Through Tough Times

At the outset, Kent said this about Veloquent...

"The idea behind Veloquent is good writing about good riding."

This collaboration of authors has done just that. Still, it appears that the skilled writers who were invited to contribute to this blog have focused recently on their own individual, and wildly popular, blogs. As someone who is not a blog celebrity, I don't have an obligation to an adoring public, so I'll take this opportunity to challenge the other authors to share their skills here. Consider this post a creative writing assignment.

The topic is "How riding a bicycle helped me through a tough time". Most of us have been through some tough times. As cyclists, surely the bicycle, in some form, served as a coping mechanism. Write about it. Perhaps, you'll find you have something in common with others in this community. Maybe, you'll develop a new appreciation for your time on two wheels. Best of all, you might even help someone who is struggling at this moment. Wouldn't that be grand?

The following is my pump primer...

It wasn't the bicycle exclusively. It wasn't even the bicycle most of all. In all honesty it was God and people who helped the most. A network of family and friends were invaluable, and my wife was the greatest earthly comfort of all. That said, my time on the bicycle provided a key ingredient and helped me mentally, emotionally, and physically through my two plus years of hell.

I'll not go into details. That is a another story for another time. I'll simply say that it involved violence, checking a loved one into psychiatric hospitals in the middle of the night, ambulance rides, confusion, loss of sleep, worry, family strife, anxiety, relocating to a different part of the state, and struggling to find ways to love more than I had the capacity to love. Compared to anything before, or since, it is the only truly difficult thing I've ever faced. During this time, my use of the bicycle was transformed.

Before the great turmoil, the bicycle was an instrument of training. During my struggles, it was a coping strategy. When life was easy, I had cycling objectives and I trained my body to meet them. When I struggled to get through each day, cycling was a short reward for surviving a little bit longer. My longer rides were less about a higher average speed or another set of intervals, and more about clearing my head, making difficult decisions, and shedding stress...or tears. I began to grab short pockets of time, even 5 or 10 minutes, to go outside and ride circles in the cul-de-sac in front of my house. In those precious longer rides that came less often, I remember feeling my legs pumping endorphines into my system. When I returned, I figured I could somehow make it through the next real challenge.

The worst of those 2 years is behind me now, but that time taught me something about what love is and the importance of people. I ride my bicycle more frequently now than ever, but it distracts from my obligations to people less than it once did. I'm not as fit and I'm not as fast, but in this more healthy balance I've found, I enjoy the bike more than ever. So when the minor frustrations (or even crisis moments) of life arise, I have learned first hand that the bicycle is good medicine.

Phantoms, Part 6

By the time I started mountain biking, Dad couldn’t follow. He could remember his old Schwinn, but the feeling of that heavy bike under a ten-year old boy was lost. He could only recall the shame of dragging it home, axle snapped, to face a mother’s “wait-till-your-father-gets-home” and the long, punishing wait until that father got off his late shift at the power plant. What he didn’t remember was the instant of silence when sixty pounds of Schwinn steel lifted off from the curb. Who could blame him? On that much bike, time in the air didn’t last. Landings were what stuck in the mind, the splay of the front fork, the crunch, the consequences.

But I remembered. I grew up mountain biking before I knew such a thing existed, cruising my parents’ farm. A downhill chute, four feet wide, ran between the east cornfield and the machine shed, opening in the gap between the shed and the barn, closing down to a green tunnel between barn and field which would spit me out near grandpa’s garden at top speed. I’d veer out of the chute at the corner of the barn, cross the broken concrete of the empty cattle lot, pedal frantically to the two-foot drop at lot’s edge, and lift off, a frenzy of sound meeting the anticipatory silence of flight. Landings in the garden meant flat tires, bloodied elbows, a mouth full of dirt, ringing ears, but who cared about consequences when you were in the air? Were the astronauts, my childhood heroes, worrying about the landing when they saw sky give way to space?

