I Am the Wind

A bicycle is an instrument of transcendence. It carries its rider from the common to the special. Those smitten with the bicycle sometimes describe the sensation as flying. Gliding downhill effortlessly, carving large arcs with wind in my face is how I imagine flying. Each swerve I make is a banked turn on outstretched wings. The only sound is rushing air moving past me as I soar through it. Bicyclists tell of this feeling, but there is another.

Sometimes I am more than a bird in flight. I become a force of nature. When the wind blows steadily and directly down the road, we synchronize pace. At once, the air is still and silent. Tires quietly hum. I and my bicycle move, but with no effort. With a rolling gold-orange-brown wave of fallen leaves, we surf across the earth. We glide in startling stillness, a massive train of air. I've been carried to a special place. I am the wind.

My Six-Fingered Man

I just finished reading The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I've seen the movie about a dozen times -- though not as many times as my wife, who can proudly quote just about anything in the film: Cliffs of Insanity, Miracle Max, Battle of Wits, you name it. I'd meant to actually see the words on paper for years, but never quite got around to it until now -- which, as Vizzini (played in the film by the incomparable Wallace Shawn) would say, is "inconceivable!"

After I finished up, I went for a bike ride, Goldman's wonderful characters and hilarious asides still fresh in my mind. As I got warmed up and felt my legs settle into a rhythm, I kept hearing the voice of Mandy Patinkin as the vengeance-seeking Inigo Montoya, facing down the six-fingered man who took his father's life. "Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. HELLO, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. HELLO! My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

I ride my bike for a lot of reasons. It's fun. It gives me an excuse to take things apart and put them back together. It gets me to work or to the store. It lets me live out fantasies of being faster or stronger than I really am. It reminds me of being a kid. But the one I don't face up to often is my very own six-fingered man. My father had his first heart attack at age 44 when I was a teenager. He survived. His second came at age 50, when I was in college. He survived again, though not by much. And his final heart attack struck at age 54, when I was just 28 years old. That one ended his life.

You don't get to duel with heart disease. You don't get a climactic battle scene in a castle, your sword flashing, blood pouring from your wounds, your enemy vanquished. All you get is another day marked off the calendar, another day healthy, another day survived, an endless series of scratches tick-marked in the enemy's flesh. But when I'm out riding, feeling the strength of my own heart banging against my ribs, I feel like I'm winning. I can look my enemy in the face and see the fear in his eyes.

Hello. My name is Jason Nunemaker. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

Proper bike usage when confronted with shovels

Things seem to have been a bit slow here at Veloquent of late. Hopefully this will get the creative sparks a flying.



Via Chris C on the boblist

Oh no, it's me!

I submit that most of us who think ourselves to be serious cyclists have goals. Perhaps “dreams” is a better word. It might be a transcontinental tour, to go carless, or notch that first century. Some might be pursuing Kent Peterson’s, “ride 12,000 miles a year and eat what you want” concept, a complete brevet series, or simply to commute to work for the very first time. I think most of us are chasing something.

As time flows steadily by, dreams change. Regardless of the dream, however, riding more has consistently been a path to my destination. I have continually sought to overcome obstacles that would stand between me and my bike.

Now that years have passed, I have systematically confronted and defeated darkness, cold, and road conditions. My children have grown and my fatherly duties have diminished. I have moved to a rural area with abundant low-traffic roads. So you might be surprised to learn that, with no decrease in passion, I ride less now than a few years ago. I seem to be losing the battle and struggle to find ways to ride more.

Just recently I was slapped silly by the realization, “Oh no…it’s me!” I am the obstacle and a formidable one. There are numerous sobering examples of people that overcome so much more to achieve their dreams with so much less. How do they do it?

Maybe I’ve been focusing on my constraints while they’ve focused on the possibilities. While I’ve been making excuses to hide my own laziness and fear, they dream and do. Yes, friends, I think I’ve found the true obstacle. It is not methods, training, traffic, or gear. Oh no, to be sure, it’s me.

I’ve read your stories and they inspire me. For those who overcame themselves, tell me please, how was it done?

bikes as trucks

I began this year hoping to ride a 200km brevet, which would be a new distance record for me. I figured that after riding four metric centuries (62.5 mi/100km) last year this was the next logical goal. Life and other stuff got in the way, and my longest ride to date has been 55 miles of the 70-mile Livestrong course which I rode in late June.

Meanwhile, I've been discovering another approach to riding: one where not distance, but cargo capacity, is the measuring rod.

I had a Burley kid trailer. In the four years I owned it I used it perhaps a dozen times. When not in use it hung folded on the wall of the shed and sometimes got in the way when I needed to get at other things. I wanted to find a better way to carry stuff, and lots of it; but the trailer just wasn't working for me.

Enter the longbike.

I had an opportunity to buy an Xtracycle kit and add it on to the rear end of an old-school 1980's ATB, thus turning it into some kind of human-powered pickup truck. The longbike solution would take up more floor space than the trailer, but if I used it more then that tradeoff would be justified. It turned out to be a marvelous idea.







I started out doing basic things: going to the farmer's market or the grocery store; bringing home the occasional frameset or wheel from the shop. Riding was easy because I'd selected a wide range of gears and also because I had readjusted my definition of "fast" to accommodate travel on this longer, heavier bike.

