unsteady states

As the weather finally warms up in the Pacific Northwest, I am finally past the worst of my allergy onslaught and am able to ride my bike more. And as my distances and the number of bike trips increase, I find myself wavering back and forth between two very distinct cycling states. 

State One: I wear padded bike shorts, a jersey with rear pockets and stiff-soled bike shoes, and take the drop-bar road bike out for a longer ride. This ride is often done alone, though occasionally with faster friends who need a "rest day" ride and are therefore more willing and able to match my pace. We average speeds of 13 to 14 mph, which is on the speedy side of things for me. The reason I know how fast we're going is because my drop-bar bike has a computer on it, something I added when I started riding populaires a couple of years ago and needed a computer that was accurate enough to sync up with the cue sheets. On days when I feel limber and fluid, my pedaling is effortless and smooth and I enjoy the feeling of fleetness, even as I struggle to keep up with my faster friends. On the days when I'm wrestling with my perennially bad knees and my breath is wheezy from allergies, or I'm beset by too many bathroom stops, my pedaling slows and I feel frustrated. In this state, trying to be an athlete reminds me precisely that I am NOT one. 

 

State Two: I wear street clothes, occasionally with special, padded cycling underwear but more often not, and I am more inclined to ride my city bike with its upright bars, racks and heavy U-lock. Although there is an old-school mechanical cyclometer on my front wheel, I usually have no idea how fast I'm going, and most of the time don't care. My flat-soled sneakers push BMX platform pedals with toe-cages bolted on, the toe-cage a holdover from my teenage years that I cannot let go of even in street clothes. I still wear a helmet -- I like my brain too much to take chances without it -- but the rest of my ensemble seems to give me permission to putter along, spinning in low gears and not worrying in the least when I am passed by every other rider on the road. I make many stops, at yard sales and gardens and friends' homes, and don't pay much attention to the clock. In this state I don't mind looking -- or riding -- like a non-athlete, a "schlub", a regular person with no pretensions to athletic greatness, and no concern about it either. 

 

The odd thing is that I am unwilling to give up on either kind of riding. And so I waver back and forth, seeking out a new "athletic" cycling goal each year and trying it on for size. For the last two years it's been long-distance riding, hanging out with the Rando crowd. The rides, mostly on the west side of town, have been beautiful, and I've enjoyed -- or suffered -- my way through each. With distance rather than time being the primary goal, I've surprised myself and achieved things I didn't think possible. Now I know I'm capable of metric centuries (100k/62.5 miles) and have completed several of them. Will I try going for a 200k brevet? It's not clear, and lately it doesn't seem to matter so much. The fact that I've ridden SIX metric centuries in the last two years is amazing enough for someone like me, and knowing that I can go out and do it again feels good. 

 

I have observed many lovely days in which I ride my bike just to ride it, and wonder if ultimately I can give up the desire for athletic "greatness" and just settle into a steady diet of State Two and stop worrying about being a jock already. 

 

But in truth, I can't just let things go. This year, in what feels like another grasp at athletic greatness, I've decided to try my hand at cyclocross, that crazy sport where people buy fancy, knobby-tired bikes and run through the mud while carrying them over their shoulders. Why on earth would I even attempt this? 

 

The awful truth: I grew up in an extended family of schlubs, super-ordinary people who did not engage in anything athletic and who in fact were so sedentary that most of them grew fat and slow and horribly unhealthy. I came from people who were known for mental calisthenics, not physical feats of strength and agility. While I was certainly smart, I was also the odd child with the short attention span, the one who could not sit still long enough to read a chapter in a novel -- or even sit all the way through a hourlong TV show -- before I got itchy feet, "shpilkes", and had to get outside and just move around, climbing trees, wading through creeks and riding my bike all over town. Short and skinny and plagued by the recurring fatigue of a disorder -- Crohn's -- that would not be diagnosed until I was in my thirties, I sometimes nearly killed myself trying to do crazy stuff that perhaps I shouldn't have done, and never stopped dreaming of being a real athlete. I marched in drum and bugle corps, wilting in the heat and staggering under the weight of an enormous drum my wiry frame had no business carrying. I went out for track, ran the middle distances and sometimes collapsed from fatigue while trying to keep up with bigger, stronger kids. A running injury diverted my path towards bicycling, with twenty-mile rides in the country and Breaking Away and still more dreaming. And that dreaming is what has kept me coming back for more; more of State One and the lycra and the helmet that makes me look like an angry insect, more of the 60-mile rides and now this venture into the insanity that is cyclocross. 

