc Edwardson. Condor Cycles, London, UK. Marc recently discovered that he should actually listen to his own advice – never trust secondhand stems or handlebars! www.condorcycles.com

Of fset Radi al

Sn

ow

fl

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velo club d’a rdbeg B y B r i a n P a l m e r. Ph o t o g r a p h L i n d a H o w i t t

t’s windy on Islay – that’s the default setting.

But sometimes when the wind’s piling in from the Atlantic with nothing between here and the east coast of Canada to lessen its force, well, then we might use a word like stormy instead.

But does it sour our cycling experience? No, not really – we just think of it as character-building. And frankly, the alternative of never turning a crank except for on a turbo trainer is too miserable to contemplate.

Fortunately, Islay has serious compensations; not least of which is the fact that there aren’t many bumpy bits, so much of our cycling experience is relatively flat.

As a predominantly rural and agricultural island, you would think that there would be greater opportunities for the off-road brigade than for those of us on skinny wheels. Strangely not; many of the so-called trails venture into the hinterlands then stop abruptly, leading to teeth-gnashing frustration. So while a lot of the singletrack roads can be difficult to distinguish from off-road tracks (think Paris-Roubaix), at least they form a rideable network that allows us to hold our annual Century Ride with very little repetition across the route. Plus it has a distillery or two thrown in for good measure.

Ah, the distilleries, those picture-postcard pleasure factories that have made this little island famous the world over. Islay is blessed with eight, with another on the neighbouring island of Jura, and we have naturally incorporated this into our cycling world. How we got our name – Velo Club D’Ardbeg – is not merely geography but involves a convoluted story.

Suffice to say, the owners of Ardbeg distillery were persuaded that their brand would be well served by appearing on a cycle jersey. Oh, and a pair of socks.

Coincidentally, the highly recommended Old Kiln Café, which they own, just happens to be around the mid-point of our annual 100-miler, and the fact that they generously provide a dram to all taking part means that the second 50 miles acquire a dream-like quality.

And just before we move on from single malts, there is an annual whisky festival held at the end of May, which provides the perfect excuse for an interesting week’s riding (and I say all this as a non-drinker).

When I relocated to Islay some 20 years ago, Laphroaig distillery ran an advertising campaign based around the slogan ‘Four Seasons in One Day’. While this sounds like the cue for a song, it rapidly became apparent that, while there may have been a lack of creativity shown by the copywriter, there was certainly not a lack of veracity.

For simplicity and habit, I have a 50km loop that I ride when the occasion suits. The island is roughly 35km by 35km, so there’s obviously a point reached fairly rapidly whereby the sightseeing takes on a repetitive air, but the almost incredible localisation of the weather removes all sense of déjà-vu.

I can cheerfully leave Bowmore of a Saturday morning under clear skies, yet pass through torrential rain only 15km later at Port Ellen. Due to the treeless monotony of the ‘Low Road’ and its peat banks, assuming there to be a headwind, you can watch your morning shower approach without a hint of stealth.

Adopting the Brian Smith ‘Tough Scotsman’ persona, there is little option but to grin and bear it. On any given day, I can cycle this loop twice and experience wildly differing weather conditions.

Islay’s agricultural nature adds yet another variation to experiencing rural bliss in the saddle. It’s a strange local quirk that it is not incumbent on the farming community to constrain their livestock behind a fence or a wall. Therefore, there are any number of roads featuring wandering cattle and/or sheep. The former can be a danger if surprised, so local riders have developed the idiosyncratic habit of talking loudly to any cows approaching their flight path; hooves and carbon fibre don’t make comfortable bedfellows.

Sheep, on the other hand, are the most predictably unpredictable animals on the planet – and the breeds over here don’t even have the saving grace of being merino. Passing sheep on any road here requires 100 per cent concentration and itchy fingers permanently fixed on brake levers. Added to which, the fact that both varieties of beast tend to leave deposits on the already crumbling road surface doesn’t help one iota when it comes to avoiding them.

But it is character-building.

Oscar Freire has never ridden for Velo Club d’Ardbeg and just look how his career turned out.

Brian Palmer. Islay, Scotland. Brian is a road rider, blogger and one of the founding members of Velo Club d’Ardbeg. www.thewashingmachinepost.net T H E R I DE

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born agai n B y R o b Wa r n e r. Ph o t o g r a p h S t e v e B e h r

think mountain biking might finally be coming full circle for me. I’m starting to rediscover what got me into it in the first place, before it became just a job.

I never set out to make a career as a downhill racer – when I was growing up, mountain bikes hadn’t even been invented. All we had at home was an old road bike frame with a set of cow-horn handlebars, way too big for my young body.

I was 12 years old when I got my first mountain bike; a Raleigh Maverick. That bike opened up a whole new world to me and my mates – every single day of the summer holidays we were off on epic adventures around the Chilterns. We’d be out for seven or eight hours, plotting routes on maps, usually to find some neolithic earthwork somewhere. This weird archaeological fascination probably came from the fact that Europe’s oldest road, the Ridgeway, runs almost directly by my front door. I find it fascinating that traces of ancient civilisations can still be seen today in the form of huge earthworks, hill forts and burial mounds that gently rise from the surrounding greenery.

Throughout the 1990s, I raced at the highest level of downhill mountain biking. The machines bore little resemblance to the clunkers that I had started out on.

The rate of development was incredible – we suddenly had disc brakes and incredibly efficient, long-travel suspension and, wearing all our gear, we looked more like American football players than mountain bikers, with our full-face helmets and body armour.

Back then, the very last thing I wanted to do when I came back from the pressure-cooker environment of the Giant Racing Team was to go out on a bike – I was burned out by the time I got home.

Now my racing career is nearly at an end, I can’t tell

you how nice it is just to get out in the woods and get back to where it all started. The bikes are now amazing – so much research has been put in to their development.

I love riding my six-inch-travel cross-country bike – OK, it’s slow, but I’m in no rush, and it’s a huge amount of fun, which is what it’s all about.

My favourite ride, then as now, is a three-mile-long earthwork called Grims Ditch that runs down off the Chilterns to the Thames at Wallingford. It’s a fantastic piece of singletrack perched high on top of an ancient tribal boundary. The narrow trail meanders downhill just steeply enough to give you some speed, but you have to pedal hard to go fast, which is difficult because if you time your stroke wrong you’ll catch a pedal on the ground and be sent off the steep side, probably into a tree on the way down. There are roots you can double – catching a perfect backside to give you a free boost of speed.

When you’re going fast, it’s as intense as any downhill race, the bike sliding around beneath you. You go into autopilot, reacting in a split second to what’s in front of you. You pedal where you can, trying not to touch the brakes, so focused that you don’t even realise your heart rate has gone through the roof until you stop and collapse into a panting heap.

That’s what I’ve always loved about mountain biking – the freedom – just getting away from it all and having some fun in beautiful surroundings. How good does it feel when you get home? My friend calls it meditation – all of the day-to-day stresses of life are gone, nothing worries you, and your whole is tingling with oxygen and endorphins.

The bikes have changed hugely over the past 15 years, but I’m glad the nature of mountain biking hasn’t. It’s just more reliable and fun now.

I’ll finish in the same way as I started – a mountain biker through and through.

Rob Warner. Henley-on-Thames, UK. Downhill, cross country, freeride, dirt jumping. www.giant-bicycles.com/en-GB www.stockfile.co.uk T H E R I DE

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Tsutsomu and Tak doing wheelies in Harajuku

tokyo got fix e d

By Nicol a C a r i g n a n i

Carnival bike shop. Harajuku

El Mariachi.

Courier, drummer/ percussionist. Shibuya

Tsutsomu and Tak. Freestylers. Harajuku

Hiroshi Fujiwara

Hiro. Courier and filmmaker. Shibuya have always been into the skateboard scene and some time ago my friend Jumbo suggested fixedwheel bikes were going to be the ‘new skateboards’.

I tried to dismiss this notion and told him that it was never going to happen. Today I have to surrender to this idea... Old skate legends, like Natas, are now fixie addicts and the scene is exploding worldwide.