Then, I got ambitious. I started bringing home larger loads, more unwieldy, oddly-shaped objects -- not on a regular basis, but just to see if I could. The ladder was free, a leftover from work that was no longer needed, and if I wanted it I had to get it home. No problem with the longbike:





What has happened is that I find I have less time and energy for "training" rides per se -- I simply haven't been able to make regular, consistent time for many long weekends rides this summer -- but instead I have made time for shorter rides with heavier, bigger loads around town. Not sure what this will do for my "fitness", and the more I ride my longbike the less I worry about that.

My best ride of all so far happened the Thursday before Labor Day, when I loaded up the longbike with lawn chairs and a picnic basket. My partner and I rode our bikes downtown for the Oregon Symphony's annual Waterfront Concert, a free event that attracts thousands of people and ends with the playing Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and a glorious fireworks show.





After the concert, we rode home again, attracting stares and some good-natured smiles along the way.

My bike isn't unusual anymore; there are hundreds of these Xtracycles and other versions of longbikes (like Bakfietsen, Brox [recumbent] longbikes and Mondo-bikes and such) around town now. My hope is that more people who see this kind of bike will come to accept it as yet another form of serious, real-world transportation. I'd like drivers to give me a little slack at intersections because it takes a little longer to get a longbike going from a standstill. I'd like traffic engineers to think big-picture and longer term when they plan future streets, to make a little bit more room for these bikes because they could really ease congestion in cities. And I'd like to think that this kind of utilitarian riding will help me ride stronger, even if it doesn't help me ride longer. Mostly, I have to say that although I didn't really go for my original riding goal, I've had a marvelous bicycling summer anyway discovering another kind of riding.

Down in Texas

Down in Texas, the north grass land grows thirsty and stalks of kindling wave in the wind. Since morning, a mockingbird has been working the fenceline, and the cattle have congregated at precious trees. They follow the shade from long to short to long again as it crawls silently from one side of the tree to the other. Pick-up driving ranchers motor by with regularity, but to pasture dwellers it is routine background noise.

First one head, and then a few, lift and look for an odd new sound. Barely audible, is it danger? What is that continuous peeling of asphalt moving steady toward us? That’s no rancher. It’s stealthier. Be ready to flee.

Two wheels roll on hot pavement. Their tires adhere to the hot, sticky black. Then the sound of stainless steel spokes, so many useless fan blades, spinning and beating the air. Finally, rhythmic breathing grows louder...and then fainter as the cyclist glides on by. A few wary heads turn and follow, but the spoke sounds disappear. The peeling fades to nothing but the same hot breeze through brittle grass from only moments ago.

One by one, heads drop back down, tails flick flies, and the hot work of summer sustenance continues in the pasture.

Phantoms, Part 4

My grey Trek 830 went from first love to rusted beater in the span of four years: accessorized, stripped, cared for, neglected, covered in stickers, abandoned in Dad’s garage, abused, left in the rain, and taken to college because it was finally too ugly to steal. In 1991, when my affections were finally stolen away by a big, tennis-ball yellow Trek 6000 with its six extra gears, ultralight aluminum tubing, stop-right-now brakes, and (finally) quick-release wheels, I stripped my first love bare, painted it black, swapped out the teal stem because it didn’t match the new paint, reassembled it with some help from the shop, and sold it cheap to my then-girlfriend’s father. He rode it a few times and hung it in his garage, too polite to admit it didn’t connect for him like his old Schwinn three-speed. I don’t doubt it’s still there, hanging from the rafters. I’ve considered calling, perhaps offering to buy back his piece of my cycling past, but I can’t figure out a polite way to say, “This is your former future-son-in-law... I know I’m no longer in love with your daughter, but that bike...”

A true bike nut remembers them all fondly. Each bike sticks in the mind like an old friendship I’ve grudgingly outgrown. The orange-and-red banana-seat Murray. The chrome Huffy BMX bike. The royal blue Murray mountain bike knockoff. Dad’s brown Free Spirit ten speed. The sky-blue hand-me-down Schwinn Continental from my cousin Dale. My blue Schwinn World Sport. The grey 830. The yellow 6000. Schwinn 974 racing bike. Cannondale M400 mountain bike. Cannondale T700 touring bike. Specialized Epic racing bike. Schwinn DeLuxe Twinn Tandem. Nishiki Citysport cruiser. GT Slipstream hybrid cruiser. And finally, my current friends, the Specialized Rockhopper mountain bike and Schwinn Paramount road bike. I learned to ride a bike twenty years ago. Seventeen bikes in twenty years. And I remember them all, because every one helped me live out a fantasy of who I wanted to be. At seven, I carried the absolute conviction that my banana-seat Murray looked just like a California Highway Patrol motorcycle. As I cruised the long gravel driveway of my parents’ farm, twisting the plastic grip like a throttle, I was Jon from my favorite TV show, “CHiPs.” I chased down the car thieves, rescued children from burning buses, wrote out speeding tickets. On my bike, I was the hero. It sounds funny to me now, but even today, when I shift into the big chainring on my road bike, somewhere in my mind I see Greg LeMond tucked low, methodically reeling in Laurent Fignon to take the 1989 Tour de France. Different bike, different fantasy, but I’m still trying on identities, wanting to be more than simply me.