A while back I remember pummeling myself for not hitting my monthly goal of 333 miles to reach this year's target of 4,000 miles. But when my doctor recommended surgery for prostate cancer, I thought my riding days were over for a long time.
Would I have to buy a recumbent? Would I be able to ride at all in 1 month, 2 months, 3 months?
It wasn't as long as I thought it would be; about five weeks. Some guys at the prostate support group were surprised I was back at it that soon. Well, I took it real easy... more»
A professor of Chicano studies is taking a bicycle tour around the United States to study the nation's "Latino-ization."
Louis Mendoza, chairman of the Department of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota, left Santa Cruz on his touring bike in July headed to New York and is returning via the Sun Belt. He recently left El Paso.
At his very insightful A Journey Across Our America blog, Mendoza writes about the increasing presence of Hispanics in large and small cities all across the country. He told an El Paso newspaper that he chose to travel by bicycle because "I'd be more likely to have unpredictable experiences along the road." ... more»
Pity poor George Hincapie. His teams can't seem to keep their sponsors.
First, the Discovery Channel announced that it would not renew its sponsorship for the Tailwind Sports team of which he had been a member since the late '90s. Then Tailwind finally gave up looking for a sponsor and disbanded.
Hincapie jumped over to the team that Deutsche Telekom and affiliate T-Mobile had sponsored since 1991. T-Mobile announced today that it was pulling the plug ..... more»
I stopped attaching foreign objects in the vicinity of my bicycle wheels ever since I ruined a perfectly good Roy Campanella basball card a long time ago.
But let me pass along a couple of websites for wheel decorations suggested by a reader. Each sells circuit boards with LED lights attached that mount on the spokes of a bike wheel and display text or images as the wheel spins.
I've seen these before, but never really looked into it. If you have some time over the holidays ... more»
Marilyn Price was riding her mountain bicycle through redwood forests north San Francisco one day when she wondered how she could share the experience with disadvantaged kids from the city.
Scoring 10 donated bikes, she started Trips for Kids. Nineteen years later, that dream has turned into an organization with 57 chapters across the US that seek to steer kids away from trouble by getting them outside and away from bad influences ... more»
One day as a newspaper reporter in an earlier life, I was stuck on a small boat in the Chesapeake Bay with a US Fish & Wildlife Service biologist. To avoid justifying the environmental policies of the current adminstration (Reagan), he swung the conversation around to books.
His favorite was "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold. I had never heard of this conservationist (he died in 1948), so I bought that book a few days later. It later found a place on the bookshelf with John Muir, Edward Abbey, Colin Fletcher and John McPhee.
Argue as he might, Steven Gravenites couldn't convince the federal judge in San Francisco earlier this month that he should be found innocent of possession of a bicycle in a wilderness area.
The 45-year-old mountain biker and well-known Marin County, California, wheel-builder was fined $60 but was able to reclaim his bike. Rangers had taken it as evidence for illegal trail riding in the Point Reyes National Seashore in June.
An account of the trial -- it actually made it to federal court -- in the Marin Independent reports that Gravenites tried to get the court to consider the bigger picture of the history of mountain biking. ... more»
Floyd Landis has begun filing appeals with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the last stage in his attempt to regain the 2006 Tour de France championship and overturn a 2-year ban from pro cycling.
The 90-page "brief," as reported at CNN, states that Landis is committed to removing dope from the sport of cycling.
"However, to wrongly strip a champion of his victory due to a flawed test is much worse than to have an athlete cheat his way to victory .... more»
The San Jose Mercury News recently ran the story about a guy who rode his bicycle cross-country more than 40 years before the first bicyclist took to the Bikecentennial route.
Charlie Klotz was a 20-year-old working in a pharmacy in Hollister, California, when he took off on his bicycle for a cross-country tour to New York City in 1935.
He pedaled between 100 and 130 miles a day, covering the 3,100 miles in 30 days. He still has the Speed King bicycle that he rode ... more»
A bicycle relay is slowly making its way cross-country to draw attention to the connections between fuel dependency, war and global climate instability.