 

I come from a people with virtually NO history of athletic prowess; Hank Greenberg and a few other stars aside, Ashkenazic Jews are generally known for their brains rather than their brawn. My father was a child prodigy who studied piano at a conservatory; my mother was a writer, singer and would-be fashion designer. P.E. class was something to be suffered through, the only class in which a "C" would be a perfectly acceptable grade, and nothing more. When my physicality expressed itself my parents looked on in confusion, not really knowing what to do with their active younger child except to let her be. They never came to my drum corps or marching band contests, or to my track meets, but they did let me go for those long rides in the country and gave me money to bring back treats from the farmers' stalls. I grew still more wiry and tan and became a weird object of both admiration and envy for my parents, both of whom smoked, ate badly and were sedentary; and neither of whom lived to see 70. 

 

When I look back on my beginnings, it is sometimes amazing that I have made the choices I've made -- to ride my bike as much as possible, to try my hand at unlikely things that make no sense and to see what I can do with this body before it gets too old to find out. 

 

So this summer it will be short-track mountain biking; and in the fall, look for me out on the cyclocross course. I'll likely be in last place, schlepping through the dirt and mud and dragging a cheap mountain bike behind me, stutter-stepping and hoping that, if I don't finish before getting lapped, I'll at least get filthy and have a grand time breathing hard and being among people who understand my need to get out and move.


(graphic designed by J. Edgar; t-shirts available at http://www.cyclofiend.com.)

The Answer

A friend, who happens to not be a cyclist, once asked me what I enjoy about cycling.  I think he was mainly making polite conversation.  Even so, he might have been mildly curious about what aspect holds particular attraction for me.  He might have been trying to get at what specifically is the reward to spinning pedals, round and round, for hours without end, in weather he thinks is best endured indoors.

I had not answered this question before and I did not have a prepared reply.  The usual questions are how I deal with traffic, or how can I stand to sit on such a hard, tiny saddle, or what kind of unique athletic power do I have that enables me to ride to a location more than 5 miles away.  This question was new, and I liked it.  So I paused for maybe 1 or 2 seconds to ponder.

During that brief pause, something surprising happened.  I couldn’t answer.  It wasn’t because I couldn’t come up with anything.  Instead, it was as if I had been slammed with a wave.  A flood of information came to mind.  My brain raced with various aspects of cycling.  It created a checklist of a thousand items and put a “check” by each one.  I was inundated with answers and had so many things running through my head that I was paralyzed.  Like my old computer when I ask it to do too many things at once.  Thinking of all these things I really, really love prompted excitement and my heart rate increased.  A friend asks a simple question, and I freak.  I know how much I enjoy cycling, but my emotional response shocked even me.

I finally gave an answer.  It probably only took 3 or 4 seconds to work myself into this hyper-alert state, and then I said, “Everything.  I like everything about cycling.”  Being all pumped up with all these ideas, that answer was the opening of a flood gate.  It all gushed out.  I talked about flying down hills, suffering during a race, rambling through the countryside with friends, buying new gear, fitness benefits, washing the bike…on and on it went.  He's a pretty big guy and a former football player, so I left out the part about shaving my legs.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that he and I were on a multi-hour car trip and he was my prisoner.  After we arrived, the pressure within had be released and I was feeling great.  I was looking forward to my next ride.

It was a very quiet drive home.  I must have given a great and complete answer because I don’t think he ever asked me about cycling again.

Tour of California devilsh details

Chas keeps an eye on the Amgen Tour from the telly.

I prefer le plein air.

I went up to Santa Rosa (with Peter Rich, future inductee of U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame)and down to Sausalito, both quite rainy days, in order to witness the goings-on.

Crowds like in Europe. Maybe this will be the beginning of something like the Tour de France.

Not surprisingly, there were old friends like artist Taliah Lempert and Dave Perry in the crowd. Bumping into them seemed miraculous. Dave’s a champ racer from the early 1970’s, and he blethered with P.R. while I blagued with Taliah, and somehow we got talking with Connie Carpenter (my old racing colleague as well as boss at 1989 CarpenterPhinney bicycle greatness camp).

