R O T H A R . C O M

So read a No Fear T-shirt I had once. I had a few along the lines of “Second place is first loser”, “If you aren’t living on the edge, then you’re taking up too much space” and “Fear: Just do without it”. What happened to T-shirts like that? Did they go out of fashion? According to Eric Saxon in the Stanford Chapparel, the No Fear T-shirt phenomenon is:

“…an example of consumer fetishism at its most extreme. Here, the messages gradually degenerate from their competitive beast origins to reveal the true insecurities and fears of the human beings behind the coverings. The last words of Know Fear suggest that only through acknowledgement of fears and insecurities, which are natural, is the danger of fear ameliorated. Repression and denial of fear by projection of strength elevates fear’s presence in the subconcious. Mostly, however, it’s a convenient play on words.”

That motocross attitude certainly had a lot of appeal in the 90s and propelled the brand on to the high street, where (perhaps inevitably) it lost a lot of the credibility with ‘the kids’ that it had built up. It’s decline was from the roots. Brands like Xtreme and Fox never seemed to be quite so boistrous and seem to be much more focused on their core target markets. These days you can even get a No Fear Pickup – they’ve changed a lot from their early days and the new logo is crap compared to the old one.

Back to bikes. The Trans-Rockies is over and as I write the Trans-Wales is in full swing with Benji and Coogle flying the flag for the mag. Then there’s the Trans-Himalayas and the original Trans-Alp. That’s a whole lot of races with descriptive, but not particularly adveturous names. I mean Wilderness 101. That’s an ace name for a race. Even the Leadville 100 sounds cool even if the name isn’t that exciting, so how about the Welsh Death March or the Rocky Mountains Killer?

Talking of such things you can read all about a little ride across Wales in the latest issue of Singletrack (Issue 30). It’s the write up of our May lasagne and Welsh beer sampling mission.

Word reached me today that Jon Kirscher (of drunkcyclist and LiveWrong fame) has been involved in a hit and run RTA over in Flagstaff, AZ:

The man himself, Big Jonny, was struck by an automobile on his way back from the Saturday group ride and is currently in the hospital with multiple lumbar fractures (fortunately, no paralysis) and severe road rash.

Big Jon was legally in the bike lane at approximately 12:15pm and was hit squarely from behind on an uphill section of the road by a sedan traveling approximately 55mph. The driver left the scene but has now been apprehended and charged with felony hit and run due to the diligence and efforts of multiple other drivers on the road who witnessed the collision.

Jon is currently in good spirits and is expected to make a full recovery. An unforeseen, yet fortuitous, byproduct of this horrific incident has been the opportunity to have numerous conversations with Jon while he is under the influence of numerous pain killers.

For your reading enjoyment, and in the spirit of Drunkcyclist.com (NSFW), Big Pun and The Gnome have updated DC with a few of the conversations Jon has had over the last two days. It’s classic. Get well soon Grande Juan.

I first saw this story on cyclingnews.com, but it’s sprung up in a few other places since then. In essence a cyclist in the US has been prosecuted for riding a fixed gear track bike on the streets without a brake.

The concern is that this case may set a legal precedent and the decision by the Judge raises some concerns and questions. Will the cops now feel emboldened to go out and ticket everyone on a fixed-gear? Are fixed-gears now essentially illegal? Are fixed-gears truly a public safety hazard?

Across the US as well as in Europe fixed gears, popularised by cycle couriers have become increasingly common with thousands of them on the roads. This issue is going to linger. Having spent a week in Boston where fixies are a dominant form of transport, I read this article with interest:

From: John Stevenson
Subject: Fixies outlawed?

There’s been a bit of hoo-ha in various bike forums around the net in the last few days about a case in Portland, Oregon where a rider was fined for not having a separate brake on her fixed-gear bike. According to bikeportland.org, bike messenger Ayla Holland was ticketed on June 1 and charged with violating Oregon Revised Statute (ORS) 815.280(2)(a) which states:

A bicycle must be equipped with a brake that enables the operator to make the braked wheels skid on dry, level, clean pavement. strong enough to skid tire.

Ms Holland’s lawyer Mark Ginsberg attempted to argue that a fixie’s transmission constituted a brake. The judge was having none of it, and in his decision said:

“The brake must be a device separate from the musculature of the rider. Take me for instance. I don’t have leg muscles as strong as a messenger… how would I stop safely?”

This has led to some rather alarmist talk about the future of fixies. “Will the cops now feel emboldened to go out and ticket everyone on a fixed-gear? Are fixed-gears now essentially illegal? Are fixed-gears truly a public safety hazard?” asks Jonathan Maus in bikeportland.org.

Well, no. The issue here is a badly-written piece of legislation being interpreted by a judge so that it achieves its aims, rather than what the absolute letter of the law says.

A fixed-gear bike with no brakes cannot stop in as short a space as one with a front brake, because only the rear wheel is providing the braking force. As a vehicle on the road, it’s therefore clearly less safe.