Called the Peace Transit, the ride started in Louisville, Kentucky, on Nov. 3 with cyclists carrying a baton, a petition and a rock to cyclists in Bardstown. Passed along five more times, the items arrived in Nashville, Tennessee, on Saturday.
No single person is making this tour. This is a very effective way to get hundreds, if not thousands, of people involved in publicizing the problems of being too dependent on oil. ... more»
Here it is not even Thanksgiving, and organizers of 53 "across-state" bicycle tours already have dates and routes for week-long bicycle tours in 2008.
It's never too early to start planning for next summer's bicycling adventure. If you're interested in putting your seat in the saddle for one of these RAGBRAI-like bike rides, check my list at 2008 Across State Bicycle Tours.
Listed are the standbys like BRAG, RAGBRAI, GRABAAWR, Ride the Rockies, but new ones like Indiana's RAINSTORM (this acronym is really a reach). Here are 28 states with updated bike rides and links to those pages ... more»
A 31-year-old Hermosillo cyclist set a record in the 25th annual El Tour de Tucson on Saturday.
Carlos Hernandez bicycled the 109-mile course in 4:10:51, finishing just ahead of Michael Grabinger, 30, of Flagstaff and David Solomon, 27, also of Hermosillo.
While the bike ride is a race for the leaders, it's simply a pleasant recreational bike ride most of the nearly 10,000 cyclists who participate in the fund-raiser for local charities. There are also bike routes of 80, 66 and 35 miles this year ... more»
It's always nice when a favored contraption gets a little respect.
In its list of 101 gadgets that changed the world, IOL Technology credits the bicycle as a useful gadget for becoming a widespread form of transportation and a vehicle toward the emancipation of women.
Justifying its claim, the magazine explains:
"First devised as a gentleman's play thing in the 1820s, the push-powered hobby-horse quickly evolved to become the most classless form of transport, trundling by the millions along highways and byways all over the world. ... more»
Many of the long bicycle trails in the Eastern US don't fade away at the state line, they just change names and keep on truckin'.
I'd been digging into some cool, long-distance suggestions for bicycle tours on "non-motorized trails" when I discovered that many well-known bike trails meet at the state borders.
Such is the case on the Georgia-Alabama border where Silver Comet joins the Chief Ladiga. It happens twice between Maryland and Pennsylvania, where the C&O Canal and Northern Central meet the Great Allegheny Passage and York County Heritage Trail... more»
South Carolina authorities charged the driver of an SUV with reckless homicide in the deaths of two bicyclists on the last leg of a cross-country, charity bicycle tour.
The 35-year-old Greensboro, North Carolina, woman turned herself in and was released on $10,000 bond, reports the Associated Press.
One of the bicyclists, Lee Anne Barry, 43, was finishing a cross-country bicycle ride called the Brain Injury Greatest Journey (B.I.G. Ride), when she was joined for the last day by Thomas Hoskins. ... more»
A while back I remember pummeling myself for not hitting my monthly goal of 333 miles to reach this year's target of 4,000 miles. But when my doctor recommended surgery for prostate cancer, I thought my riding days were over for a long time.
A professor of Chicano studies is taking a bicycle tour around the United States to study the nation's "Latino-ization."
Pity poor George Hincapie. His teams can't seem to keep their sponsors.
I stopped attaching foreign objects in the vicinity of my bicycle wheels ever since I ruined a perfectly good Roy Campanella basball card a long time ago.
Argue as he might, Steven Gravenites couldn't convince the federal judge in San Francisco earlier this month that he should be found innocent of possession of a bicycle in a wilderness area.
Floyd Landis has begun filing appeals with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the last stage in his attempt to regain the 2006 Tour de France championship and overturn a 2-year ban from pro cycling.
A 31-year-old Hermosillo cyclist set a record in the 25th annual El Tour de Tucson on Saturday.
It's always nice when a favored contraption gets a little respect.
