Here's A Fine, Douchebaggy Start to Your Week

Seen in the morning "papers."




I don't take these "examiners" too seriously for the simple reason that most of them are ignorant dipshits. But y'know a broken clock is right twice a day. I for one have been saying that the only thing that looks worse on a cyclist than white spandex shorts is self-righteousness. But whatever. Cyclists are superior to pedestrians and automobile drivers, and the sooner everyone realizes it, the safer we cyclists will be. And all-powerful. And benevolent in our absolute control over every living thing. Car drivers will still be allowed to ride folding bikes. Pedestrians may continue to pedest, so long as they use a unicycle or a Razor scooter.

Still, no one likes a moralizing prig, regardless of whether or not he's a prig on wheels. And, as so often is the case with moralizing prigs, this guy steps over the line:

Then I became a victim of the wrath of “entitled biker.” You know the guy. He flies along, disregarding anything and anyone in his path. And God forbid you dare to cross his path. He will mutter angrily as he passes you. Those guys are the reason I wish more bicyclists were run over by trucks.

Nice.

A Whole Lot of Justification for Bending One Rule

In Oregon, they're talking about adapting the "Idaho Stop" rule which basically turns stops signs into yield signs for cyclists. Not a terrible idea, I guess, but seems quite a lot of paperwork for legislators, advocates, and other busybodies. What they're really saying in the subtext here is "OUR POLICE OFFICERS ARE BORED AND THERE ISN'T ENOUGH REAL CRIME GOING ON IN OUR GENTEEL CITY, SO THEY'RE BUSTING BIKE RIDERS FOR BREAKING AUTOMOBILE RULES, AND WE WANT THEM TO STOP THAT."W



Bicycles, Rolling Stops, and the Idaho Stop from Spencer Boomhower on Vimeo.

This is a clever video, and you can appreciate the earnestness of it all, but basing the entire proposal on the "scientific" merit of momentum preservation is ridiculous. If stop signs are what stand between you and a debilitating bonk in your daily commute, you might consider taking the bus or buying a Segway.

A danger -- sweet danger -- to ourselves

Another season, another 100,000 words on bikes competing with cars. Krikey, now that 10 million Americans are looking at unemployment and foreclosure, you'd think we'd have something more interesting to yammer about, but still. Cars continue to weigh roughly 5,000 pounds, and despite some nominal weight gain during the winter months, my bike and I continue to weigh significantly less than that. Ramifications are clear: I can zip around pretty efficiently, using sidewalks and alleys and bike paths and beaver runs. But of course I can also be quickly reduced to ground chuck if my line happens to intersect with that of an automobile. The rest -- who's right, who's wrong -- is just blowing smoke up the ass of a Judeo-Christian God. We all bend and break the rules, and thank goodness you generally can't have guns and strong liquor at hand, or the Parkway would look at bit more like Faluja.

Car owners assign blame in collisions to cyclists not following rules of the road, yet one of the reasons some drivers refuse to bicycle is because they say it is dangerous. Why is it dangerous? Because of cars. Otherwise, people would say it was dangerous because they didn't trust themselves to follow traffic rules.

That's waterproof logic for you, but I realized that if I were being perfectly honest, I'd agree with that final premise. To wit, biking is dangerous because I don't trust myself to follow traffic rules while biking.

This falls under a whole category of activities that I don't trust myself to do intelligently, legally, or in moderation.


Things Pinchie Does Dangerously

• Rolls through stop signs and the occasional red light
• Tries to track stand in overtightened SPDs
• Rides alone with iPod
• Gin
  
• Sometimes uses crosswalk to gain competitive advantage
• Wears lycra shorts
• Occasionally signals a right-hand turn with right hand
  
• Goes helmetless, like going condomless, sometimes just for the thrill of it
  
• Does not keep receipts
• Falls in and out of love almost every day with biker chicks
• Runs a Shimano 610 derailleur with XTR cassette on crossbike
  
• Plays lawnsports without first doing dog-poop duty
• Does not thoroughly separate glossy paper from newsprint in recycling
• Overloads door of fridge with little-used condiments
• Has used a wrench as a hammer and a screwdriver as a chisel
• Sometimes takes dog offleash in non-offleash areas
• Procrastinates in paying $120 ticket for taking dog offleash in non-offleash area
  

I'm sure you could make a list of your own, or add to my list.