It was all very cool. About 48 degrees, and wettttttt.

I went home and scribbled a bit for the Pacific Sun, and am happy to see that people like the story.

Charlie told me about what I missed on TV…something the announcers refused to comment on: a yellow and black caped devil brandishing a HUGE twin-speared syringe pitchfork, jogging along one of the snow-edged roads, jabbing at the riders until Lance shoves him into the snow. I found a decent sequence onlline…but doubt the mainstream media will show what a gadfly with the words Live Clean on his cape has to say about pro racing (several of the riders are back from 2 yr drug suspensions).

Phelan peckish? Check our hoard oeuvre…

meant to be used

Last week I noticed that my Simplex B & B front derailleur, after ten years on my bike, had cracked at the clamp. Not sure how long it had been that way, but knowing I needed to replace it, I began scrounging around in my stash of bike parts until I found its replacement.




I'd obtained an even older Simplex Super LJ derailleur about a year and a half ago and stored it away in anticipation of this event. Last night I made the swap, and rode home with the new dearilleur secured to my bike. It worked fine and I was happy.

(Side Note One: All bike mechanics have a private stash of parts. The variety and generation depends largely on the generation of that mechanic and the beginning of his/her serious technical interest in bicycles. Most of my parts, for example, reflect a mid- to late-1970's sensibility; while a younger mechanic might have a collection of early-generation mountain bike parts. Most of us keep a small supply on hand with which to repair our own bikes, and perhaps family members' bikes as well. We also tend to hoard parts if we know it will be difficult to replace a part we particularly like. For example, I have this wacky thing for Suntour Power-Ratchet stem shifters, and I have five sets in my parts box. Since there's not much call for this component I don't feel especially guilty for hoarding five sets. If it were something rarer and more in demand -- like 1970's-era Campy Record derailleurs -- my level of guilt might increase, at least a little.)

Because Simplex is a company that no longer exists and whose components are of historical interest to bike tech freaks, I posted photos of the repair on my Flickr page.

Within hours of posting the photos, I received an email to my Flickr box from a fellow who scolded me for using such a rare and valuable component on my bike. "You should remove that part immediately and either store it, or put it on ebay. In fact, if you want I'd make you an offer for it that I suspect would be far more than you paid for it."

Well, he was right. I'd paid only ten bucks for the derailleur, because it came into the shop as part of a large lot of used parts, and I'd bought it with my worker discount. As for storing it, well, I'd already DONE that for a year and a half; now that I needed it, it was there for me. I figured my mission had been accomplished.

(Side Note Two: when I first started working in the bike shop where I remain employed today, we kept a large case of vintage bike parts on display. We mostly kept the nice stuff in there, like early Dura-Ace and Campy. A couple of times a year, a Japanese businssman would come through town, and he'd call ahead to see if our case was full. It usually was. He'd swing by an hour or so later, and proceed to virtually clean us out. We'd be several hundred dollars richer and he'd walk out with a box of fancy old bike parts. This had gone on for a few years by the time I was hired.

One day we asked him where all those bike parts were going. He replied, "I take them back to Tokyo, have my doctor friend clean them in a sonic cleaner, and then I put them on display in one of the glass showcases in my office lobby."

We were dumbfounded. The guy was buying up all these parts and then just sitting on them? "Don't you ever use any of them on a bike?" I asked politely.

The businessman shook his head emphatically. "Oh, no," he said. "These are special parts that are no longer being made. They are status symbols in Japan. To use them on a bike would be to destroy them." Seeing that we were still confused, he added, "I and my friends are great lovers of bicycles, and we collect and trade these parts with each other to complete full component sets."
I imagined twenty such offices in high-rise towers throughout Tokyo, filled with gleaming, restored Campagnolo parts that would never go outside again.

We thanked the man for his business. He loaded the box of vintage parts into his rental car and drove away. We decided then and there that we would never again allow him to clean out our case. We'd rather sell at least some of those old parts to people whose old bikes actually needed them to keep going. When he called us the following year, we lied and told him there hadn't been much to come in lately. He was surprised but accepted our story. Seven months later, he called and one of my co-workers did the same thing. He must have gotten the message because I'm told he never called or came by again. But by then, Ebay had begun to siphon off the supply of good, older bike parts from the shops.

