Citizen Rider

September 2005 - Posts

• Into the Night

  In my rural area I tend to give up the bike commute when I can no longer complete the route in daylight. I've pushed it a few times, but it was easy enough to slip into the car, riding dawn patrols for exercise on the bike before driving to town for work. With gasoline prices charging upward, and my paycheck still crawling in the weeds, riding in the dark looks a lot more attractive. I have lights, including at least four flashing rear beacons. The Planet Bike Beamer headlight is a remarkably effective small light. The whole array is readily transferrable from Cross Check to fixed gear to road bike as the need arises. It's not like my old generator light, which remained permanently bolted to the bike I used for commuting at the time. Last Friday morning I got up just after 4 a.m. to get ready to ride 41 miles to get a car back from the mechanic. I've developed the habit of riding from Effingham to Gilford to get the car before work when I need to fetch it, which means I have to leave by 5:30 to complete the route in time. It's still dark at 5:30 now. I piled on the lights, the bright vest, the reflector leg bands, and headed out into the murk on the fixed gear. The forecast was for showers, so I had a rain jacket, and had clipped the fenders onto their brackets. The pre-dawn motorist crowd seemed pretty kind and accommodating.  It encourages me to try the commute in darkness again.  Too soon I'll have to travel 70 miles a day commuting, and that's just not practical for an old dog, day or night.  I'll be stuck in the car then. Posted Sep 28 2005, 12:52 PM by TimWhite with 3 comment(s)

• You Cyclist

  A road cyclist in the USA gets a taste of what it's like to be in a minority.  And if you happen to be in an actual officially-recognized minority on top of being a cyclist, I really salute your courage. We find, on the road, that some people are sympathetic, many are tolerant --though not necessarily pleased with us-- a fair number are contemptuous, and a few are down and out cross-burning, lynching bigots. I stress that the most virulent are rare.  The contemptuous are less rare.  Much of what gets thrown at cyclists, verbal or actual, is just heckling from people who consider themselves better than the idiot out there pedaling.  The hecklers don't usually go the next step, though some do, thinking the sight of a cyclist sprawling in the gravel is as thigh-slapping as an episode of The Three Stooges. It's easy to get caught up with worst-case scenarios and forget that most rides are peaceful.  Your results may vary, depending on local custom, but most of the time we get where we're going with few, if any, ugly incidents.  It's just that the ugly ones point out uncomfortably ugly truths about human nature.  Those people need to ride a bike.  If it didn't open their eyes, it might at least numb their genitals and keep them from reproducing. Posted Sep 24 2005, 09:04 AM by TimWhite with 1 comment(s)