Tough times for the economy — and your gazifit

It's become a truism that bike sales are up in this particular recession (which is, by the way, shaping up to be an actual depression, depending on your definitions), but it turns out that's not exactly true. Bike shipments overall were down in the third quarter of this year. Kids bikes, 24-inch bikes, and 26-inch bikes were all down -- led by double-digit declines in sales of double-suspension mountain bikes, which suggests that when the going gets tough, the tough ride a hard tail. (Not me, dude!)

BUT! Sales of bikes in the Big Wheel (700c/29er) category are actually up. This category includes commuters, hybrids, city bikes, road bikes, and most cargo bikes that look really gay. So it would appear that even if bike sales are down overall, the area where you'd expect solid sales -- commuters, realpolitik riders who are desperate to avoid the financial/emotional expenses of car commuting, etc. -- are in fact up and staying there.

Put those winter studs on and ride proud, young commuter!

Is that a bike pump in your pocket, or are you just mad to see me?

I've worried a long time about homophobia in the cycling community. There are quite a lot of fag jokes in the peloton that I somewhat optimistically dismiss as being ironic, since most of my riding buddies could care less where a fellow chooses to, um, park his bike (as it were).

But come to think of it, I'm not sure the LGBT community is fully pro-bike either.

Are bike lanes gay? Or are they straight? I'm cool with them either way. Seriously.

NYMag >>

The president poaches some bitchin' singletrack

We live in fractious times. I sometimes feel myself getting an ulcer when I watch the news. And when I watch video of hardcore red-state Republicans dissing Obama and his supporters and yelling uncivil nonsense ("terrorist," "Muslim," "baby killer," "socialist") I have a couple of responses, but mostly it's just what a bunch of pathetic sore losers. I think, Y'all have monopolized all three branches of government for almost two decades, and now maybe it's time for a little change, and your response is to act like spoiled children whose parents never taught you how to behave in public.

There was a time when I was a "Bush hater." I just couldn't stand the guy. He was a Yale-educated grandson of an oil baron whose only achievement in life was flipping the Texas Rangers for a tidy profit, and he talked like a hick, and it all just seemed like a big put on, while he was really just interested in enriching his old oil buddies and letting Dick Cheney take a big crap on the constitution, start two idiotic and debilitating wars, and -- oh yeah -- subvert the credibility of the entire global economy, with the end result that the US was pretty much thought globally to be the Assholes of the Universe in just seven years' time.¹ That's not just me and Sarah Silverman talking. That's the rest of the Universe talking, and it might be a good time for us to start listening, before the Universe decides that maybe oil should be priced in euros and not dollars. For example. For starters.

So but I'm not here to lecture anybody, and I apologize if I just can't control myself, but my point is that George W. Bush will, before he leaves office, make it easier for mountain bikers to gain access to national parks. Naturally, NORBA and IMBA and maybe even NAMBLA have been pushing for this for years. It's a glacial system right now that takes years, and mountains of paperwork, and canyons of despair to get bikes into some of the nation's most coveted natural environments.

I've got mixed feelings about this, because sure it would be awesome to take the old Stumpjumper out to the Cloud Peak Wilderness in Wyoming, or into Arches National Monument in Utah, or wherever. Who wouldn't dig that?