In Tokyo, the obsession with these bikes is totally out of control. In the most fashionable neighbourhoods – Shibuya, Harajuku and Daikanyama – you can literally see them at every street corner. The scene is huge, and with a rich mix of very different characters. There are a few young, rich TV and music producers who were probably driving Mercedes until they started ordering superprofessional track bikes from Italy worth a few thousand euros. You often see them walking, with bike in hand.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are hardcore couriers who are speeding across the city on very cheap, self-assembled bikes, and making their living out of it.

As with skating, the fixed-wheel scene is also tightly bound with creativity. Many of these couriers are

musicians, video-makers, painters and tattoo artists.

I found them open-hearted, welcoming and generous and they exuded a great feeling of purity and enthusiasm.

Tokyo streets have no name. Not even in Japanese.

Addresses are composed only by the area followed by a series of numbers indicating the block, building and floor. And building N2 is never close to building N1 – they are spread out with no logical order.

There are detailed plans of every single block, and everybody is continuously asking for information and consulting maps. It is crazy. A lot of interesting bike shops have no street-front window because they are on the seventh or eighth floor.

It is fascinating that this fixed bike thing is binding Japan to my native Italy. They are such different cultures.

Japanese riders are crazy for Italian track bikes, both new and vintage – Italian brands like Campagnolo and Cinelli are true legends for them.

At Carnival, the best fixed gear shop in Tokyo, they treat, restore and sell vintage components as if they were pieces of jewellery. The Carnival crew recently finished a DVD entitled Vita della Via. The cover is a black and white photo of riders dressed like vintage cyclists around a traditional Italian trattoria table. Che storia incredibile!

Sharak. Courier.

Shibuya

Nicola Carignani. Milan, Italy. Loves independent publishing, art, sports and creative advertising. www.nicolacarignani.com T H E R I DE

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Tour d e te l ly

By Kev i n Br addock

have no idea who Ogonzilla is, but someone needs to get him off YouTube and onto TV. He is the blogger who makes montages of classic Tour de France duels, moments and interludes, sets them to grinding acid house tracks interspersed with commentary from Liggett and Sherwin, and posts them online for the kind of cycling saddo who’ll never have a hope in hell of competing up the vertiginous hairpins of a Pyrénéen stage, or riding alongside the sport’s heroic figures. People like me, that is.

I’m not ashamed to say I’m a cycling fantasist. I adore rolling around the mountains of mid-Wales or belting from London to Brighton on a Saturday morning, but at the same time, I like cycling though the Alps and Pyrénées and along the pavé or Champs-Élysées without leaving my flat, or even my own head.

That’s how I rode the 2007 Tour – in an unconventional way. Every July evening you’d find me in my living room perched atop my turbo-trainer-becalmed Bianchi, working the high cadences and glued to ITV2’s footage.

After a while, it was easy to forget I was in London SW4, and instead I was following Contador and Rasmussen up the Peyresourde. I may not have actually been there, but caught in the tractor beam of Le Tour on telly, it was easy to feel like I was – my legs were absolutely killing me.

To the outsider, my behaviour must have looked eccentric at the very least, if not pointless and deeply narcissistic. I dread to think what the drivers gridlocked on the arterial route outside my window must have thought, let alone the other residents in my block, who might have peered through the bay window to see a sweaty bloke with a strap around his chest atop a contraption vaguely resembling a bicycle.

Ordinarily, turbo training is no more interesting than watching a particularly boring shade of paint dry, and last year I did quite a lot in training for the London triathlon – wearing full ProTour kit I might add (although the helmet didn’t seem strictly necessary, what with my flat’s deep shag-pile carpet). Similarly, I’m probably not the only amateur triathlete who finds tooling around Richmond Park time after time just a

little bit monotonous. Come July, turbo/telly training becomes the most convenient way to watch, participate and train all at the same time.

Of course, retailers offer Spinerval DVDs to give turbo-heads something to focus on instead of the sideboard as they toil away during Le Tour’s off-season.

Terrifying sounding titles, such as Have Mercy: The Sequel, Enter The Red Zone and Tough Love give a fair indication that these DVDs are there to whip you into a cardiofrenzy rather than to allow you to enjoy the broader aesthetic pleasures of cycling. Personally, I’m far happier watching History of the Tour de France with its amusingly wooden commentary from Sean Yates, a man who injects so little verve into proceedings that he could be talking about watching a plank slowly warp in the sunshine.

Better still – and I realise how nerdy this must sound – is to set up my laptop on a chair in front of the turbo and watch Ogonzilla’s YouTube montages in succession.

Frankly, this really does it for me – in response my legs blur, my heart hammers in my chest and my lungs struggle to keep up. Watching Lance Armstrong destroy Ivan Gotti and Fernando Escartin on the climb to Sestrières in 1999, or seeing him bite the dust in that pile-up with Iban Mayo on Luz Ardiden in 2003 before going on to conquer Jan Ullrich and the rest of the field – well, even the most ardent armchair cyclist will discover fast-twitch fibres they never knew they had (even if you’re at your desk avoiding work).

But Ogonzilla’s soundtracks to these montages are what really brings out the beautiful burn. There’s probably an academic report to be commissioned on the synergy between pounding tracks by the Crystal Method, Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy, and depictions of extreme athletic endurance. All I know is that the moment someone like Ogonzilla sets Josh Wink’s Higher State of Consciousness to footage of Fabian Cancellara’s prologue win in London last year, two of my deepest personal thrills – cycling and raving – will finally be requited.

Ogonzilla’s clips are motivational workout videos for anyone who’s swapped their rave whistles and white gloves for Lycra shorts and white bar tape.

And when it all becomes too postmodern, theoretical and airless to bear, I’ve got a solution for that too. I just get on my bike, slam the front door and go cycling instead.

Kevin Braddock. Shropshire, UK. Competes in triathlon and rides a Bianchi Pista in London. www.kevinbraddock.com T H E R I DE

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Rol lapaluza B y P a u l C h u r c h i l l . Ph o t o g r a p h s M a r k D e n t o n

y first courier-style roller race was back in 2000 in a smoky room above a pub in Clerkenwell.

It was full of crowds cheering us on and stank of beer and smoke. Pairs of cyclists battled it out on an ancient rig to a soundtrack of hip hop and punk tunes. If you want to know what the atmosphere was like, then think of a one-night, underground, static, continental six-day race and you’re somewhere close. Despite being a track racer at the time, I didn’t even qualify, but stayed to watch to the end and was hoarse from shouting by the time we were kicked out.

When I was first told about the event, what I pictured was significantly far from the eventual reality. I figured it would be something akin to the club-room competitions of my schoolboy race days; a handful of riding mates in vests, a cup of tea and next to no atmosphere. These new courier Goldsprints, as they were then called, couldn’t have been more different. I was immediately hooked. I think we all were.

That seems like a long time ago now (there’s a video of that first race out there on the internet somewhere that makes us all look very young), but although Rollapaluza has grown, the atmosphere and the thrill haven’t changed. We recently returned to the source – that pub in Clerkenwell – and though the function room is now smoke-free, the atmosphere was better and louder than ever.

So why would anyone want to compete in a roller-race and why the hell would anyone want to go to watch one as a form of entertainment?

A Rollapaluza roller-race is a 500m sprint at about twice the speed you could go on a normal bike; it’s immediate, it’s full-on, you are in the crowd’s face and they are in yours. Technique can overcome brawn – David and Goliath situations occur on a regular basis.

As a competitor, the adrenaline flows, you watch your opponents, study their technique and pick out

the favourites as you await your turn. All the time your heart is hammering faster and faster as the tension grows.

Finally the MC calls your name and suddenly you’re on stage. Hundreds of excited, expectant faces are staring up at you. There’s no going back, you’ve got to give it your all. You’re counted in: “Three… Two… One… Go!” It will be the longest 20 seconds of your life. Despite the minimal resistance, timing your effort is crucial; your legs burn and your heart feels like it’s exploding.