• The Impoverished Athlete

  A musician joke asks, “What do you call a drummer without a girlfriend?” Homeless. You could as easily ask that question about a bike racer without a girlfriend or accommodating parents or any friends or acquaintances who will let him crash on the couch. Steadily over the years, a number of women have also followed the lure of cycling performance. When I raced they were rare. That’s changing. A bike racer in my district, or the next one over, supposedly lived in a self-storage warehouse whenever he was in the town he called home, because it was the cheapest roof he could put over his head. He used the bathroom at the gas station down the block. He ate out or bummed meals off friends. On racing trips he lived out of his car. Almost every racer I knew was poor. It was part of the challenge. In a peculiar way, it was part of the reward. Focused on racing, we had to arrange the rest of our lives into some form of order, even if some riders did it by abusing and discarding personal relationships until they were left with a bike in a bare-walled room with a naked light bulb hanging above their grubby sleeping bag on the floor. No one was going to find their ticket out of the ghetto on the bike racing circuit. A few of the penniless strivers might make it to the big time, with some sponsorship to help them in their subsistence lifestyle, but more often they came up against racers favored with a bit more money going into the race. Racing takes money, it doesn’t make it. The number of million-dollar salaries going to bike racers would barely put a single starting lineup on a pro basketball court. In the United States it probably wouldn’t put a doubles team on a tennis court. Racing bikes is more like riding rodeo. Battered competitors drag themselves from one event to the next. Win or lose, they usually leave quietly in the end. Face it, who’s watching? And yet some riders remain devoted even as their hair turns gray, their knees stiffen up and that separated shoulder begins to ache with arthritis. Most people don’t stick it out that long. Riders may keep riding, but the holy quest of youth, to be faster, stronger, more resistant to pain, gives way to a wiser, more measured pace. Sure, one might go for a little hammerfest, or duke it out with a group of friends and acquaintances, but that isn’t real racing. Many sports begin with this trial by poverty. You get just enough, or maybe even not quite enough, to get by. In sports with real earning potential, the payoff can make the difference between unimaginable wealth or selling used cars and polishing your high school trophies. Just as backpacking is really just recreational homelessness, some racers just play at being poor. Those of us with really tight finances had to guard our resources and our bodies carefully, while the rider with the safety net could tolerate more risks. We used to say you could tell the sponsored riders from the unsponsored ones because the sponsored riders would pull their leg out in a crash and let the bike scrape across the road, saving their skin. Unsponsored riders would lift the bike up and take the burn themselves. Flesh heals, equipment doesn’t. We became battlefield medics for ourselves and each other. Washing down after a crash was called The Screaming Shower. Cyclists traded folk remedies and little tips and tricks we got from real emergency room doctors and paramedics. Keep that road rash moist. Change the dressings several times a day and never let the wound dry out. Treat it as you would a burn, to minimize scarring and stiffness. We didn’t care too much about appearance, only fast healing and full range of motion. Crashing isn’t the worst part, it’s the down time afterwards. Soon I hardly knew anyone with a normal collarbone. The bump was either in the middle from a fracture or at the end from a shoulder separation. If you hadn’t busted a collarbone, were you really going for it? Riders without the telltale bump were either very smooth and very good, or had simply broken something else instead. At a time when the country wasn’t having any popular wars, bike racing was our own trial by fire. It was a great way to test yourself without involving any innocent bystanders. On the best of days it hurts. On the worst of days you may not wake up for several days afterwards. Life is simple in the race. If you’ve ever watched a professional race or a good film about one, you notice how the racers are surrounded by their motorcade, separated from the world around them. In some areas spectators can reach in and touch them, but often they proceed as if in a tunnel. In an amateur race there aren’t even many spectators. The race becomes a miniature world. The objective is clear. You see the reward for your effort immediately. Once you cross the finish line you want to start the journey toward the next one, to preserve that clarity. Once you care about anything else, the pure intensity is gone. You might serve another cause with your racing, as Lance Armstrong and Tyler Hamilton do, with their charitable foundations, but they do it as part of their racing, not as a distraction from it. At the start of it all is the impoverished athlete who has chosen this hard journey to see how far he can go. The price will be the same when following any dream. It costs your life, no matter what. The time passed. What did you do with it? It wasn’t about winning as much as about trying to win, because you can’t win without trying. It was about distilling life to one pure effort. At the time it is just how you live. You live in the rhythm of training. It becomes as big a part of life as you want it to be. If it becomes the biggest part for a while, it is because you wanted it that way. Only after it is over might you notice the skeletal simplicity and the dedication to it that snuck up on you. We leave a life like that for many valid reasons, but it was good to have lived even a little of it. Posted Sep 21 2005, 12:12 PM by TimWhite with no comments

• Say What?