But you know I'm just not sure the Presidency of the United States should be used, necessarily, to serve the needs and whims and hobbies of the man (or the woman) sitting in that saddle, and I'm not at all sure that allowing mountain bikes on "multiple use" trails out West is an unconditionally good thing either, given the already rancorous relationship between horse enthusiasts, say, and backpackers. Mountain bikes are hell on trails, no question about it, which is why trail maintenance is so important to good relations between "different constituencies," but even better is to give everyone their own designated path, but of course that's doubling or tripling the impact in the national environmental treasury, lands we should be grateful have been set aside into perpetuity to protect from the usual enchroachments of "civilization" and "development."

I worry that opening up national parks to mountain bikes is a little like "drill baby drill" in spirit -- that is, let us have access to the resources for our own selfish purposes, everyone else be damned. Of course, like anything else there is surely a middle ground, and it's not especially useful to make the conversation a polarized all-or-nothing sort of thing.

So in the spirit of moderation and bipartisan fellowship, let me just say I think it's neat that President Bush is an enthusiastic mountain biker, and that he's willing to ease up on rules that have long discriminated against mountain biking (whereas it's amazingly easy to get your 1,000 head of beef or sheep² onto federal lands to graze on the People's Grass and contaminate and reroute the People's Water Sources, etc.), and if it results in some awesome new trails in our national parks, that's great. But! I'd hasten to add that there are plenty -- plenty! -- of awesome existing trails on unregulated lands, dozens more than I'll ever be able to ride in a lifetime.³

So pushing really hard to allow more mountain biking reminds me, a little, of the idiot motorhead contingent here in Minnesota who insist that the BWCA should be opened up to motorboats in the summer and snowmobiles in the winter, when literally 99% of the rest of the state's land area is perfectly legal for those pursuits (and a significant amount of it's public land and perfectly accessible).

It's not a perfect equivalence obviously because cycling is more or less a silent sport that has less aesthetic impact on the environment (unless you're wearing one of those heinous Rock Racing or LiquiGas kits, of course), but I guess what I'm saying is that we need to proceed very carefully and diplomatically. Let's keep it civil and above-board. You know the rules, and I think they apply pretty well to the real world, too: ride within your limits, yield to others, warn of your approach, skidding is amateur.

I'd like to see those rules on campaign lawn signs around the country, actually.


¹Edward Abbey said, memorably: "America. Love it or leave it alone."
²John Muir, seeing the damage grazing sheep had done in the High Sierra, called them "hooved locusts."
³There is one troubling exception to all this, and that's the ongoing hassle with the Mah-Da-Hey trail in North Dakota, where a significant section of existing world-class singletrack is interrupted by Theodore Roosevelt National Grassland, and there's been a battle brewing about this for years and years, and it seems to make the most sense to any normal person evaluating the sitch to just go ahead and open up that disputed section of remote trail and stop the silly game of bureaucratic charades.

And now for something completely different

Re: Why rednecks may rule the world.

You know, I'm pretty fucking sick and tired of being put down and dismissed and disrespected for being educated and living in a city and having values that run a bit more esoteric than how to fucking field dress a goddamn moose. Fuck these people and their stupid fucking values. Fuck guns and hunting. Fuck "self-sufficiency" and flannel and ATVs and jet-skis. You want a goddamn culture war, you got it. I'm tired of you selfish petty assholes ruining every goddamn election and running this country to ground, all because you want a president you can be comfortable drinking a Bud with.

My God-fearing, Republican parents worked their asses off to give me a good education, and though they might regret it, I don't intend to waste it being put down by a bunch of beer-bellied asshats who are somehow more "authentic" and "real" and "American" than me and everyone I know and respect and wish to spend time with.

And the idea that "rednecks" are tough enough to take being called "rednecks" to their face is patently ridiculous. Rednecks CANNOT take a joke or a putdown or any kind of criticism that comes from anyone outside their inbred, idiotic circlejerk of Republican lickspittles. Least of all from the so-called liberal media. Who do you think invented that whole "liberal elite media" thing? Dipshit rednecks.