You can’t lose the spin, don’t think about a final sprint, just think about not slowing down. Then it’s all over, you’re semi-conscious, with no idea who’s won. But if the MC doesn’t tell you, the crowd’s faces will. If you qualify, you could be going through this another four times on your way to potential glory.

Who would not want to go to watch this kind of face-to-face competition? It’s exactly the same spirit that draws people to boxing matches – appropriately enough, a number of recent events have been held in boxing rings. Competitors’ gurning, pain-filled faces are half the fun and camera flashes pop constantly as photographers vie to capture the best grimace of the night. Factor in the bands, DJs and bar that are typically found at a Rollapaluza event, and you’ve got a great night out.

But to give you my reasons – well, it’s all the above, for starters. I also love it because it’s similar to track racing as you can play to your strengths, using your technique and mental attitude to overcome more powerful riders. I love it because it’s inclusive; anyone can race on our rigs, even non-cyclists and children.

I love it because it’s fair – the best rider throughout the night will win. I love it because it’s nostalgic – despite our modern take on the format, it harks back to the 1950s, when the sport was massive.

And I love the vintage equipment and mechanics.

We’ve seen others using digital representations of the roller-race dial, but there’s nothing like the mechanical connection between the riders and the dial hands: cranks to chain to wheel to roller to cable and finally to gearbox.

The perfect combination of man and machine.

Paul ‘Winston’ Churchill. North London, UK. Loves riding bikes, hates cleaning them. www.rollapaluza.com T H E R I DE

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bike ki l l

Phot o g r aphy by K l au s T hy m a n n for H Y BR I D S -proje c t . w w w. t hy m a n n .com

T H E R I DE

{ 89

Bike Kill is one big, messy pile of mayhem that takes place in Brooklyn in the fall each year. Think of a block party mixed with food fights, bike gladiators and BMX riders trying not to wipe out as the crowd chuck boxes and mattresses at them. The grand finale tall bike-jousting - takes place after dark.

Bushwick, New York. 2007

T H E R I DE

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the pion e e rs B y R o y S i n c l a i r. Ph o t o g r a p h A n d r e w M a t h e w s o n

he cooling evening finds me all alone. It’s just me and my folding bike, which I have extracted from my car. It is late winter. Snow adorns the nearby Rock and Pillar mountains.

I unfold the bike, set it on its wheels and slide the seat post into place. I tighten pedals with an improvised cone spanner. Five minutes later, it is ready to go.

I am in the small town of Middlemarch, on New Zealand’s South Island. In a few months’ time, Blind Billy’s nicely grassed camp will be full of cyclists, brought here by the 150km Otago Central Rail Trail which leads through some of NZ’s most isolated landscape.

The route follows the former railway running between Middlemarch and Clyde, which closed in 1993.

The journey is steeped in the history of gold prospectors, explorers and pioneer agriculturalists. Six years and more than $850,000 were spent converting the rail line to use by a different form of transport.

I am definitely not a recluse. I thrive on social activity.

When not writing or photographing – or on a longdistance bike ride – I work in frontline tourism. Yet, here I am, heading down the line, where the only sounds are the bleating of new-born lambs and the crunch of Big Apple tyres on old railway ballast.

The further I go, the more isolated it becomes – railways in New Zealand are like that. As I ride, I imagine the lonesome shriek of a steam locomotive’s whistle.

I constantly feel like I am in self-imposed solitary confinement. But prisons do not have these fine views.

The early September wind freshens, unfortunately from the wrong direction. The enjoyment of the day seeps away as I pedal through 60km of strong headwind.

A group of women pass, heading the other way, being propelled effortlessly by the wind at their backs.

The day ends in the small art deco town of Ranfurly.

Completely exhausted, I book into the Lion Hotel, having failed miserably to attain the typical 11km/hr average speed for the trail. Overnight, the wind changes. In the morning, my bicycle is half-buried in snow and most roads are impassable. I call off the day’s ride without guilt.

Another day, and my tyres are happily crunching on

thawing frost and ice puddles. I glance to the deserted snowy landscape of Mt Ida and then descend towards the tiny town of Oturehua with its pub, holiday cribs, and quaint Gilchrist’s general store. All day I have met just two other cyclists – a couple from Auckland.

A heavy overnight frost turns my bicycle into a work of art: as the sun rises, the ice crystals glitter like gemstones.

The sky is clear and I’m heartened by the knowledge that heavy frosts can only happen when there is no wind.

The day is perfect. I am soon pausing to shed outer garments and stuffing them into panniers. The trail here has an excellent surface and the way ahead is mostly on a gentle downgrade across the 37m-high Poolburn Viaduct, through the Poolburn tunnels and gorge, across the long Manuherikia River and towards the sparse inland agricultural communities.

I spare a thought for the pioneer rail-builders who toiled for 42 years to build this spectacular stretch.

What would they think if they could see the iron rails ripped up to be replaced by a smooth gravel cycleway?

Briefly I feel guilty for my enjoyment of their efforts.

I detour through the ghost town of Ophir, with its quaint old post office and swing-bridge across the Manuherikia. The town was born during the 1860s Otago gold rush when thousands of hopefuls, including my own Cornish ancestors, trekked inland from the city of Dunedin. The failed dreams of many are etched on the crumbling headstones of lonely cemeteries in the town.

These days, Ophir’s living population is a mere 20 souls, and I do not see any of them.

At Galloway’s small train station, I dig out my mobile phone and book my accommodation and an evening meal in Clyde. The afternoon is balmy, with more than a hint of spring.

I arrive at the end of the trail, having clocked more than 70km for the day, just as the sun sinks behind the mountains. The warmth is snatched from the air by the first hints of another frosty night.

During the 1970s, Clyde was a bustling town that was involved in constructing a huge hydro dam on the nearby Clutha River. These days, like Ophir, it is a place for those who prefer a slower pace.

Roy Sinclair. Christchurch, New Zealand. In semi-retirement now, he’s an unrepentant long-distance cyclist who enjoys writing and photography. www.r.sinclair@clear.net.nz T H E R I DE { 03 93

TOTAL LY fixatE D

By Den n is Bea n-L a rson

t always came at about the same point in the 50-mile Sunday morning group rides – the horses always smelled the barn about seven or eight miles out and I’d be struggling at the very back of the pack.

I was never watching the fastest riders – just the slowest.

I would never have admitted it (of course) but I virtually lived for those Sunday morning group rides – my whole week revolved around them. I taught myself to sprint during the week, I pushed myself on intervals up local hills, I bought more ‘bike stuff ’ and I logged my mileage every day.

As that first summer rolled along and everyone, including myself, got fitter and fitter, the stops at the top of the big hills got shorter and shorter, and I discovered that the hospitality of the Sunday group grew less and less. I learned not to take long pulls at the front, how to position myself behind the bigger riders, and how to eat and drink on the bike.

But, no big surprise, I still struggled at the back of the pack – while all these guys were about the same age as myself, they’d all been riding for 10 years or more.

The scenario was pretty much always the same – when the smack went down soon after 40 miles, I’d watch the wheel I was following just inch itself away. When there was a three-foot gap, it would be all over, for they’d never look back, and there was nothing left in my tank to close the gap one more time.

Eventually I got fed up with this and asked the strongest rider I knew how I should improve. He came back with two pieces of advice: firstly, quit the cigarettes, and secondly, beg, borrow, steal or make a fixed gear bike and get those winter miles in.

So I went into the barn and dug out my other half ’s old Fuji Road Racer with its 10-speed gears, center-pull brakes and a decent bit of alloy here and there. It was one of those bikes that heralded a new wave of cycling

popularity in the US and knocked the bike weight down from the 45lbs of the 1960s Schwinn Varsity to a practically gossamer 32lbs.

I’m sad to say that one winter of riding fixed didn’t move me all the way to the front of our weekly peloton, but it did allow me to move up bit by bit, year by year.

No longer dropped by the slowest group, I was soon getting dropped by the middle group at 40 miles, and then, eventually, barely hanging on for dear life to the group at the front.

I rode that Fuji every winter all through the 1990s.

It would get dusted off in late October and be given a shakedown ride. When we drove to my wife Katy’s parents’ house in Washington DC for Christmas, the Fuji would be on top of our car, standing defiantly against the 800-mile winter drive from Michigan.

