One handed, it’s apple season and I’m biting fresh sweet clean bitter like the air. We’re on a route around the 1930’s Quabbin reservoir in Western Massachusetts, water collected to serve distant Boston and the communities in between.
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: Writing about cycling
Commute
Heading to work usually a means and a transition, an empty something in between important things, but not this time.
Sweden Grey
Lost in a watercolor smear between hilltops and sky until every shard was just a tighter spiral of repetition to a grey singularity. Windblow enough to not be able to hear what’s said, but the cadence and tonal shape is enough, the absence of reference points and yet we’re still here.
Inaugural NYC Dirt Audax Invitational
Five riders set out in ideal Autumn conditions to pedal a 204k loop from Manhattan primarily on dirt.
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.
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.
Sean Kelly’s Hunger
The lean angular prose of Sean Kelly’s autobiography makes it almost seem as if you have sat down at a pub with him for a chat. Extraordinary accomplishments are offered with a humility that never seems false or fake, and the mundane details are just the ones a fan of cycling history would want.
Bunyan Velo 02
The second issue of Bunyan Velo—Lucas Winzenburg’s quarterly cycling journal of writing and photography—is now available. Within you will find images and tales from Rwanda to Alaska to Argentina to New Zealand. I am honored to have […]
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.
Grant Petersen’s Just Ride
I imagined that I would hate this book and roll my eyes at pages of dogmatic anti-dogmatism that Petersen is infamous for. At the very least, I thought I’d react more or less the way I do to everything on the Rivendell website: their stuff and the justificatory storytelling behind it is harmless even while overly shrill and defensively self-assured, the bikes are great looking but excessive in the wrong respects—i.e., they’re pretty but don’t do anything that plenty of other bicycles do without the annoyance of 650b wheels and pointless heft over cost ratio—and Petersen himself, to the extent that his personality comes through, seems like he’d be irritating to hang out with.
I was completely wrong. Just Ride is terrific. It’s filled with ingots of wisdom, it’s smart, and the plain, direct writing is a pleasure.
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 […]