Right Wing Scum VS. Reality

I've been to Amsterdam. The place is pretty damn safe. Even the homeless (who are few) are polite. If society there is falling apart I'm all for it. Please bring some of that anarchy over here.

Steaming Piles of Bike Poo

For a couple of weeks I avoided the intertubes. Lots of work. Lots of riding. I DVRd Le Tour every day and rushed home from work to watch the action. Thank the gods for Digital Video Recorders. Three weeks ago I went out to the Rockies (Breck and Colorado Springs). Needless to say that daily rides above the tree line and ample supplies of liquids from Breckenridge Brewery put me in quite a state. It took me a while to catch up since getting back.

With the Tour over it's time to look at second half of the cycling season. Seems that while the rest of us are thinking ahead to Cross Season and counting the remaining days of summer, The 2009 Tour Champion is acting like an inglorious SOB!

“My relationship with Lance Armstrong is non-existent. Even if he is a great champion, I have never had admiration for him and I never will,” the Contador said. “On this Tour, the days in the hotel were harder than those on the road. It was a delicate situation, very tense, the two riders who had most weight on the team did not have an easy relationship and that puts the rest of the technical staff and the riders in an uncomfortable position.”

I've been a Contador fan for while now. They guy is gifted. Hard not to be impressed by a guy who's won all three grand tours. If you truly appreciate the sport you want to see guys like Contador ride. Guys like him and Armstrong are history makers. Contador is Kobe. Armstrong is Jordan. Get it?

So Contador mouths off like an immature jerk and what's Lance's response? Lance the arrogant prick. Lance, the guy who made fun of Pantani's "elephant ears." Lance, the man the French fans loved to hate?

“Seeing these comments from AC. If I were him I’d drop this drivel and start thanking his team. w/o them, he doesn’t win.”

“hey pistolero, there is no “i” in “team”. what did i say in March? Lots to learn. Restated.”

Sounds like a new Lance. I liked the old Lance. But I like this one even more. There's no "I" in team, Poonta! Look at the photo. Every one of those dudes left it on the road for you. EVERY one of them.



Time to switch gears. How about NO gears?

While I spent a week in Colorado with no bullshit the rest of the world was piling it on. As soon as I started catching up on my email I found a piece of spam in my in box that verified beyond all doubt that the hipster fixie craze is over: Urban Outfitters now sells Fixies.



Buy yourself a pair of skinny jeans, white leather belt and too small print hoodie, then plop a multi color bike in your shopping cart. Check out with your moms Amex and you're good to go. Hip has never so easy, thanks to the folks who brought you used Levis at new prices and flannel shirts only your grandpa would love.

For every stupid idea, though, there's a less obvious good one. Like oatmeal stout ice cream.



My old friend Bernie Chihuahua used to take his Founders Oatmeal Stout with a scoop of Hudsonville Vanilla. Probably just as tasty.

While I was dreaming of beer ice cream and sipping Fat Tire in Colorado Lance Armstrong was teasing hoards of cycling fan boys with a promise to be back next year with a bigger and better team. Looks like it's Team Radioshack!

Yeah, Radioshack! That place your dad bought his CB Radio, and your grandparents bought you that cool set of walkie-talkies back in the day.



While Lance was holding his tongue at The Tour. The little lady fought the good fight and managed to finish 5th at the Breckenridge 100 last week. Altitude sickness, nausea and some screwed up organization didn't get her down. Why is it so hard to properly mark a race course? The week before we were lucky enough to catch two stages of the Breck Epic. An award should be given to the Epic's promoter, who set a great example for how to mark a course: easy to see, bright and frequent signs with arrows at every intersection and turn!

To prove that performance ain't about the bike it's the motor, I submit the LaLond freak bike.

LaLonde's weapon of choice is what he likes to call the "GT Freak Bike", a GT Zaskar hardtail frame with a rigid fork, 29er front wheel, 26 inch rear wheel, and all of it is powered by a singlespeed drivetrain.

Mark LaLond has been crushing the field in the Midwest for years. And he doesn't need a 30 speed $7,000 plastic bike to do it. What's the moral of this story? Save your money, buy a six year old bike on ebay and throw half the components away. Oh yeah, then train your ass off and get fast as hell.

Helmet Saves Cyclist Life

I can't even come up with an ironic and snide comment on this. What kind of a sick SOB shoots a guy for riding a bike with his child?

ASHEVILLE, N.C. -- A driver, now identified as an Asheville firefighter, shot a bicycle rider because he was angry the man was riding with his child on a busy road, Asheville police said.

Officers said the victim was riding with his wife and had his 3-year-old son in a child seat attached to his bicycle when a driver approached him. Police said the driver, Charles Diez, claimed he was upset that the victim was bike riding with his child on the heavily traveled Tunnel Road.