It’s always had a very eclectic set-up: two different crank arms, a frozen seatpost, Modolo levers and $27 Suntour brakes, chrome fenders and a mixed-lineage headset. It had been painted yellow, then red, then blue, then metallic charcoal. I think I even put on a new chain sometime during the 1990s. Cleaning it meant throwing a couple of five-gallon buckets of hot water over it and lubing the chain.

Regardless of the other, fancier bikes in my stable, riding the Fuji never failed to put a smile on my face.

Getting up on top of that 43 x 18 with those big, cheap, knobby tires was always satisfying. Regardless of the problems or misfortune that life might deal me, I knew that I could always have fun riding this bike.

Even now as I write this story, the bike is parked downstairs from my office. With studded knobbies on Miche track hubs for the winter of 2008, I logged a couple of hundred cold miles once again. The seatpost is still frozen in place, the yellow, red and blue paint shows through with every scratch, but that damn thing still puts a smile on my face every single time I ride it.

Dennis Bean-Larson. Traverse City, Michigan, USA. Received a BA and an MA in 2004 after first starting college in 1963. He and his wife, Katy, have been married for 32 years and have two children.

All of them ride fixed gear bikes. www.fixedgeargallery.com T H E R I DE { 03 95

s i ngular vis ion

By Sa m A l ison

t started out simply enough – I just wanted a nice bike for myself, that’s all. I wanted something that I could use to escape into the woods at weekends and, if I was lucky, in the evenings, to take my mind off the nine-to-five (or eight-to-eight) grind.

Various custom options came and went (sample conversation: “I know what I want thanks, just build it”).

Meanwhile, I was stranded in cubicle purgatory: a day-to-day existence of meetings, pointless conference calls and constant corporate back-stabbing and buckpassing. My companion through this was a constant nagging question: how to be free of this drudgery?

I was daydreaming of escape, to follow my passion and do my own bidding.

Slowly a thought coalesced into an idea, an idea into an action, and the action into a fledgling company.

Now I build my own machines. Bikes have been my passion as far back as I can remember; riding, fixing, painting, upgrading, improving – I haven’t been able to get enough of two-wheeled locomotion in almost any form for such a long time. Little can compare with the unfettered sense of freedom I feel from the simple act of sitting atop two wheels and some connective tubing propelled along by a simple cog and chain drive.

It happened without me realising. Somehow, over time, I moved from this sense of joyous simplicity; days roaming the countryside on BMX bikes as a kid to weekends camping out with rudimentary mountain bikes in adolescence. Then, becoming more specialised, refined perhaps, road racing on lightweight aluminium, then carbon fibre. Day-long death marches on persnickety, fully-bounced, times-table-requiringgeared wonderbikes. Was it really still fun?

Of course we still find it; sometimes under a pile of sodden muddy clothing following a January jaunt to Wales. Other times, it’s more obvious – it’s hard not to feel a sense of joy with the smell of spring flowers in your nostrils while spinning along a country lane in the sunshine with the wind at your back.

On those occasions when it doesn’t matter where you’re riding, or on what, the outside world seems to fall away and it’s just you, two wheels and your thoughts.

You focus on the moment, which blocks out all the dayto-day worries, or perhaps in more sedate stretches, allows you to see those same concerns in a different light.

My hope is that my bikes will help people to find such moments more often than not, to restore a sense of fun, to inspire an escape from the everyday and a return to a time when life was simpler. Making all this happen has taken more work than I’d ever have imagined, but it’s all been worthwhile – the dream is taking shape.

Sam Alison. Beconsfield, UK. Are we riding or what? COME ON! www.singularcycles.com T H E R I DE { 03 97

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Trevor Ray Hart. Lives in the countryside, UK. Rides an embarrassing eBay purchase. www.trevorrayhart.com

goi ng dutc h B y D a’ S q u a r e W h e e l m a n . I l l u s t r a t i o n D o r a D r i m a l a s

he’s rolling a couple of metres in front of me in the bike lane up Lincoln Avenue. It’s somewhere around the first third of my daily commute home from work in the Loop. Could be Armitage.

The first thing I notice is her bike: a Dutch Oma three-speed; chain guard and everything, more rust than metal. But man, oh man, the rear rim is true. Probably does it herself.

As usually happens, she has to swerve left to miss a car blocking half the bike lane. Helmetless, she elegantly stretches out her left arm, hand pointing towards the spot where she’ll enter the traffic. The driver doesn’t notice or perhaps doesn’t care.

Looking over her left shoulder, she points again to where she’s going. But this time slightly, ever so slightly, she waggles her finger. An old teacher scolding a troublesome student. Without having to, the driver slams on the breaks and as I roll past I catch a sheepish look.

I’m smitten…

I spend the rest of the commute trying to catch up with her. Is she Dutch? The finger waggle was classic Amsterdam biker. She cheats every stop sign and rolls, albeit slowly, through the red lights. Though she does stop for cars crossing in front of her.

At one point, one driver stops even though he’s got the light. She stops too. I stop behind her. Who is going to be

more polite? The car doesn’t move. She takes the favour, but before rolling off, gives an old school ‘What are you?

An idiot?’ shrug. Yep, she’s definitely Dutch.

What am I going to say when I catch up with her… or even if I catch up to her (I pretty much obey the stop signs and traffic lights)? We cross Fullerton, then Belmont, just a few metres apart, me still behind but closing fast. I don’t know if she notices me as other bikers pass around us. What am I going to say?

I definitely don’t want to ask: “Are you Dutch?” in English. On the one hand, she might not be. On the other hand, if she is… I’ve got about six seconds to impress her with my worldliness. Problem is, I don’t know enough Dutch to ask. I’m gonna have to fall back on German, learned mostly in bed with an old girlfriend: “Sind Sie Holländer”?

Unfortunately, my weinig Nederlands meisje (little Dutch girl) turns right on to Hermitage, heading north. OK, Plan B. I speed up; armed with the only Dutch I know, learned mostly in an Amsterdam bed with another old girlfriend (it’s a long, long story).

I yell as loud as I can: “Doei!!!” You say doo-ee, clipping it at the end like a farmer saying “Yep”. It translates pretty much as: “See ya!!!”

She hears me, slows down, looks around, sees me.

Her elegant finger waggles again, this time up at the sky.

She smiles big and shouts a perfectly clipped: “Doei!!!”

Yep, she’s Dutch.

Da’ Square Wheelman. USA. Odd ramblings on bikes. www.bicycle-diaries.blogspot.com / www.hybrid-design.com TTHHEERRI IDE DE{ {10035

REcyc le d

B y G r a n t Ta y l o r. Ph o t o g r a p h A n d r e w D i p r o s e

or many of us, cycling is more than just a hobby: it engulfs our lives so much that we consider ourselves cyclists first and whatever our day job is second.

For me, though, it’s only recently that I’ve switched my passion (although some would argue obsession is a more accurate description) from the bikes themselves, to riding them.

It wasn’t always that way round. As a kid growing up in a Midlands village, my bike was a means of escape.

It wasn’t the riding that was the key, it was the fact that it widened my reach and that of my friends – we could go down to the river to swim in the summer or nip to the shops to pick up chocolate and buy the latest edition of The Eagle or 2000AD. I wasn’t a cyclist – the bike was just a mode of transport.

In the summer 1986, two lads started riding over from the local town on mountain bikes. These were new to me. I was riding a Raleigh Burner at the time and jumping over as many of my friends as would let me.

The mountain bikes were cheap and cheerful cash’n’carry specials but they got me hooked. I needed one.

I was due a new bike for Christmas, but managed to persuade my mum to buy it a good deal before then. I escaped further afield on that bike than I’d ever been before. Now I was cycling – out in the open, covering miles of roads and trails. We’d sometimes hit 250 miles a week. Not bad for 11-year-olds.

I blame the next transition from cyclist to bicycle fetishist on the magazines. Bicycle Action was the first to catch my attention. My cycling friends and I would eagerly pore over each edition – Richard would avidly read the race results and travel articles whilst Craig and I lusted over the shiny bikes being tested. I particularly remember a bright yellow Muddy Fox Explorer jumping invitingly out from the pages.