My father doesn’t mountain bike because it’s marketed as an “extreme” sport. He doesn’t understand or want to understand all this “extreme” nonsense. As if on schedule, exactly thirty years after leaving Kent State as an idealistic liberal, he has become a grumpy old bastard. “What’s this Mountain Dew commercial about? All these mountain bikers screaming at me... what’s the point of that? Stop screaming. Go get another piercing.” He puts on a good show, but I can see the fear and bewilderment. In a span of time that must seem sudden to him, the counterculture has gone from peace signs and pot to nose rings and heroin. The new teachers he hires at his school are younger than his own children. A stomach which once tolerated morning pizza heated over a dorm desk lamp has become delicate. On his forehead, the hair has gradually crept away at the corners leaving only a narrow peninsula in the center. After fifty-three years and two heart attacks, he is just starting to accept the possibility that he might be getting old.

Schwinn first reissued the Black Phantom in 1995 to celebrate both their centennial and their return from the ashes of bankruptcy. The company had gradually cashed in on the growing rush for “retro” bikes with some less-expensive replica cruisers, but the ‘95 Phantom aspired to much more than these novelties could ever hope for. It was to be an exact copy of the original, top to bottom. The project was to create pure anachronism, bicycles designed from crumbling original blueprints, constructed with tools that had not been used in almost half a century. Where original tools could not be found, they were built, created from history and memory to fabricate one small production run at an astronomical cost. The 1995 Phantoms were born of human touch in an industry dominated by computer-controlled robot welders. The project cost a fortune, well beyond what the company could recoup from the sale of the bikes, even at almost three-thousand dollars each. It made no sense. It was beyond business. It was irrational. And it was beautiful, all the way down to the tiny ridge across the bottom bracket replicating a flaw in the original casting process. I imagine the idea taking root not in conference rooms, but during a ride. A group of true bicycle nuts pause after a long, hard climb to catch their breath, and in the dizziness of oxygen debt, someone jokingly says, “why don’t we build a Phantom?” After the ride, over coffee and donuts, someone else starts drawing on a napkin, tracing the chromed curve of a springer fork, a design Schwinn hasn’t built in decades, and something in that curve sticks in the imagination.

However the concept was planted, it slowly grew from silly idea to fully-realized rubber and steel, history rendered in metal. The company had faced death, become an industry joke, and come screaming back to legitimacy. What better way to announce its return than with a piece of the past, a bike that, like its parent, would surprise the industry simply by existing, enduring? So Schwinn created the 1995 Black Phantom reissue, a small pocket of 1950s America, a testament to durability, to timelessness. At work, when I walk past the reissue, I cannot help but pause, awestruck. The bike is 1955 made tangible, a blend of deco design and car culture lifted into another era. It is graceful. It is brash. Ridable examples of the original Phantoms still exist today, and I don’t doubt that this reissue will still be begging to be pedaled forty years from now. The bike laughs at time, dares aging to touch it.

Those original Schwinns would eventually become the first mountain bikes. In the early 1970s (while I was busy navigating sidewalk cracks on a green tricycle) a group of riders were resurrecting big Schwinn cruisers from California junk piles, driving them to the top of mountain roads, and riding down at top speed. Each run burned most of the grease out of their antique coaster brakes, forcing the riders to repack their hubs with fresh lubrication. To most of the 1970s cycling world, this new kind of riding made no sense. In a bike culture enamored with slender European road racing machines, the very idea of riding down mountains was laughable. Yet, each weekend, a group of accomplished road racers donned jeans and flannel shirts and did just that, sliding through switchback corners on their sixty pound relics. They fell. They drew blood. They broke bikes. They broke bodies. Then, they laughed, went back to the top, rode again, fell again, bled again, laughed again. And those bikes, those abandoned, rusted relics raised from the dead refused to act their age, taking flight just as they had under exuberant ten-year-olds in 1955.

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.