I'm sick and tired of not being represented by my president, of being embarrassed by him and the people who elected him. I'm sick of apologizing to friends and acquaintances abroad. I'm sick of making excuses for American mistakes, missteps, fuck ups. I'm sick of pretending that America is automatically right simply because we're America. It's embarrassing. Our country has been turned into an international -- no a GALACTIC-- laughing stock by a bunch of profiteering, selfish suits who did it with the password "BUDWEISER" and the yuk-yuks and wink-winks of the retarded "cultural South." I'm sick of seeing this country run into the ground for selfish, stupid reasons. I'm sick of making excuses for major American coprorations to continue to rape the planet for personal profit. I'm sick of "maximizing return" to"stockholders." I'm fucking sick of snowmobiles, and ATVS and dirt bikes, and Thirty Ought Sixes. I'm tired of your fake hillbilly accent. You are ruining the planet, and you're wrecking the view, and you're stinking up the place, and you don't even pay your fair share of taxes, you ignorant socialist tit-suckers.

I'm for people. As many people as possible. I'm for the planet. I'm for profit, as long as it doesn't come at anyone's expense. I'm for diversity of experience, of life. I want to travel everywhere and be respected because my country is a bastion of rights for all individuals, no matter what the color of their skin or the flavor of their beliefs, or the origin of their parents.

If you're not with me, you're against me. Ride a bike every day, and call me in 12 months.

Ahhhhh, spleen. Much better.

Fifth horseman of the Apocalypse: Bike lanes!

Seen in the morning papers... Dude thinks bike lanes cause more pollution. The upshot is that bike lanes cause more congestion and more idling cars.

Mr. Anderson disagrees. Cars always will vastly outnumber bikes, he reasons, so allotting more street space to cyclists could cause more traffic jams, more idling and more pollution. Mr. Anderson says the city has been blinded by political correctness. It's an "attempt by the anti-car fanatics to screw up our traffic on behalf of the bicycle fantasy," he wrote in his blog this month.

What do you think? Does Rob Anderson care more about air quality than you? Or is he just being a lazy, self-righteous asshole?

Burning down the... barriers

Here's a video of David Byrne, discussing his participation in NYC's bike rack competition and his own entries thereof. There's a a moment when he's talking about powdercoating and he takes a long pause... and my heart sank, thinking he was going to go into the whole "it's what the kids are doing with their fixies and their deep-Vees." But good old DB pulled me back from the brink of cynicism. "It's what they paint.... file cabinets with." Awesome!

Liza goes to Washington -- on a bike!

Our young friend Liza Stoner has arrived in D.C. after a 1,500 mile ride from Minneapolis.

Well done, Liza! The 14-year-old cyclist brought US senator Amy Klobuchar a petition signed by 1,200 Minnesotans to raise awareness about... uh, electric cars. (I rather think it raised awareness of bikes, too.)

Sure, this may be coals to Newcastle. Still. It takes guts (and legs and lungs) to ride cross country.
It especially takes heart to ride through the demoralizing flats of Ohio and Indiana.

Klobuchar, incidentally, has done her fair share of long distance riding -- being one of the pioneers, with her estimable father -- of RAGBRAI.

Supply and demand, my friend. Supply and demand

Whatever you might think of Trek -- the General Motors of the bike industry and all that-- they've got the muscle and the money to do some nifty stuff. And I'm not just talking about those strange TDF advertisements that feature the unshaven Lance Armstrong. (I do like "Believe," it's a cut above the cheesy and crass "Best.")

So I think it's in the spirit of "Believe" rather than "Best" that they've pioneered this little "bike gas station" in Madison. Judging from what I saw on my way up to the UP last week, I'd say there will be plenty of vacant gas stations looking for new leasees in coming months and years.

At last, a major media source recognizes a global opportunity

Seen in this morning's Boston Globe...



