A second then third day in yellow dappled green and sometimes fulvid leaves clinging near unilluminable burnt trunk silhouettes. We find a spring and linger there, this the pace of not having an urgent destination, […]
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: North America
Bikepacking Santa Fe-Los Alamos Loop I
Correspondence turned into friendship into plans over maps and gear and words. Cass contrives an itinerary, Nick and Lael pedal south to the rendezvous. I start in New England chill leaning in with the turning leaves […]
New York Postcard
Last night in a darkness like a shawl and unbright enough to seem unusual, tree creaking coda to hiss, critters doing a jig and pitch that makes them seem five times the size they really […]
Breckenridge to Colorado Springs II
Second day. Crystalline skies, confident but companionable sun, sublime roads to Colorado Springs.
Breckenridge to Colorado Springs I
A simple overnighter on lovely Colorado roads and tracks. Legs certainly don’t want to ascend Boreas Pass the day after racing, but the easygoing brilliance of the day carries us along. We go through our PB&J stash with alarming gusto and rapidity alongside streams, through dusty horse and cattle country, knurled crags against puff Western skies.
Firecracker 50 Race Report
(Photos courtesy MCoady)
The legendary start of the July 4th Firecracker 50 in Breckenridge, Colorado doesn’t disappoint: We’re staged, there’s the national anthem, then a neutral start has us parading down Main Street packed with revelers five or six deep hollering and waving the stars and stripes. The sense of the community coming together in light of recent and present fires around the state gives the event a charged, cathartic feel. I stay left for high fives with the gangly shining kids sticking their hands out and to make sure that I get to say hello to little A&G, their own home so close to blazes. Margaret yells out my name and I grin and laugh, not at that moment thinking about two 25 mile vindictive laps at 10,000 feet.
Thirty five single speeders out of 750, we get a shout out from the emcee for lunacy and grit, “these are the guys I’d want with me in a bar fight,” um, uh huh. Mostly it’s one of those ideas that one poses to oneself to vigorous nods and fuckyeah while sitting in underpants clicking registration buttons on the internet months before when, you know, braggadocio costs nothing.
xc racing
Woods pinball ricochet piloting by shoulders, hips, leaning into the grips and over brake bucking foiled if you think or plan too much. Approach an ascending series of switchbacks, drop three bike lengths off the […]
Mountain Bike Training NYC
Suit up in the usual way — mountain helmet, gloves, shades, baggies, H2O pack — out the door, but it is a bit different to start with elevator pleasantries with the guy with the two dachshunds, each floor dinging otherwise quiet but for the muzak playing in my head. Pedaling into bright sunshine and brighter car horns, business suited pedestrians, delivery cyclists with front baskets, traffic cop white gloves whistles, drafting buses until they pull over, I surf the wake into the more frenetic middle lane fray. Heading uptown comic zippy BMX under geared single speed cadence, 25 minutes to Grand Central Station. Walk the bike into the main concourse, no one pays any special attention except mid 20’s with sideburns and headphones, raised eyebrows to gear inspection to approving nods. Cleat clack down platform 34 to board the Metro North, bike wedged into a space not meant for it but I have a $5 per year card that says that I can at this off-peak hour. I sit and don’t bother to take my helmet off, just another freaky hat, an hour meditation to Cortlandt.
Alaska Postcard
Half clear rec path a road a snowmachine corridor cross country ski trails a riverside with warning slate grey cracks and exposed flux. The snow won’t crunch, sighing contented wet resculpted under fat tires. Then […]
White Mountains 100 Race Report
Tremble frigid, but thinking it in unfluid blocks stumbles far short of the cutting, the blades in your lungs, the warning away pain and strain in moving such that a warm pocket in your clothes might bellows inhale the cold. Exit the car when there is enough activity to confirm ten minutes to go, the way it always is before a race, even one that you didn’t conceptualize as it but instead as something perpendicular with a built in urgency…