Eventually, I scrimped the money together for a new steed. Craig and Richard had already hooked themselves up with a Muddy Fox and a Marin respectively so I had to pick something different. In the end, I went for a Diamondback in achingly cool smoke-effect paint.

I began to pimp my ride: I added a Flexstem, white Onza porcupine tyres and flipped my thumbshifters under my bars to emulate Greg Herbold. I fancied myself as a downhiller too, so I bought padded Axo shorts and a Tomac-style helmet.

University changed my cycling again. I went to Brighton and joined the mountain bike club, but I didn’t ride all the trails I knew were out there. Instead, this was my time to discover girls, booze and music.

The bike became a mode of transport again, but this time to the pub, to a gig, or to the girlfriend’s house.

It wasn’t until I returned to the Midlands that I really started riding again. I bought a generic hardtail from one of the big four; but riding had changed so much in my relatively brief absence. Mountain biking had splintered into factions – you were now a downhiller, an XC rider, a trails rider… Gone were the days of doing everything on the one bike.

But I decided to just do what I’d always done and ride both off and on road using the same machine.

A job change meant a move back down to the south coast and by chance I came across a mountain bike forum on a magazine’s website.

This reignited the passion for shiny parts again.

People were buying and selling all those old bikes and bits that I wanted 15 years earlier, but couldn’t afford.

I spent the next five years going through 40 different bikes! All those Klein, Fat Chance and Yeti frames I’d lusted after were mine, at a fraction of the original cost.

The forums also hooked me up with new cycling buddies. Friends who laughed at my retro-bike addiction, but knew what drove it. These guys also reignited my passion for riding: they slowly weaned me off the old bikes and on to decent modern kit.

They guided me to those Brighton trails I’d missed as a student. They filled me with beer and whisky on cold winter night rides, made me stop and look at the scenery, learn to enjoy climbs, buy a road bike and even start racing again.

But more than these friends bringing cycling back to me, cycling has brought me these friends. And I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ll ever be without.

Grant Taylor. South Downs, UK. The ride is always to the pub and back… I just didn’t say which pub! www.downlandbiking.co.uk T H E R I DE

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Abbotsford, BC

wi nter of cont e nt

By D a n B a rh a m

Sometimes you just have to make do with what’s around.

The sun isn’t always shining, the trails aren’t always dry and the roads aren’t always passable. Temperature and climate conspire to slow the heartbeat of regular riding into a mere murmur; summer seems as far away as can be.

Such is the harsh reality of living in North America; even the most temperate city can have its bad spells, and there’s two ways to deal with it – either a steady decline into season-long hibernation or a triumphant defiance of the elements and nature’s will, exploring every avenue of cycling and forcing a ride where previously there was none.

I set out to try to capture the essence of those riders who find a way to pedal four seasons of the year, through snow, rain, mud and cold; those to whom bad weather is not a full stop but merely a comma.

Abbotsford, BC

Top: Monterey, CA. Bottom: Mission, BC

Gastown, Vancouver, BC

Vancouver, BC

Dan Barham. Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Photographer. www.danbarham.com

the start of stoppi ng B y Jo n Me r e d i t h . I l l u s t r a t i o n D e s i g n B y S t e a l t h

t one point in my life I had signed up to four separate drug trials in order to finance a set of new brakes. I think it’s fair to say that I was a little bit obsessed.

The genesis of this fascination can be traced back to 1988. We would gather at the top of steep, root-infested, muddy slopes. If we made it down in one piece, we would then try to force our way back up.

Obviously, power is nothing without control. Velocity and traction were all very good for the ups, but the downs required decent braking.

A paper round and pocket money got me a 21.5in Specialized Hardrock. It was enormous whichever way you looked at it; I think the plan was for me to grow into it. Basic componentry included a set of Dia-Compe 986 front cantilevers and a Shimano U-brake hidden under the chainstays. The Dia-Compe levers graced the handlebars in a full four-finger length.

I could hardly wait for the magazines each month.

I loved the articles giving technical advice, especially about brakes. I would fiddle with straddle cable length, pad toe-ins and spacers in search of perfect modulation.

I spent hours peering at the front of the bike to make sure the pads hit the rims at the same time and at the same angle. Lubing and balancing the springs became an act of penitence. In truth, with a U-brake and limited money to replace the cables as frequently as the mud demanded, perfection was never quite attainable.

No matter how hard I tried, consistent braking performance remained a frustratingly unattainable goal. But the more I fiddled, the more obsessed I became.

I was entranced by the possibility that ultimate stopping power – power with oodles of modulation – was out there somewhere; I just had to do one more tweak to find it. And if that didn’t work, then there was always another trick to try.

As my bikes progressed, so did the brakes. Mid-1990s Shimano cantilevers were soon augmented with thicker, braided cables. Although modulation was reduced and

the brakes had a wooden on/off feel, when you needed to grab a handful and stop the wheel, it happened with very little lag. Then there was the 90-degree rule to help work out the best position for the cable hanger.

This was an inexact science sometimes as the washers on the brake pad post tended to alter things, not least when you rotated them to adjust the toe-in.

Although mainstream brake manufacturers continued pushing cantilevers, there were changes at the top end.

At the forefront of this was Grafton with its Speed Controller, but this was soon copied and modified as each boutique manufacturer strove to come up with its ultimate braking system. It’s as if they were as obsessed as I was.

Everything was eclipsed by the introduction of Shimano’s V-brake in 1996. This eagerly awaited design meant that expensive CNC-machined brakes became obsolete virtually overnight.

The V-brake offered me the easiest and most affordable route to improved braking. The Kona Kilauea frame I was riding at the time, replete with Manitou IIIs, allowed me to ride faster and more technically demanding trails.

As a student in Manchester, funds were scarce and I worked as a guinea pig in four drug trials to afford two sets of the brand new XT V-brake calipers. The dedicated levers had been beyond my finances initially so I continued using SS-5s. I put up with poor rim clearance and enjoyed excessive power. When I finally purchased the XT levers, I was disappointed with the function, but ecstatic with the clearance and silent running.

The era of long-arm, side-pull cantilevers meant as long as the left and right pads hit the rim at about the same time, the brakes would work well. There was no need to know how to tune the feel, or the power of the brake. That precious stock of old washers and spacers became useless. Braided cables disappeared. Somehow, the love had gone. I felt like I had lost something, something precious. I no longer had the same level of involvement with the function of my bicycle.

But I must admit, my current bike stops a lot better than my Hardrock ever did.

Jon Meredith. Glasgow, Scotland. The doctor rides anywhere and everywhere the wheel takes him. www.drj0nswanderings.blogspot.com T H E R I DE

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n e rvous e n e rgy B y Ph i l i p D i p r o s e . I l l u s t r a t i o n D e a n Ta y l o r

thought that it would wear off with age. It’s afflicted me since I began riding properly, and now, nearly 20 years on, it still creeps up and engulfs me. The trigger can be a race, a long-distance route I haven’t ridden before or even a weekend of riding with friends. What’s ailing me? Nerves; nothing violent or life-threatening, but enough to make easy living decidedly less easy.

The seed can be planted as early as the week before.

Thinking about the imminent event will set off impulse purchases. Maybe I really do need a new tub of energy drink (I hate the stuff but feel I can’t ride without it, placebo or not)? Four new pairs of brake pads suddenly appear – essential for a weekend of dry trails. Thankfully, most of my bikes are single-speeds, otherwise the night before the event would be spent attempting to rip out and change gear cables.

Ah yes, the night before. This is where the agitation shifts up a gear. I know that a small degree of nervous anticipation can be good for you: it keeps you focused, and hell, it makes you feel like you’re really alive. But the amount I suffer seems too much, and even changes the way I act, forcing me to adopt semi-obsessive routines.

It begins with mindless shuffling; absent-mindedly walking from room to room slowly assembling my kit.