Hecklejacked

Ladies, say goodbye to a Rock Star! My man Hecklejack goes off the market on Friday. Yep. He's gettin' married on Windmill Island in three days.



That dude is one fast as hell hollander. He's won a lot of races. And he's still a young buck. The photo above is Mark getting a "podium shot" after winning the Athens Twilight Crit in 2007.



I got plenty of stories about this guy. But I think he probably remembers that night in Athens more than any crazy shit I could tell you about him. Like a bone-headed ride late one winter at a secret training camp in North Carolina. I had to rescue his big ginger ass from the top of a mountain with my Subaru Outback. The Dutchman was wacked, it was 45 degrees and he sucked down a dozen donuts on the ride back to the cabin. Or the time I dropped him (the only time I ever dropped him) on a ride up Yellow Creek road. Ha Ha.....

Those were the days. But no more. Hecklejack is a legit pro, I'm a fat old man and I don't think I'll be dropping him on any ride ever again.

Ain't No Warrior

I don't care what anybody says, all men like to think of themselves as warriors. Guys want to pretend that firing up their X Box or playing golf on the weekend gets them in touch with their aggression. I can buy that some if you're talking about blood sports maybe, but even killing a deer ain't much of a sport when you're using a rifle and scope.

Mountain bikers like to think of themselves that way. Ever seen a couple of Sport Class dudes scream at each other at a mountain bike race? It's quite a sight. With all that weekend warrior testosterone oozing from their chubby pores, the antics of a 15 mile mountain bike race can set a dude on fire. Cut em' off on the trail or worse yet, be some unlucky slower chick blocking Joe Racer's path to glory and you're gonna hear it!

All dudes think they're warriors. Me included. But the truth is I ain't no Mickey Ward. I'm the dude who ducks under the table in a bar fight. I can get amped up for a race, though. I've talked wild shit because of it. One year I told everybody all summer that I was going to win the Wilderness 101. Instead I got schooled by Mike Keefer and Skip Brown and ended up just far enough back not to make it into the Wilderness Wiki. I ain't no warrior.

Last weekend I found myself on the line at the Stony Creek marathon. Still too far out of shape to line up with the big dogs in elite. But I hadn't lost any Expert races yet this year. Three laps in and right on the tail of some dude who should have been racing in Elite I went down on a wood boardwalk and hit my ass so hard I almost crapped myself right there on the trail. At the three lap mark (halfway) I bailed.

DNF!

The little lady pulled off a good one, though. Maybe she's the warrior.

Michigan Hardcore

What does it mean to be hardcore?

No, this isn't another one of my punk rock posts. Hardcore means taking the hits. It means getting back up and doing it again and again until you stick the landing. Evel was hardcore. Had to be. How many times did he crash? How many times did get right back on the bike!

Hardcore means pain. Tons of pain. Trainloads of pain. Pain from one end of your body to the to other. You can't be hardcore until pain has crushed you. It means giving failure the bird and dealing with the consequences. It means breaking your bones and gettting back on the bike. Hardcore is the difference between ordinary or being fucking amazing.

My wife is Hardcore.



I'll leave all the details to her. She tells the tale of the 2009 Lumberjack like it was another day at the races. Like it was just another podium finish. But the truth is that the difference between a good mountain biker and a great mountain biker is that the great one can take a thousand times more pain.

Each lap was 25 miles long and after the first lap Scott informed me that I was in 3rd place and 4-5 minutes behind Betsy Shogren (the female race leader). I wanted to make up time in the 2nd lap and tried to pick it up a bit. I was having a little too much fun on the downhills and hit one downhill WAY too fast. The bottom of the downhill had a bunch of wet roots that you had to turn on and you can probably imagine the rest...

65 miles later she finished in third and after the obligatory podium photos we drove to the ER in Manistee so she could have the dead tissue cut away from her knee. 2 hours after that we were back in the cabin in Brethren with Jeff, Chris and Roger (from Trek) and Nam and Eddie (from Topeak/Ergon). Talk that night was about that long day, Jeff's second Lumberjack win in a row. How bad ass Danielle was riding 60 miles with a smashed knee. How great Michigan micro brew is. How Jeff and Chris are going to kick ass at the BC Bike Race.

You can check out my "official" full race report at mtbracenews.com .

Another day at the races. The difference between ordinary and extraordinary.

Breaking Away

Nice pic, eh? Look at all those scary skinny Euro dudes climbing a mountain during this year's Dauphine, reminding us why they're worth millions of Euros a year in salary and endorsement deals. Just look at that field! Right there, all the way on the right in the black and white BMC kit is Brent Bookwalter. Brent is from the 616. He rode for my old shop team when he was in high school. He's won multiple National Collegiate championships. That dude was kicking my ass on a mountain bike when he was 16 years old. And now the kid is mixing it up with the big (er little) guys back in the old country.

Give em' hell, Brent!