Within a year of that man's last phone call to us, we'd noticed a real falling-off of higher-quality used parts and frames coming into the shop. The genie had been let out of the lamp and could never go back; people began to perceive that their stuff was worth far more than shops had traditionally paid out, the parts began appearing on Ebay and Craigslist more frequently. That was pretty much the end of the "innocent" age. Unfortunately, it was also the end of being able to easily find old parts that fit older bikes, and our vintage parts case has never been quite as full since then.)

I wrote back to the fellow who'd emailed about my derailleur swap. I thanked him for his advice and his interest, but explained that I bought that derailleur with the intention of using it, as I feel that bike parts were meant to be used on bikes. I planned to ride with that derailleur until it crapped out, and would not feel a shred of guilt at the idea.

I haven't heard back from him and I suspect he thinks I'm nuts. That's okay by me.

Too Many Options?

Sometimes. Maybe. There are too many options. There is, perhaps, something to be said for doing a thing well rather than adding complexity to make it easier.


On the bicycle, the simple, fixed-wheel doesn't give many options. One either develops a certain skill and rides well, or he probably doesn't ride. The rider of the simple machine learns efficient cycling experientially. He masters the preservation of momentum by doing. He works with the terrain and circumstances given. Like a craftsman, he applies practiced skills to make something of beauty of his resources.

Might this be true in living? Perhaps we reach a point at which we have too many options. We come to a place where we spend too much time evaluating choices. Or we devote too much of our resources developing, maintaining, repairing, rehabilitating, and upgrading complexity...so life might be more convenient. Or faster. Or more entertaining.

Recently, I removed the complexity of coasting and the option of shifting gears from my bicycle. I returned to the simple, fixed-wheel configuration of last summer. Riding the bicycle is a little more work. It is arguably slower in some conditions. But I believe it makes me a stronger, more skillful rider.

I wonder if the same disciplined approach to remove options in other areas of life would build in me a stronger character and make me a more skillful friend.

Phantoms, Part 5

Author's Note:
It's funny, I'd walked away from this piece for a while, picked today to look it over again, and realized just how appropriate it would be to put up the excerpt where I'd left off.

This is dedicated to my late-Grandmother Nunemaker, who sent me on the wild-goose gift chases described below every Christmas (the most memorable led to my first computer, appropriately enough), and to my late-Dad, the first person out of bed on Christmas morning his entire life, even after he had kids of his own.

---

In the bike shop where I work, I hear it almost every day: “Oh, I had one just like that.” The customer is usually male, mid-fifties, responding to the Schwinn Black Phantom reissue cruiser that hangs from our ceiling. I would guess that eighty percent of these glassy-eyed nostalgia sufferers never owned a Phantom. Most probably owned another model in the Schwinn line, or perhaps a bicycle built by Schwinn to be rebadged as a department-store model. After all, in 1950s America, the Schwinn Black Phantom was, without question, the best - and most expensive - bike a kid could have. Granted, from a strictly utilitarian perspective, the original Phantom was nothing new, borrowing from balloon-tire technologies Schwinn perfected two decades earlier. However, unlike its prewar ancestors - the Motorbike, the Autocycle, the DX, the Excelsior - Phantoms had all the toys. Deep black and red enamel, blinding chrome on just about everything, tubing junctures smooth as poured liquid, flowing curves, long antique white pinstripes, real leather saddle, drum brakes, fenders, built-in wheel lock, rear rack with working taillight, working headlight growing organically from the line of the front fender, and a small button on the side of the imitation gas tank controlling the battery-powered horn inside. Everything about the bike was big and overbuilt, from the wide balloon tires on rolled steel rims to the long cowhorn handlebars. In one bicycle, Schwinn blended all the fantasies of postwar Americans, adult and child alike. Style, polish, power, and features - if they sell cars, Schwinn reasoned, why not bikes? The Phantom brought ten-year-old boys to tears of desire, a machine-as-identity lust that would eventually be transferred to four-wheeled vehicles like Mustangs, Corvettes, and Camaros. In its time, it was simply the ultimate bicycle. Even fifty years later, the Phantom still stands as a defining moment in bicycle history, pursued by collectors like a two-wheeled Holy Grail. So I can’t blame these glassy-eyed men in my shop for the blur in their memories, the hardening of want into remembered ownership. My own father, now fifty-four, suffers the same illness.