I build a small cairn of cycling kit in the spare room – shoes, socks, shorts, jersey, gloves, helmet, glasses… and then I move on to anything I might be carrying with me. Bidons or CamelBaks needn’t be filled yet, but I may as well line them up next to the altar of bits (right by that tub of damned energy drink).

Once this has been completed I’ll retire to bed, inevitably later than I’d planned. I set the alarm on my phone at least twice. Despite setting it every weekday night, I still convince myself I may have made a mistake the first time and then I worry that I’ve actually got it

right the first time and have now set it incorrectly.

I hate the tricks my mind plays on me.

Sleep will invariably be fairly slow to wash over me.

I can usually fall asleep as soon as my head hits the cold pillow, so staying conscious for anything more than five minutes seems like a descent into agonising insomnia.

But eventually I will fall into a bizarre, fitful sleep where weird dreams trawl through my subconscious. These will rarely be about anything as simple as actually riding but may hint at something velo-related: perhaps I’ll be late for an event, or maybe I might have forgotten my wheels.

A psychologist would have a field day.

These thoughts will eventually rouse me from sleep and I’ll switch on my phone to see if I’ve somehow missed my alarm. There’s really no need for this as it’s often still dark outside. Unless Mother Nature herself is running a couple of hours behind schedule, then I’ve still got a while until I need to rise. And so far she’s never been late.

I’ll then settle back into another half-sleep that will only serve to make me feel even more sluggish when the alarm finally does shriek into life.

Walking through the flat, I’ll go to the big window in the lounge to get a good view of the weather. Of course, I’ll already have listened in bed to see if I can hear the enthusiasm-dampening sound of rain hammering against the window. If I haven’t heard the telltale rat-atat-tat, I’ll be looking for any signs that might make me want to change my choice of riding outfit. Are the skies foreboding enough to make a waterproof worthwhile, or will I be safe with just a gilet?

Now that I’m up and about, the fear will begin to subside. The whirling stew of emotions will start to settle. In the cold light of day, there seems to be little point in being nervous – after all, this is what I love, this is what I live for. Getting kitted up and forcing down some toast, I ready myself to leave the flat. When the door clunks shut behind me, I can finally look around and see that today is going to be a great day for riding.

Philip Diprose. London, UK. Riding is great, but riding with friends is even better. www.flickr.com/photos/philipdiprose T H E R I DE

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japan e s e al ley I l l u s t r a t i o n i l o v e d u s t . w w w. i l o v e d u s t . c o m

paint job B y Ta l i a h L e m p e r t w w w. b i c y c l e p a i n t i n g s . c o m

T H E R I DE

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h igh cade nc e

By D u s t i n K le i n w w w.c adence col le c t ion .com

C rysta l M E T HOD B y B e n Wi l s on . Pho t o g r a p h Ni c k Je l l

The bike took about a month to build, and that was with two helpers for a couple of weeks applying the stones. I think there’s about 110,000 crystals on the frame and about 10,000 on each of the wheels.

I built it as a homage to lowrider culture. I’ve always loved what they do in the States and wanted to pay respect by hooking up with the world’s most famous crystal company. Half the fun for me was the technical side – how to apply such a large amount of stones. In the flesh, the bike almost looks like it’s got a crystal skin.

Ben Wilson. London, UK. Industrial designer, with a passion for bikes – practical, efficient and effective. www.benwilsondesingn.co.uk Photograph copyright: www.jell.co.uk

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The Tour of Flanders, 2008

two wh e e l s good Ph o t o g r a p h y B a r r y S c o t t

The Tour of Flanders, 2008

Barry Scott. London, UK. www.bespokecycling.com

THE S EA RC H

By Debbie Bu r ton.

can’t find a bike. For the first time in my life I have a real need (as opposed to random and completely unjustified want) for a new bike. It’s not like there’s nothing to choose from, even niches have their niches these days.

I will admit to a slight weakness for anything to the left of quirky, preferably put together in a shed, just because I live with the mistaken belief that cool bike equals cool rider.

However, the first bike I ever lusted after, I mean truly coveted, was the BSA Twenty I got for my 12th birthday. Found at the back of the toys section in my mum’s catalogue, it was a shopper style in just the right shade of burgundy with white decals and white tyres.

It had three gears that I only gained the strength to successfully change with the intended one-thumb operation around the time of my 15th birthday.

I still had it when I moved to London to start my first job. On my £3,600-a-year salary I couldn’t afford the rent and tube fares, so the bike was summoned from my parents’ house for commuting duty.

Once I moved on to another job with an annual bonus scheme, I blew it all on an Evans tourer. It cost £400 and my colleagues couldn’t believe I’d bought a bike and not a car for that. But it was sublime. Dark grey with a hint of metallic, it was as comfy as an armchair, but with a reliably fast turn of speed. I used it to commute around London and to and from training sessions at my rowing club. Cranking up the pace to race the boys back down the long straight through Bushey Park, hitting the turn around the fountain and on again, it was smooth, smooth, smooth. God, I miss that bike.

In the end I sold it to fund my first mountain bike.

Ironically, I can’t remember what that was, though; it

was turquoise but not special. Other bikes followed: two more mountain bikes, a road bike that was (whisper it in shame) my triathlon bike, a good and sturdy Trek that never let me down and another road bike. But, to tell you the truth, I loved my three-speed shopper more.

The man who was eventually to become my husband built the next bike that resonated in any way for me.

We weren’t yet a couple, but I like to romanticise that somehow he knew and that’s why it turned out so well.

It was perfect; I rode better and faster. Hell, it even made me braver. So brave, in fact, that I wound up in Brighton hospital with someone reading Tour reports out loud from the Daily Telegraph to take my mind off the fact that a cluster of nurses were loudly observing that you could see right through my arm to the bone.

Then there was the beautiful green Surly Cross-Check frame that hung on the wall of John’s Bikes for months.

Every time I went in, I would make sure it was still there, and when a freelance contract finally paid, I rushed to buy it before I could waste it on the mortgage and clothes for my child. I use it all the time and it’s been my longest-lasting love – but now I need a mountain bike to ride in anger, and so here we are again.

I’ve done lots of looking, but after six months, no bike.

I’ve been trying to force it with midnight browsing of websites promoting handmade frames, but still, nothing.

I’m all too aware that I’m trying to kickstart the longing that was the defining factor in the relationship I had with all my favourite bikes – because I think if bikes are central to your life and how you live, you cannot conceive of it being any other way. Faking it can’t be done though, so for right now I’m resigned to not looking and trying not to get my hopes up.

Anyway, everyone knows that good things happen when you least expect them. Besides, I borrowed a bike from a friend the other day. And I think I rather liked it.

Debbie Burton. Somerset, UK. Debbie’s riding philosophy: start slow, get steadier. www.minx-girl.com T H E R I DE

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RI DI NG STY LE B y S i r P a u l S m i t h . Ph o t o g r a p h Wi l l W h i p p l e

started riding when I was 11 years old, when my father bought me my first bike. He knew this guy who was a member of the local cycle club who had a pale blue Paramount for sale. The guy said to my father: “If Paul ever wants to come out with the club on cycle runs, then that’s no problem.” I soon realised, riding about in Derbyshire at the age of 11, and looking around, that there was no mum and dad.

I suffered very badly at first after joining the local club, because Derbyshire’s quite hilly. I think at the beginning we only used to do really short runs like 10 or 15 miles, and then later on that built up. When I was 12, someone from the club said to me: “You should try a bit of competition”, which is how my racing career began.

At the start line it was very nerve-wracking. You may have read that I always aspired to become a pro, but the truth is that I would never have been able to do it because I wasn’t brave enough and, ultimately, I just wasn’t good enough. But in my head at the time it was a different story. My best position was sixth, but it was probably out of only seven riders!

I can remember coming home and saying to my father that, rather than supporting Nottingham Forest or another local football team, I was really into Fausto Coppi and Jacques Anquetil. I think my father’s response was: “What are you talking about? Where did you get that from?” Here was his 12-year-old son saying these Italian and French names, with this strange pronunciation. My parents and I never ever travelled; we were just a humble Nottingham-based family. So suddenly there was this other, almost alien, aspect to my life.