I know, I hate that. I have this wonderful old Fuji commuter set up with Sugino and Nitto, and the kickstand is about 1 inch too short. So you know, constantly on the lookout for a slight hill to park on, or small bits of wood.

Let a million bike trailers bloom

In Denmark, Ikea is rolling out its own bikeshare program, but with an extra bonus: Their bikes will come equipped with a trailer, one of which I want about as much as I want a vintage Kosmo.com mess bag. (A lot!) Ikea says about 20 percent of their Danish customers arrive at the store by bike. (At my local Ikea, at the Mall of America, that number is more like, uh... zero. The South Metro is less bike-friendly than Los Angeles, and not nearly as pretty. I've been known to ride the Surly out that way though. The last time, in fact, was to buy a 7.5 MM hex wrench at Sears in order to take off my self-extracting Campy crankset.)



Thing is, though: My full-sized Dodge Caravan -- a behemoth in every sense of the word -- has frequently been too small to bring home what I need from Ikea.

Perhaps I need to downsize my purchases and stick to wine glasses, lightbulbs, and Swedish meatballs.

The worst city in the US for bike commuting? Ahh, why bother.

One might think that Los Angeles or Houston are the worst places on the planet to ride a bike. But apparently Atlanta and many northern counties in Georgia can make that claim. An article today in the Gainesvilled Times says that even though gas prices have gone all... well...



that bike sales are actually flat. (Motorcycle and scooter sales are up, though.)

While the article spoke flatteringly of Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle as "bike friendly" towns with plenty of bike lanes (take that, Boulder! Pffft, Santa Clara! Fuggedaboudit, New York!), let's face it: The US generally sucks for bike commuting. If you take David Crites' word for it, the ideal bike commute is 2 to 8 miles. So the executive director of Georgia Bikes makes it clear that pretty much 75 percent of all Americans have no hope of bike commuting. (But hey, there' s this think called the Internets? Allowing more people to work at home? Then they can get their own Internets and ride their bikes. For pleasure!)


Anyway, what caught my eye in the article was this little tidbit:

But most roads, both in Hall and throughout metro Atlanta, are not designed to accommodate bicycles, and that’s a problem that no one has yet been able to fix.

Funny, most roads in Europe weren't designed to accommodate cars or bikes, and yet they seem to have no problem accommodating both. It's not a design issue, its a cognitive issue. If you turn a two way automobile road into a one way with a bike lane -- voila! You have a bike friendly city.

This ain't rocket surgery folks.

But of course American cities wouldn't be what they are without the serious lack of candlepower in the civil planners' offices.

Happy Thoughts for Your Critical Mass Ride Today

Out in Alameda, the city council is trying to pass an amendment that would make it illegal to ride bikes or skateboards in city parks, school yards, parking lots and public structures like parking ramps.

The original reasoning for changing the ordinance was to address an ongoing problem with skateboarders using the steep interior ramps of the new six-story parking garage as a recreation area.

I've noticed a couple other ongoing problems: The cost of fuel and the wastefulness of driving 2,000 pound internal-combustion cages and obese police officers. I'm just saying. I've noticed.


Meanwhile up in San Francisco they're sort of taking the opposite approach to Alameda. There, they're trying to pass laws that would limit urban sprawl and encourage population density. That is, more people living closer together within cycling distance to grocery stores, baseball stadiums, city parks.

The automobile is quickly becoming obsolete, so why not start planning for that eventuality?

Canadian crackdown

Up in Toronto, authorities have wrapped up their week-long "bike blitz," a dragnet operation that resulted in 7,000 tickets being issued to car drivers and cyclists. It was an attempt to shore up the rules and slap a few wrists -- from nailing outlaw cyclists that run red lights and menace the sidewalks, to cars drivers who blithely park in bike lanes.



I'm glad that justice was, in this case, blind and meted out on a fairly equal basis between riders and cagers. While I think bikes can and should bend the rules to suit their needs, they shouldn't do it in ways that antagonize car drivers.