  Don’t you love it when they yell? Someone in a speeding car going by yells what sounds like “aileron!” or something and then rolls the window up. “Broccoli stalk!” “Inna Gadda Da Vida!” What the hell are they saying? There’s a little thing called the Doppler Effect. It makes sound do weird things when the source of the sound or the listener is moving at a high rate of speed. Add wind noise, motor noise and so many people’s mush mouth delivery. They only have a half a second to get their point across. Yet still they try. Is it encouragement or criticism? Unless they accompany it with a digital gesture or a thrown object, I can’t tell. Something about a person on a bike just says “captive audience” to these public speakers. They’re inspired to share something with the world just because they saw a cyclist. “Albert egg-timer!” “Get the fuzz off the toad!” Now that last one I can decipher. I would much rather hear a yell than a horn blast at close range. The automobile horn was designed to convey alarm and disapproval. It’s like a fanfare of trumpets to announce the arrival of a majestic middle finger. Horns are put on cars to tick other people off. We use them to anger the people who have angered us. Thrown objects also send a message. Frequently the message is “Don’t quit your day job and sign up for pitching camp, Buttercup.” But the marksman intends to send more of a threat. Sometimes the missile connects, damaging the bicyclist as the thrower intended. Intent counts for a lot with me. Motorist harassment seems to peak in the spring and fall. In spring, cyclists are out there retraining the motoring public to expect to see people on bikes. In the fall, frustrated teenagers are back in school, days are getting shorter, schedules are getting more full as school and business settle down after summer’s hiatus. Fall is the time for broken glass. I attribute this to young adults chafing against the restraints that school and work bring after summer’s freedom. In all my years of riding I have always seen some kind of increase in the number of broken bottles in September. You can do a lot of amateur anthropology and sociology from a bike. The human parade goes by in all its uninhibited glory. You can step aside from the hurtling roller coaster of tailgating maniacs and just watch them work out on each other. Feel the love. Cyclists have figured out that the journey is the destination. Do you really get more out of life if you have to get somewhere as fast as you can so you can hurry up and do something there so you can get back out on the road and hurry somewhere else? And all you leave behind you, echoing in the breeze is the mysterious word “aileron.” Posted Sep 21 2005, 12:11 PM by TimWhite with no comments

• The Machinist Advantage

  Bicycle manufacturing launched the modern era of mass-produced transportation, but because bicyles were relatively small they could be produced in small facilities. Modern industrial economics moved the Bike Industry into gigantic (not to say Giant) facilities, but small operators still produce bikes. Some are status symbols from exclusive builders, others are obscure for various reasons. More people know about Richard Sachs than about Victory Bicycles, but Victory's immaculate reproduction Ordinaries are status symbols among their devotees. But I'll bet few people reading this have heard of Dennis MacKinnon, Paul Carpentier, Albert Bold, or Brian McCall. My machinist friend Diane, a partner in Victory Bicycles, grew up in a machine shop and then built another one with her late husband. At home they built bike frames, restored airplanes and motorcycles and generally built any sort of mechanical toy they wanted. In the 1980s, before the aero bike craze, they had already built themselves a pair of time trial bikes using aircraft strut tubing, aerodynamically shaped. They had to make all sorts of odd-shaped parts and adapters to get the componentry to fit the bikes. Working for their own amusement, they never publicized any of what they did beyond the word of mouth they generated in the Orlando area and wherever else they might go. Diane built her own 20-inch wheel adult bike to take in their Cessna. She figured out the gearing and geometry so she could sit at the height of a conventional bike and join group rides wherever she happened to find one. The bike disturbed some of the other riders because it looked so weird, but apparently it rode like a normal-sized one. Bike Friday makes the same claim. People I know who own them can't say enough good things about them. I'm happy to be able to do as much as I do. Some people even consider me a good, experienced mechanic and a creative problem solver. But I tell you it's hard to compete with someone who not only miters their own tubing and builds the frame from scratch, but actually manufactures the rims, shapes the tubing, cuts and threads every spoke and practically raises the cows that produce the leather from which the saddles are made. Every machinist I know has the same casual attitude toward building or rebuilding things most of us would simply replace. But they also have several thousand dollars' worth of serious stationary tools somewhere around the house or barn. Most of them do not earn their primary living from bike work. Even the Wright Brothers had to branch out. There's a perfect example of machinists who wouldn't say they couldn't. Posted Sep 20 2005, 09:14 PM by TimWhite with no comments

