Seems like it was uphill all day, intermittent hike a bike way into the mountains, towns receding below. Went to one of the cool Spomeniks and then this old guy came out with a bottle of some kind of wicked alcohol and talked our ears off, we didn’t understand a word of what he said but he was very kindly and hammered and I drank some too.
Cycling adventurist, bikepacker, travel writer, photographer, speaker, professor of philosophy. Route designer of the VTXL, the Green Mountain Gravel Growler beer tour, the Silk Road Mountain Race course 1st edition, and many more.
Category: Just Words
Commute
Heading to work usually a means and a transition, an empty something in between important things, but not this time.
Leopard
“In a parallel reality we might understand each other, but in this one, we are just gravity for one another, just void and light and dream.”
South Africa Postcard
Levitating atop the smallest gear, clingy traction, absorption into modal blue. Mean little sheep feet have obscured any tracks from the racers ahead but sure as sure that this is the way.
Location
Jacques explains. “Location” indicates the black townships, we’ve been directed here by that very word on the lips of a nodding woman on the dirt avenue, I’m looking to buy a local SIM card. One story high, corrugated steel, off-rectilinear lots that expand or contract to the hilly contour but somehow still seem tidy, colors sing cheer and that they’re brightly painted itself enough to distinguish the boundaries.
New England Journal
Then we time trial home on a guttural roar tailwind. Threes, twos and fours trying to keep one another in sight, trying to find a gear that you don’t need to shift out of because your rigor mortis hands have trouble doing it, trying to negotiate the betrayals and the surprises of how you feel. Trying to have an April ride.
Trajectory
Nearly sixty miles on dirt today. Pre sunset I sit in front of a tienda sipping another coke, sideways conscious of my vacant look.
Expedition Portal Interview
Christophe Noel at Expedition Portal—a terrific source of inspiration for wheeled adventuring world-wide—was generous enough to interview me on bicycle travel.
Winning the Tour de France
I never get tired of watching the crux stages of the 1989 Tour. The L’Alpe d’Huez climb where LeMond falters while wearing Yellow, the final day in the Alps when Fignon extends his lead. And then the time trial final stage. LeMond in his goofy to our eyes Oakley sunglasses and swaying on Scott aero bars, Fignon low in the drops orienting beams of intensity through prism spectacles. Eiffel Tower, Champs Elysées bricks, roaring crowds. Edge of my seat, lean forward, stand while LeMond himself crumples to the ground in elation. Yes! He makes up nearly a minute over 25k, beats Fignon and wins the Tour by eight seconds.
Us fans of pro bike racing—I’ve been and am—we celebrate the history, the landscapes, the spectacle, the drama of the competitions, strategy, and micro tactics within the race. We celebrate the teams of a team sport. We celebrate the riders. I’d be deflated to learn that LeMond cheated to achieve his ’89 victory. The disappointment would be over the fact that it was something other than what I thought it was, so what I think it is must be meaningful and important. The truth of it is essential to its power to inspire and elevate, and for the simple pleasure it gives to spectate. We look for sport to be true. Or, more accurately, we look for sport truly to match what we believe about it such that, under that description that we hold inside, we feel the surge of celebration, identification, admiration, and motivation.
Colombia journal
Gregarious full voice, skylit eyes that we’ve encountered in so many Colombians, it never goes away though there are times they mark and times they mask. He’s mentioned his farm up in the hills, it […]
Home Roads
Touring, none of them are, even if fondness for rewoven recompositions makes for wishing it to be so, even if the delight and embrace makes it okay afterward to say. And, really, merely familiar terrain […]
Riding in Rain
Even if it’s inevitable, you think about it, unless you’re from that kind of place and even possibly then, you think about it again, check the forecast for no reason since it’s only those first […]