Were Toronto's efforts the naked face of fascism? Or an effective marketing campaign reminding one and all that bikes are an inevitable and growing part of the city landscape?

Incidentally, "stout" is a euphemism for "fat"

Later this week over in St. Cloud, Minnesota, cyclists are attempting to put together the "world's largest bicycle parade," and to have it certified by everyone's favorite English brewer in Ireland, Guinness. The ride is dedicated to the purpose of raising awareness about childhood obesity.

But get this: The standing world record for the biggest bike parade is just 2,150 bicycles, a record that was set in Taiwan in March.

Totally low-hanging fruit, man.

Surely there have been Nude Bicycle Day rides that exceeded 2,100 riders. And the mass start of the Chequamegon Fat Tire 40 each year is just a few bikes shy of that "world record." Plus, I feel like I've been on a few Critical Mass rides in San Francisco that were twice that big -- and God knows there was no shortage of beer, Irish, English, and otherwise. Just no one sober enough to certify the thing, I guess.

Notes on the state of my "pro cycling journalism"

OK, so we're back. I covered the Nature Valley Grand Prix again this year for VeloNews, and it was -- as ever -- a hoot. Those athletes are something to see, and one of the pleasures of covering it with a MEDIA laminate hanging on my neck, is that it gives me an opportunity to run around talking to as many of them as I can. Being a shy and introverted person who makes a lot of bold and brash statements from behind my little screen and keyboard (we used to call this "cocking off" in the dark days before the Interwebs) this poses some interesting challenges. And it provokes a couple of interesting thoughts.

• Isn't it strange that Kristin Armstrong is completely unrelated to Lance, and yet dominates the pro women's field as much -- or even more -- than her male predecessor? Isn't that kind of a strange coincidence?

• CyclingNews.com's Kristin Robbins is a former pro bike racer turned journalist who cranks out the copy and gets the story straight, often from the mouths of the racers themselves. She knows which breaks were key, she gets inside strategy, and basically can spin a perfect yarn around any given race. That's what happens when you have her connections and history, and when you practice your craft 50-weeks out of the year. I think she's likely the best workaday journalist covering the domestic pro calendar, and I know that all the riders read her pretty closely.

• Robbins is also connected with Colavita/Sutter Home, one of the big pro teams on both the men's and women's side, where she has worked PR and media relations. In trad journalistic circles, that would be seen as working both the dark side and the legit side, but I can't see how that's much of a problem. Maybe if she had something ticklish to write about, some kind of major scandal within the ranks of her employers (The chamois butter is Canola-based! OMFG!) , then she'd be in a pickle. But frankly I think her longterm association with pro cycling is aces, and it's not like the domestic pro peloton is festering with secrets and intrigue. And if it is, it's probably just those goofy Aussies who wreck every after-party with their drunken derbying.

• I myself felt a little compromised in a couple of ways. First, it's great to cover this race year to year, but I'm at a significant disadvantage to folks like Kristin, Amy Smolens, and Kent Gordis (more about them in a second). Without regularly following the pro schedule in person, I don't have instant mental access to the general trends -- who's riding strong right now, who's injured, what happened at the Reading Classic last weekend, where is the peloton headed to next. True, I could stay on top of that stuff, but you know how it is. How much of your free time do you spend reading books that will help you do your part-time job better? (Part time as in about 20 hours per year.) But more than all that publicly available data, it's the inside information that would really help: the team directors personal cell numbers, the hard-working promoters, the USCF officials. I could get my sweaty mits on all that stuff, if I were more tenacious and anal and generally type-A.