• The Accidental Mechanic

  I never considered myself mechanically inclined. I took devices as I found them. Growing up, I did as little as possible to any of my bikes, and never dug into the mysteries of mechanisms, as my older brother did. By the time I got into college, I had started to do a few minor things to whatever car I happened to own, though nothing major. Then my mechanically-inclined brother sparked my interest enough to get me to buy a bent used Peugeot ten-speed. Under his instruction, soon reinforced by a classmate who had been a year behind me in high school, I found myself ripping bearings apart. The classmate, a girl named Diane, had grown up in a machine shop, so she wasn't afraid of anything. She went on to become an expert wheel builder, then a torch goddess, and now practically starts by mining her own iron ore when she wants to build something. I stopped short of that, but the simplicity of the bicycle showed me I could have transportation independence very cheaply. I couldn't afford a good work space and all the heavy tools to keep a car going through all the things that might go wrong with it, but I could completely overhaul my bike in my apartment. If I laid down some old newspapers, I wouldn't even be a landlord's nightmare. It could be socially responsible, yet revolutionary. Even the heavy tools, like a shop-quality workstand and truing stand, fit in an average room. A dedicated workshop is nice if you're going to start lathering solvents around, but you can do a decent overhaul at your kitchen table if you're neat and patient about it. I guess maybe I am a little more mechanically inclined than I thought. The number of people I meet who find the inner workings of a bicycle mysterious still surprises me. Or maybe it's too trivial to be worth their attention. Being good at bicycle mechanics often seems about as respected as being good at armpit farts. In need of a day job, I got sucked back into the bike industry in 1989, and have remained the itching powder in its bike shorts ever since. I won't leave, because I like getting parts and tools at cost, but I won't play along with the dispos-a-bike trend in sophisticated, temperamental componentry. I still want to be able to fix it at my kitchen table, or in a camp site somewhere. At heart I remain sympathetic to the consumer. That will put you on the outside of most industry trade groups. Posted Sep 20 2005, 08:38 PM by TimWhite with no comments

• Surly=Lasting Value

  If I could only have one bike, it would be a Surly Cross-Check. I didn’t really want cantilever brakes when I bought the frame to build my commuter-explorer, but the rest of the package was too good to refuse. Since I got mine in 2000, they’ve made it a little better by including rack bosses on the seat stays. You could build a Cross-Check frame into almost anything. The geometry provides secure handling on dirt, but sporty enough performance on pavement. I wouldn’t want to chase a froggy bunch of roadies on it, but it does well in the daily traffic criterium. The long dropouts in the rear allow you to use it as a single-speed and to adapt some combinations of derailleur and cluster God never intended. I wish more frames in the Surly line had those dropouts, but they’ve fallen into the VD epidemic that swept cycling in the 1980s. The whole Surly line reflects a fine balance of performance and durability. If you had the tools and knowledge you could build a small fleet of Surly custom bikes for the price of one high-end bike, mountain or road. Since I built up the Cross-Check I have taken it into places where I welcome the cantilever brakes. I recently built a second wheel set so I can have my skinnyish commuting tires for the daily grind and a set of fatties for exploring the dotted lines on the map. The Pacer road frame and Steamroller fixed gear also tempt me, although the top tube is a little short for me on the Steamroller, and the Pacer has VD. Still, for a dedicated road bike I guess VD are okay. I could still mix and match drive train parts, because I don’t care about index shifting. Other makers offer one or two models that match Surly versatility, but you have to know what you’re looking for. Rivendell takes the high-end hand built approach to versatile bikes. But Surly provides it for the working class. Vote with your wallets for the guys who provide lasting value. Don’t get suckered into buying a dispos-a-bike dripping with trendoid componentry. Posted Sep 20 2005, 12:10 AM by TimWhite with no comments