At 16 I went on a youth club trip to Como in Italy. It was the first time I’d ever been out of the country. From a fashion point of view, that was where I first saw how the Italian riders were dressed. I went to the Standa supermarket in Como and found a red leather crash 04

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helmet, and white leather gloves with the mesh back in the world championship colours.

Seeing all this stuff in the supermarket, I was in a cold sweat, thinking: “I’ve got this much money for the rest of the trip… but if I don’t eat I’ve got this much.” So I bought them both and went hungry and when I got back to the track in Nottingham, people were bowled over.

The reason I’m doing what I do today is because of an accident I had while I was training on my own.

I was riding, head down, and hit a car and broke my femur so badly that the bone was sticking out of my leg.

I also ended up with a broken collarbone, broken nose and two broken ribs – all in all, a real mess.

I was in hospital for about three months and when I came out, I couldn’t bend my knees enough to cycle for a while. So instead I started meeting up with various people I’d got to know in hospital and one of them suggested we go for a drink. We met in the pub and by chance it was the boozer that all the Nottingham School of Art students used to frequent. Gradually I started to become involved in all these conversations about subjects that I’d never come across before, such as Pop Art, Andy Warhol, Kandinsky and architecture from the Bauhaus movement.

Through these people from the art college, I met a girl who wanted to start a shop. I don’t know why or how I had the confidence, but I just said: “I’ll help you.”

So I left my job and went to work for her.

After three years of working there I met my future wife Pauline and through her I learnt about design and how to make clothes, how to cut patterns and the importance of proportion and quality.

Eventually, I saved £600 and opened my own room that I called a shop.

I could relate my new career to the bikes because the attention to detail is exactly the same – the weave of the carbon fibre, the polish of the aluminium, the milled finish of the seat clamp, the rivets of the Brooks saddle – fashion and bikes go hand in hand.

Paul Smith. London, UK. Sir Paul is a fashion designer. www.paulsmith.co.uk / www.willwhipple.com. As told to Andrew Diprose.

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1966 wool jersey.

A richly deserved emblem of hard-fought contests

fa de d glory

By Ma rc Edwa rdson a n d J a m e s Wi l s o n .

Ph o t o g r a p h y R o g e r S t i l l m a n

Thanet Silverlight frame.

Retrospective innovation

Campagnolo Gran Sport derailleur. A reminder of the origins of today’s prized components

Coureur Sporting Cyclist.

A source of dreams, heroes and inspiration 04

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Condor / Mackeson wool jersey.

Sponsorship produces unlikely marriages

James Wilson. Kingston, UK. I only ever listen to my own advice: never pander to comfort on a bike, looking good is always worth the pain. www.sigmasport.co.uk

Pas hley PAS SION

By Si mon M i l ls. Il lustration A nd rew Diprose

have five bikes in my twowheeled quiver. A sturdy and reliable Pinarello road machine with a stock Dura Ace groupset and dishy Mavic aero rims has taken me on endless loops of Richmond Park, the length and breadth of the Home Counties, as far afield as deepest Dorset and all the way back from Paris via Le Havre.

A custom-built Dave Lloyd Slalom frame has recently been re-sprayed in a lovely duck-egg blue by the guys at Argos and converted to a single-speed town bike with one of those nifty off-centre White Industries rear hubs, an eBay-purchased carbon-fibre Sugino crankset, cheap but achingly cool BMX brake levers and some eccentric butcher-boy handlebars.

There’s also a full suspension mountain bike in Stealth Bomber matt black and a fold-up, commuter machine that lives in the boot of the car. All these bicycles are fine examples; fast, lightweight, slender and gloriously efficient. But it is my Pashley High Head Roadster – heavy as a tank, about as modern as rickets and with the aerodynamics of a brazier – that sees almost daily action.

My deep affection for this fogey-ish lump is strange because I don’t usually like repro/retro things. I don’t lust after Wurlitzer jukeboxes that play CDs or MP3s.

I am not the type to ride a noisy Harley Davidson motorcycle with its folksy engineering and off-theshelf, mid-life-crisis rebellion stuffed into the fringed leather panniers. And I am properly offended by those preposterous PT Cruiser things that Chrysler knock out for mortgaged-up baby-boomers.

But there are exceptions to this rule. The shed-tech Pashley is a veritable retro classic. Unapologetically British, it is the Roberts Radio of bicycles; an old04

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fashioned design that doesn’t need more than a gentle fettle every so often, because the makers got it so deliciously right the first time around. Yes, Roberts could (and do) add FM, a socket for your iPod and provide a DAB version, but you’ll still go back to the basic threeknobbed, long wave, manually tuned original because it’s so clearly, lovingly handmade, and because it sounds better, warmer and more human.

It’s the same with the beautiful, big-boned, forbiddingly black Pashley. There’s a reason for this.

Where the likes of Specialized and Giant earned their racing stripes on Alpine passes, the cobbles of Flanders and the boulevards of Paris, Pashley, which has been making bikes since 1926, established its bombproof reliability on the village postal routes of England and the butcher and baker delivery rounds of rural Britain.

The Pashley is also the bicycle of choice for American motor company campuses, the Pret A Manger sandwich outfit, the Green & Black’s chocolate people, Domino’s Pizza and Kazakh oilfield workers. Personally, I like to imagine that it was Pashley bike parts that potty-mouthed, Jack-the-Lad factory worker Albert Finney was milling in Karel Reisz’s film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

True to form, the specifications of the bicycle speak a fluent brand of brown coat and cloth cap engineering.

Order a High Head Roadster and you can have any colour you like as long as it’s black. Well, ‘Buckingham Black’, actually. This regal vernacular sets an overall tone. The frame is lugged and brazed and defiantly weighty (the rear triangle is, bizarrely, bolted, rather than welded, on to the seat tube) while the gears are venerable SturmeyArcher three-speed hub jobs operated by the sort of thumb trigger that went out with Spangles and Aztec bars.

You sit on an agricultural black Brooks B33 equipped with comical, double springs that lurch you around corners with the joyful elan of a Silver Cross pram on a ram-raiding spree. The wheels are outrageous 28-inchers with grimly institutional black rims. Handlebars are T H E R I DE

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chrome and swept back like your postman’s. Brakes are hub types like those you see on step-through mopeds. The bell, chrome-plated and soup bowl-sized, is officially listed by the manufacturer as a ‘ding dong’. The black mudguards, meanwhile, have gold-lined coachwork and would look more at home on a restored traction engine. There are no quick-release options with a Pashley and you’ll need more open-ended spanners than Allen keys to work on it.

In what appears to be an attack of pre-war modesty, many of the bike’s moving parts are hidden underneath cowlings, cases and boxes. The chainset does its stuff behind a full black plastic jacket, meaning that it never has to be lubed (or maybe it does, I’ve just never bothered to find out exactly how I’d get access to it). I leave the fiddly job of brake maintenance to my friendly mechanic.

There are other downsides to such an intractable disregard for modernity. For instance, when you buy it, the top third of the Roadster’s back wheel immediately adjacent to the saddle is fitted with a weird, see-through plastic guard which, I presume, is designed to stop one’s long mackintosh (or pleated skirt) from getting caught in the spokes. I thought it looked twee and unnecessary so I removed it. I mean, who do they think I am – Miss Marple?

Then there’s the matter of punctures; again, you have to pay a professional to fix them for you. I know, I know.

Even though we’re usually only talking about a tenner at a time, this hurts me as much as it would any other seasoned cyclist who fancies himself as something of a dab hand with the vulcanizing glue and chalk dust.

But honestly, I have tried to get both the Pashley’s front and rear wheels off on several occasions but the fiddly, labyrinthine brake mechanisms, the skewers that appear to have been designed by Brunel, the heavy Model T mudguards and the myriad retaining and bracing bolts have beaten me every time.

Truth be told, I haven’t been particularly kind to my bike during the past six years. As the city centre miles have rolled on, I have persisted in abusing the Pashley something rotten with jarringly cruel (and energy sapping) wheelies 142

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up pavements and tipsy judders off them. Sometimes I have left it chained to the same parking meter for days on end, safe in the knowledge that because its steamengine styling has zero cred with the drug dealers and pub fences, it is unlikely that it will ever get stolen.