• Another way that I was compromised in a more obvious way, relative to being an "objective journalist," was that I'd agreed to help out with the NVGP this year on the volunteer side-- I stood in to provide "race radio," which means riding in one of the officials cars and relating all available and relevant information about the race back to the team cars: You announce breaks, you call up cars to provide support to their riders, you give warnings about situations on the road-- loose gravel, railroad tracks, hard turns, the time gaps and the numbers of the riders in them, and so on. This is an ideal position to be in to try to reconstruct a race, incidentally, and by far the best place in the world to be. (One of the motos at the head of the peloton would be a slightly more advantageous place, but it would be hell to take notes. Truly at well-covered events like the Tour De France, television viewers have by far the best seat in the house. Those moto-guys with their cameras are amazing athletes in their own right.) I'm a terrible note taker, but I have an awesome memory for details-- what the course looked and felt like, how the peloton is behaving, what their mood appears to be, and so on. But I have almost no memory whatsoever about anything numerical or mathematical. Sometimes I think I'm a little dyslexic. Or maybe just an idiot savant, without the savant part. So it can be a significant challenge to take good legible notes about what happens during a race. The best way, in the end, is to make sure you get the numbers of the riders, the time gaps, and the portion of the course. No need to worry about teams or individuals until afterward, when you can reconstruct the race like a baseball box score. (You really can tell the story of a ball game, at least in broad strokes, from reading a box score, if you know what you're doing.) The officials I rode with in the Mankato Stage were brilliantly talented at remembering numbers, instantly editing them in order to read them back and confirm in ascending order-- meanwhile, I'm not sure I got about a third of those numbers even right. Luckily, the officials have a very redundant system of reading and confirming the numbers of any riders making a move or needing help or what ever.

• So anyway, I wondered: Working for the race and covering it would not pass the smell test of traditional journalism. But I didn't get paid, and it was actually a way of doing my job "out loud" and in service of the peloton and their support. Plus I only did it for one stage: The official kicked me out of the car in Canon Falls (I'd arranged to have someone else do radio tour that day because of the "smell test" issue.) If you want to see the difference between covering a race from inside an officials car versus covering it from the lawn at the finish line, you can read the Canon Falls report and compare it to Mankato.

• I'm not sure who, incidentally, really cares about the fine details of every little attack and every little 5 second gap, but maybe a lot of people are interested. Surely the riders and their sponsors would love to get every mention they can-- that's the business side of pro cycling, the pro part of pro cycling. Press coverage is PR. It's the reason companies like Colavita and Jelly Belly support cycling the way they do (though it very often has to do with a particularly enthusiastic cycling fan or amateur athlete high in the ranks of those companies marketing departments).

• If Kristin Robbins is the best "print" journalist working the domestic pro cycling scene, then Amy Smolens and Kent Gordis are surely the best on the broadcast side-- and more purely "journalists" in the traditional sense. Both self-employed, they cover many of the world's biggest cycling events from the Olympics to World Championships to the Tour de France to-- well, to the Nature Valley Grand Prix. It's a real honor to be chasing those two around and hoping just a tiny bit of their knowledge and expertise rubs off on a pretender like me. I envy them their expertise, but I definitely don't envy them their travel schedule. They live in hotels and airports and in rental cars, and probably have zip for a social life, and probably don't get to see their families very much. I don't think I could handle that trade-off very well, so there you go. That's the moral of the story: trade-offs.

• Finally -- for now anyway -- I hope that my work this year conveyed one thing most of all: What an astonishing athlete Kristin Armstrong really is. She's one of those athletes that establish whole eras. You know, before Kristin Armstrong and (inevitably) after Kristin Armstrong. And in many ways she personifies why pro cycling is really fun to cover as a journalist. She may be the best female cyclist in history -- the XX-chromosome Eddy Merckx (the Eddy Merckx with two X's, ha ha), and that's no exaggeration. Naturally, she's a cannibal on the road in every stage of every race, a take-no-prisoners kind of competitor. And yet she's so modest and approachable off the bike, taking extra care with media parasites like myself, almost looking for children and begging to meet them and sign autographs. She recognizes fans and makes friends with them. She wins the most competitive domestic races virtually alone, with no team, putting minutes into a field that is otherwise separated by seconds. She is head, shoulders, hips and thighs above any of her nearest competitors -- and yet you could never hope to meet someone more down to earth. If you never have the pleasure of seeing her race, you are missing a historical opportunity. An historical opportunity.
  