• Doper, doper

  When you race me, you're racing drugs. I've had a bad ibuprofen habit since I was in my 30s. And my typical coffee consumption might put me over the12 micrograms per milliter limit in UCI competition. Known on the street as I-Bombs or Ibbies, these little pills, white or brown, are highly prized by aging athletes looking for a little of their youthful resilience. The ibuprofen is no big deal. I could have sworn I saw it on the list of prohibited substances a few years ago, but I probably had a moment of dyslexia when I saw buprenorphine on there. So many other over the counter drugs contain banned ingredients that I was expecting to see something as helpful as ibuprofen forbidden along with them. I found the reference to ibuprofen as a banned substance on page 227 of Bike Cult, where author David Perry refers to the irony of the makers of Nuprin sponsoring the 1992 US Olympic Cycling Team when their product contained "the banned substance ibuprofen." And that was after ibbies became an over the counter drug. In 1980-81, the Cat. 2 in the house I shared had developed a symbiosis with a doctor training for the Iron Man. My roomie had a limitless prescription for this stuff called "Motrin," which had miraculous curative powers. Maybe back then, when you needed a prescription, it was on the list. Give me 400 milligrams of the good stuff and 12 ounces of Kenyan coffee and you wouldn't know I wasn't 25.   By the way, no one really calls them ibbies. But it's a damn sight shorter to say than ibuprofen. So feel free to start. I guess this voids all my world records. Posted Sep 19 2005, 07:17 PM by TimWhite with no comments

• So YouThink You Can Drive?

  We need to build race tracks in every community. These would not be real sporting tracks. They would be proving grounds for all those people who consider themselves great drivers. Anyone could drop in at any time to run a quick heat against whoever else was around. They would get no guidance and no training, just a starting flag and a finish line. At regular intervals, crews would remove the wreckage. In a closed environment, dangerous idiots would finally be a danger only to each other. Concentrated in that way, they would be more likely to take each other out. Traffic would be two-way, to simulate the environment in which these self-perceived experts usually operate. To goad them further into doing something homicidally or suicidally impatient, we could insert remote-controlled slower vehicles. Drivers would pay no entry fee. In addition, anyone convicted of a traffic offense would be sentenced to run a certain number of laps, increasing with the severity of the offense. All participants would be encouraged to sign up as organ donors. Spectators would pay huge admission fees. The money would go toward highway safety programs and improvements in bicycle and pedestrian facilities. Posted Sep 19 2005, 07:12 PM by TimWhite with no comments

• Biketopian Notion

  In Biketopia there are transportation centers near concentrations of workplaces, industrial or office complexes, downtown areas and shopping districts. These centers provide safe parking for bikes, locker rooms, showers and transfer to mass transit if that's available in a given area. They might even provide work areas and small parts like cables and tubes (for a fee), or have commercial concessions selling parts and service. The centers would at least create an area nearby, where commercial service providers could prosper in a location convenient to the people who need them the most. I wonder if any bike shops are offering safe, secure parking to local commuters, perhaps with a service deal thrown in. A business would need to realize income from the square footage in order to continue to afford it. A public facility could spread the cost over a wider base and use it to encourage more healthy behavior among citizens who might be more likely to ride if they knew they had a nice place to work from, once they got to town. The first concern of any rider is safety on the road. The second is secure parking. Will the bike be there, rideable, when I get back? Protected facilities extend the range of rideable weather. If the bike itself will be protected, and the rider can freshen up before reentering society, no one need fear a little rain, chilly weather or breaking a sweat on the way to work. Posted Sep 19 2005, 07:10 PM by TimWhite with no comments

• Some Commuter Math

  If I drove every day, my car would probably consume roughly ten gallons of gasoline a week. Commuting by bike for 20 weeks, that's 200 gallons of gas I don't consume. I generally manage to commute uninterrupted for about 26 weeks before short daylight and the need to carry bulkier equipment forces me into the car. By cycling instead of driving, I make available 150 to 180 parking spaces in the course of a season. When I lived where I could commute by bicycle all year, the rest of the motoring public got to enjoy that much more of the gasoline and parking I wasn't using up. But now that area has turned into a megalopolitan meat grinder of hustling traffic honking past "Share the Road" signs. Posted Sep 19 2005, 07:06 PM by TimWhite with 3 comment(s)