On March 3, 1954, for his ninth birthday, my father received what he remembers as a Schwinn Black Phantom. That morning, my grandparents probably gave him something small, pretending that the gift-giving was over. Then, just as disappointment set in, they handed him a small note: “Look in the hall closet.” In the hall closet, another note: “Look under your pillow.” I see my grandparents exchanging smiles over coffee as their son scurries around the house. Under the pillow: “Look on Mom’s dresser.” On the dresser: “Look in the garage.” Since it was March in Illinois, I’m certain my grandmother stopped him on his way out the door, insisting on a coat and hat, adding one more delay just as the suspense reached its zenith.

Finally, a warm coat wrapped over his pajamas, he burst into the garage, and there it was: his Schwinn. Black, with cream trim. Black-painted fenders with matching cream pinstripes. A rear rack. Chrome springer fork. Big. Gleaming. Most birthday presents would require a bow, but the Schwinn had enough style simply propped on its kickstand. They rolled it outside into the bitter Illinois winter, stood boy and bike in front of the garage door, and snapped a picture in the snow.

In the next four years, my father would shear off the coaster brake fixing strap (as well as several of grandpa’s replacement straps) and shatter the front axle jumping the bike off what he calls “a small wall.” The social mores of preteens would shift, decreeing that bikes were no longer “cool,” and the bike would be abandoned in the garage, then sold. But forty-four years later, if I could just find that photograph, my father would still be a pudgy, grinning nine-year old in his winter coat and hat, the piles of snow would never melt, and his Schwinn would remain unridden, unbroken, and unquestionably cool. Would I have the heart to tell him his bike was the less-expensive, less-coveted Panther, not the Phantom it has become in his mind? Would it matter?

Cool New Bike Porn

The Competition Bicycle
A photographic history
By Jan Heine and Jean-Pierre Praderes

There is almost no bicycle book I don’t love, and this latest coffee-table book, weighing in at three and a half pounds, is a velo-bibliophile’s dream tome. It could be the coffee table itself, so long as you wrapped it in two layers of plexiglass to keep it pristine.

The well-reproduced color photographs by renowned French photographer (himself a devout randonneur) Jean-Pierre Praderes show every gritty inch, er..millimeter of the legendary frames that propelled the greats from Coppi to Merckx to Lemond (with a couple of feminine detours thank goddess) across destiny’s finish line.

Jan Heine, the author and publisher (www.vintagebicyclepress.com) is a rabid Paris-Brest-Paris competitor. When he called me a year ago about photographing my bicycle Otto, I was astonished to learn mine would be the only mountain bike in the book.
It’s an honor
Said Heine: What other mountain bike was twenty years ahead of its time?
Eat yr heart out, Tom (name withheld to protect ego). Sometimes steel IS real…real heavy!
Settle down, girl. This is a magazine. Not a gossip sheet. (Feel free to hurl, o editor mine)
The fast majority of the bicycles shown are indeed steel, custom machines that reveal over 150 years of improvement the leapfrogging improvements that allow us to enjoy multiple gear choices, modern materials and sometimes even evolutionary cul-de sacs (psst: “Dursley Pedersen”)

Many of the original machines (flown in for the photo shoot) reveal details of workmanship that cannot be found anywhere else, unless specified to a custom builder today.

Artsy touches appear in the mass-produced chainrings of British Short Arms bikes (BSA spelt out in the chainring) and ALCYON cast into the pedal cages).

The reader will at first page through this book slowly, savoring the pictures—most of which have never been seen before—bicycles seemingly track-standing mid-air…and action shots of the great racers. Later, the reader will return feverish for more intimate details of bicycles hard-ridden and put away, but not forgotten.
The book costs sixty (swiftly deflating) dollars, plus about thirty dollars post (THAT is not gonna go down, with fuel costs rising)… it’s the perfect stocking stuffer if you have a sock the size of Santa’s size fourteen platters tacked to the mantel with a grade twelve alloy steel 10-32 socket-head cap screw with cold-rolled threads. Ahem.
Santa? Got that?