• Pinch Flat News is about bike culture. Less and less, maybe, as I just don't find the time to devote to it that I should or did. Several people approached me during the race to tell me how much they enjoyed the cyclocross coverage last fall, and I had to admit that I had "burned a lot of matches" on that coverage. Maybe I'll hit my stride again this fall, I don't know. Mainly, I just don't get a lot of feedback or ROI for goofing off here as I do, and I realize that's all a get-what-you-give deal, but you know. See "trade-offs" above. I get a lot of return for hanging with my amazing kids, making my Thursday night dirt ride, and occasionally, you know, showing up for the dayjob.

• Is pro cycling a part of bike culture? Definitely. It's a bit removed from the world of advocacy and spoke cards and mess bags full of PBR and clownish couch bikes, and there are elements of it that seem incredibly decadent and wasteful. The carbon footprint of any given race is gigantic, with all the huge vehicles chugging around the country just to put on a show of a couple hundred hardbodies in funny skinsuits. Decadent indeed. I was super bummed to see how the peloton threw water bottles this year during the extra hot Mankato stage, littering every little farmyard with plastic, stopping in front of a little ranch house to have a group nature break and whipping it out in full view of a little ranch house with a picture window -- when 100 meters up the road there was 5 miles of uninterrupted cornfields. Whatever. I just mention it because bike racing is still pretty exotic in rural America. To see the looks on the faces of these humble and generous people standing in their years to watch the show, and then to have their children literally pelted with litter, and their lawns urinated on by about 100 men-- well, I was embarrassed. I really was. Call me a puss. I know a lot of the guys could give a crap -- they're animals during a race, and that's fine. I'm just saying. There is actually a rule in place in Minnesota that riders are supposed to be fined for throwing their bottles. It's actually a matter of life-and-death-and-taxes, because livestock that eat plastic bottles can and do die. Any idea what a head of beef costs a farmer? Let's just say it's worth more than a handful of those fancy carbon bikes with Dura-Ace and Zippy wheelsets, and when they autopsy that Black Angus and find the shard of plastic that pierced the animal's intestines, and it has the words "Team Bissell Pro Bike Racing," what do you think their view is? Don't kid yourself: one head of beef is every bit as important to a farmers' livelihood as three or four bikes are to Team Health Net presented by Maxxis. I was chagrined that the officials made no effort to enforce this rule, although I announced it several times to the caravan on race radio. Maybe it's unrealistic, I don't know. And maybe the worst that will happen is that a few angry farmers will refuse to honor the road closures (which would not necessarily be all that harmless, come to think of it), or they'll just pull their shades. Whatever. I just know -- having grown up riding my bike around Mankato and knowing how little sympathy and understanding there is out there in that beautiful rolling and windy country -- that the last thing everyday cyclists need is less sympathy for our sport.
  

The biking over-under on Barack Obama

Sen. Barack Obama went for a bike ride yesterday, and a number of PFN operatives asked us to comment. We'll go with the tried-and-true plus/minus system that works so well in professional hockey.

1. Bike helmet: +1
2. Trek bike: 0
3. Seat too low/frame too small: -1
4. Underinflated tires: -1
5. Adams trail-a-bike with superlame seatpost coupling. -2
6. Implicit pro-bike advocacy and all that implies: +2
7. Riding a rigid hardtail in granny gear: +1
8. Schrader valves (Blue Collar, yo!) : +1
9. Pulling an entire nation's head out of its collective ass: +9

Score: A perfect 10

More like the "big gut of the law."

Seen in the morning papers:





Accompanied by this photograph:





Uh, I'd say the biggest reason for the Pittsburgh Police to get out of their cars and on their bikes is right there hanging over their belts.