I am not the biggest road racing fan in the world, but I am a fan of spring and of course cycling. And to me there are a few things in life that mark spring’s arrival…
Post Category → Cycling
Unlikely Inspirations
This week has been a strange one as far as me “doing stuff.” Sadly, it only allowed me one day of “real” riding: Wednesday’s hour and a half fat bike ride. The rest of the week has been a hodgepodge of trips to the gym and time spent on the trainer. Not the best of weeks, but better than many I’ve had.
I was up early today and had no problem convincing myself to get on the trainer.* The problem I had was actually forcing myself to pedal the bike on the trainer. The first minutes of my warm up were spent cursing the vile winter for forcing me to the trainer again and my belly which was bouncing off my legs like a gelatinous, beer filled, lycra covered sack with each pedal stroke. Cuss me! CUSS ME TO HELL! (or reasonable facsimile).
Ridin’ Bikes is Swell
After mentally cracking for what may have been the 84th time in my life last week and vowing to spend the rest of this godforsaken endless winter under beer fueled fart smelling blankets in a curtains closed bedroom, I pulled up my grown fat man bibs and forced myself out into the snow to ride today. I have to say it was worth every second of the 21 minutes it took me to stuff my fat ass into three layers of cycling and cold weather gear.
Dirt Road Racin’
I love riding on dirt and gravel roads and racing on them can be just as cool. Sadly, as I look out my window it is snowing yet again, adding more inches of the white stuff on to the many layers of ice and snow that have been on the ground since Thanksgiving. So, any riding I do in the next few weeks will probably have to be done with four-inch wide tires.
Bringing The Mountain To The People
I have an article that I have been working on for almost a year about short track mountain bike racing (here in the States) and cross-country eliminator racing (in the rest of the world). I may or may not ever finish it, and even if I did, I am not sure who would read it or care. But I digress…
Not Moshing To Euro-Techno
When I first saw this photo of Philipp Walsleben on Pez Cycling News, I thought maybe he was all sorts of pissed off and slamming his bike down for some reason or moshing to some sort of hard-core Euro-techno whilst hopped up on ecstasy. Or better yet, having some sort of mental breakdown caused by years of huffing embrocation, riding in circles and jumping over man-made barriers, freaked out and started doing a chorus line dance while holding his bike aloft and laughing maniacally like a smoked up Jürgen Klopp going mental on the touch line.
It turns out I was wrong on all counts, he just fucked up a barrier jump. I like my imagination better… I don’t think I’ll read the photo captions any more.
I can’t thank Philipp enough, because if I had not seen this photo, I would not have been inspired to Google search videos for hard-core Euro techno and I would not have discovered this gem…
Loss For Words (So There’s Pics)
Lately, blogging has been pretty easy and my mind has been pretty generous with topics. Sadly, that ended today. Feel free to read on but I can’t promise much (except a bunch of photos and that the blog is even more lackluster than usual)….
Vintage Milano-San Remo
I was poking around the web yesterday and discovered some pretty sweet video from the 1922 Milano-San Remo race (or Milan-San Remo if you have something against the letter o and prefer the English pronunciation). The 1922 edition of Milano-San Remo was 286.5 km long and won by Giovanni Brunero (Legnano-Pirelli) in a time of 10:14:31. Brunero was also a three-time winner of the Giro d’Italia, taking overall victories in 1921, 1922 and 1926.
The video below is a great look at the 15th edition of one of cycling’s classic races.
Shamed Into The Cold
A well used ceramic space heater sat humming at my feet as I sat sipping my third cup of coffee and staring blankly into my computer monitor. I had long given up on it producing anything worth while and now aimlessly clicked through dead-end after dead-end on Monster.com, hyperbolic football gossip on The Daily Mail and finally full circle back to weather.com where I had started my morning off three hours earlier. I was pleased to see that it was warming up, however I was disappointed to see that all that meant was that it was now 4˚ and not -4˚. Thoughts of climbing on the trainer in my basement now entered my head as I took a big sip of my now ice-cold coffee. Fuck.
Random Photo 00001
Random photo from the snowless 2013 Farmer’s Fat Bike race I used for the contents page of XXC Magazine No. 18 (the final issue).