Last year, when the luggage rack and the bulky Heath Robinson stand started to rattle something awful, they had to be removed. Even after such precise, F1-style loadshedding measures, it still weighs as much as Rutland.

So why do I love it? Where my Shimano-clad Pinarello whirrs along like a chip-driven Japanese sewing machine, the Pashley makes joyful, urban music, clattering and humming along like a foot-cranked Singer. It should also be noted that the High Head Roadster is the only bicycle on the road that looks good when worn with a suit. The bike is both curmudgeon and hooligan.

Well, it is when I’m on it, anyway.

Pashley converts tend to wax lyrical about how their gentlemanly contraptions inspire gentlemanly highway conduct, and how the upright, anterior riding position (you are all but standing when sitting in the saddle) makes for impeccably well-mannered journeys, but I’m afraid to say that the aloof, osteopath-approved geometry brings out the worst in me.

Standing tall and easily able to look over long jams of car roofs, I weave through the traffic like a maniacal courier, plotting my heroic, zig-zagging moves many vehicles ahead, grinning like a goon and waving a ‘sorry’ hand signal as I cut up yet another taxi.

I’ll whack the thumb gear changer into second and leave it there for the duration of my usual journey from west London to West End. If I’m feeling especially sporty, I’ll shift into third for the ride along the Hyde Park cycle lane. And no, you can’t do a track stand on a Pashley.

Simon Mills. London, UK. Simon is a freelance journalist who writes for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph. He is also a contributing editor at GQ. He has a wife, two daughters, a dog and five bicycles.

SIDEWAYS cycles

www.sidewayscycles.co.uk - info@sidewayscycles.co.uk

LI FE IS A RACE B y M i ke K l o s e r. Ph o t o g r a p h s E m i l y K l o s e r

ittle did I realise back when I first started out on the national and international race scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s that this was mountain biking’s heyday. Sure it’s still going strong – it’s even an Olympic sport these days – and is undoubtedly bigger now on a worldwide basis than it ever was when I was riding. What’s changed, though, is the money.

Of course there are still big-name pros winning national and world titles, but there are very few big teams with high-salaried riders like there were back in the early 90s.

Most of the top riders were making six-figure salaries and travelling the World Cup circuit, which at its peak featured 10 races around the world, including Australia.

During my first year with Alpinestars, I lived in Albertville, France. I made regular trips to help design their new MTB shoes. I remember them loaning us their big logo-ed box truck to travel to a couple of World Cup races in northern Italy and central Europe. I was travelling with a Welsh guy, Tim Davies, who rode for the British distributor of Alpinestars. Tim was young, loaded with energy and talent and always good for a laugh.

The next summer I spent several weeks with Tim and his family in Wales and training on the steep local roads is not something I will forget; we were on road bikes needing mountain bike gears to get up the hills.

Some of my best achievements were in those early days; the biggest was winning the World Championships in the Swiss town of Crans Montana in 1988. Ned Overend, Johnny Tomac, Joe Murray and all of the top Europeans of the time were there.

It was a race that I felt I could win if I had a good day, but would need to uncork a great ride as I wasn’t seeded as one of the top riders on the front row. I got mixed up

in the field and had to start about 300 people deep but by the time I got to the top of the first climb, which was about 45 minutes into the race, I had made it into the top five. By the second time up the mountain, I had caught and passed Ned, moving into second place.

I had my sights set on Tomac, and fortunately I had the legs to catch him on the final climb and hold him off on the descent to the finish.

I remember slipping and sliding my way down the mountain in the mud: I had some 2.1 Fisher Fat Trax tyres on the bike that I’d been using for most of the summer.

In those days, I didn’t have the luxury of multiple tyre choices or the inventory to put on a new set for each race.

Tomac, on the other hand, had Tioga for a sponsor and access to all the fresh tread he needed.

One of my other accomplishments came at the 1990 World Championships on home soil in Durango, Colorado. I had gone in with high hopes for a good result in the cross country. Because I had spent the summer racing in Europe I hadn’t acquired a US team ranking for the worlds, so I had to race the qualifier two days prior.

Qualifying was no problem, but had a tough day in the actual XC race, finishing in a disappointing 13th place.

I hadn’t put much emphasis on the downhill the next day as I felt my skills were more suited to XC. Despite this, I laid down a great run with only a couple of little mistakes and ended up second to Greg Herbold, a Durango native. At the time I was happy for Greg – this was his speciality and he’d spent countless hours training on this course, but with hindsight, I wish I had found a way to be three seconds faster. A downhill gold medal would sure have been nice alongside the XC win. To date I think only Tomac has managed to achieve that one.

The two Iditabike victories I had were unique in themselves; just the preparation for these races took a pretty intense commitment in the winter months around my home in the Colorado town of Vail.

I recall some pretty crazy rides in some pretty epic conditions, on the groomed trails of Vail mountain in T H E R I DE

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the late evening. I used to encounter snow cats as I zipped down some of the freshly groomed pistes I had skied earlier in the day. In fact, I think I became quite a novelty to those night-time snow-cat crews.

One of the more memorable winter training rides I had for the Iditabike was up two mountain passes in the morning (one being Interstate 70 out of Vail and the other Loveland Pass via the old Highway 6 route).

I was a director of the Professional Mogul Tour and spent the day organising it before returning back home on the mountain bike with studded tyres.

When I first started out in the mountains, I was competing only during the winter, but in the summer I found a love for riding dirt bikes on all the old logging roads and trails that were on my doorstep. I dabbled in both motocross and enduro racing for a bit, while finding some time to do some local running and road bike races.

I never really paid much attention to the endurance sports until I came back from a summer of travelling through Europe on a touring bike. When I returned in the autumn of 1984, I got my first mountain bike; a Specialized Stumpjumper. I equipped it with a rear pannier rack, fenders and a bell for good measure.

The following spring, one of the local sport shops partnered up with their affiliates in Park City, Utah and Sun Valley, Idaho and put on a series of races with the championships being held in Vail.

I won all of the races in the series that summer, including the finals. For that I was given a Gary Fisher Supercaliber. The next summer I started doing some more races around the state and was finding some good results against the likes of Ned and other top names.

As the summer was winding down, I put in a call to Tom Ritchey and Gary Fisher. Both expressed an interest in me, but I think Gary offered me the better deal – a new Procaliber like Joe Murray was racing on, a couple of sets of shorts and jerseys as well as some expenses for entry fees and gas to the races.

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If I recall correctly, I took fifth place at the national championships in Durango that year.

For me, the late 1980s and early 1990s were my years of infancy in the sport. I was highly motivated and determined to become one of the best mountain bikers in the world at that time. I knew that if I was to be successful, I would have to devote myself fully to the sport, and prepare and train accordingly.

During my first 10 years or so of living in the mountains, I had competed regularly in local and national freestyle skiing competitions. But I had to make the decision to hang up the mogul skis, and focus on what would become my livelihood – racing mountain bikes.

I had started racing relatively late compared to many of my rivals: I was 26 when I got my first real sponsorship from Gary Fisher. This is the reason that I’m still able to race and have the motivation to go out to train and prepare for all the competitions I do. To this day, I race on average once or twice a week throughout the year.

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s – nearly a decade after I had seriously started racing mountain bikes – that I felt it was time to start considering what I would do after I finished. Road racing appealed, but I knew that as I was by then in my mid to late 30s, I was passing my prime for this. As it turned out, my final race on the international scene was the World Cup in Vail in the late summer of 1997.

I’ve since moved into adventure racing and have carved a decent career out of it. But the bottom line is that I would still ride my bike regardless of whether I was racing or not. I love the feeling of rolling along under my own power, the ability to see new places and just being able to get lost in the beauty of the outdoors.

And most of all, I love the feeling of a healthy workout for both the mind and body!

Mike Kloser. Vail, Colorado, USA. Loving life and still racing strong at 48 years young. www.mikekloser.com

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