This is a matter of simple physics. In the third edition of Bicycling Science, David Gordon Wilson demonstrates that the maximum deceleration of a crouched rider on a standard bike (that is, not a recumbent) on a dry road is 0.56g. Try to brake any harder than that and you go over the handlebars, which is the limit condition, as the limit from tyre adhesion of vehicles that don’t pitch over (tandems, recumbents and cars) is about 0.8g.

If you brake with only the rear wheel, according to Wilson, the limit is 0.256g, because braking effectively shifts your weight forward, reducing the load on the rear wheel to the point that it skids at that deceleration. Once a tyre is skidding, its braking effectiveness is reduced because you no longer have sticky solid rubber in contact with the road, but a lubricating layer of molten rubber. (Which incidentally demonstrates that the Oregon legislation was written by someone with no clue at all about bikes.)

Therefore, however good a fixie rider is, stopping distance is roughly doubled without a front brake. In practice, it’s probably more than that.

In some jurisdictions, better-written laws make this issue moot. In the UK, for example, the law requires a bike to have two independent braking systems. I used to ride a fixie in the winter in the UK, and I knew quite a few fixie riders who dispensed with a rear brake on the grounds that the transmission was a braking system, but I never met anyone daft enough to have just a rear brake.

This judge has clearly decided to ignore the letter of the law in favour of enforcing its obvious intent, that bikes have at least one maximally effective brake. That’s the sort of thing judges are handy for: turning legislation written by idiots into rules that make sense in the real world.

All that fixie riders have to do to conform is slap on a front brake; hardly rocket surgery, and a long way from fixies being suddenly illegal. And to fixie riders who are about to reach for the email to defend riding brakeless fixies, I refer you to Cmdr Montgomery Scott: “You canna change the laws of physics!”

What an excellent idea.

Singletrack’s SOOB Day 2006. I guess BikeMagic will be busier…

It’s taken four days, but tonight on the way home I spotted my first IF in Boston, a rather nice Midnight Blue Metallic to Shark Grey Pearl fade steel Crown Jewel. In general I am really impressed by the number of bikes and riders here. Fixies and Singlespeeds are the most common bikes here ranging for ancient Raleighs and Univegas through to Bianchi Pistas and Serotta exotica.

There is a big range of bikes and people are riding them to work and for fun. They also have some rickshaw type taxiis to. People riding bikes is a great thing and the numbers here give you a lot of faith in the fact that future isn’t necessarily a car dominated certainty.

The other thing that gets you here is the number of iPods. Every 4th person you see has an iPod. The white ear phones are a dead giveaway. There maybe even more people who have them with different colour earphones. Advertising for them is also dominant especially on the transit (subway) system here in Boston. It’s hot here and getting hotter as a heatware moves eastwards across the US. I’ve spent the majority of my time in air conditioned hotel conference facilities, but the battle too and from the downtown area is a sweaty affair. It’s not just the heat that gets you, but the stiffling humidity too – especially when you’re in a suit.

My final rant about things here is that you can never find what you are looking for. Then when you don’t need it anymore you find it under your nose. For example… Yesterday I needed to get some card and a new USB Pen drive. At lunchtime I walked into the central downtown area. It took 40 minutes to find a stationers and a Radioshack electronics store. Today I spend all lunchtime looking for a pharmacy to get some Ibuprofen to counter the hideous lighting induced (the appalling carpets might have had something to do with this too) migraine headaches that have been driving me round the twist the last few days – last night they were so bad I slept for 14 hours, because I just couldn’t do anything else.

My wandering this afternoon around the maze of coridors in the Boston Sheraton led me to discover the fact that the Hotel is attached to a shopping mall that has a stationers and electronics shop. So I could have avoided an hour of getting hot and bothered yesterday by just going upstairs one floor and heading out into the mall. There was no pharmacy though. I only found that at the end of today downstairs in the lobby. Everything is so huge here that you really just can’t find what you’re looking for.

Luggage arrived eventually.

I’m in a rather lovely hotel just off Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA. Yesterday I hopped off the subway just north of the river and walked up Main Street through the MIT campus and onwards into Harvard. What a contrast between the two University campuses. Both like Manchester are very much integrated into the urban area, but there are vastly more big name chains and shops integrated into them. MIT has many ultra modern buildings, whilst Harvard seems to have many more that share the classical architecture that the older Oxbridge colleges offer.

After a bit of wandering I managed to find the hotel and after checking, I headed back out into the sweaty night iand wound up in a top bar called Grendel’s Den. This little gaff served the local beer, Sam Adams, and some too sweet for my palate stuff called Magic Hat #9 from Vermont. Factor in some top food outside on the terrace and live music from a band just sitting on park benches playing to folk on a humid, warm summer evening and it was a great way to spend the evening.

Of course actually getting here was rather more complicated. I recognise in the wake of 9/11 that they Americans are rather more security conscious but… The UK side of things was fairly normally. Getting frisked before boarding doesn’t seem that unnatural anymore. Having to give index finger fingerprints and have a digital photo taken at the passport control in Philly did feel like a bit of an invasion. From landing to getting to my connecting flight (which involved getting through passport control and then customs) took an hour and a half of standing in big old queues. I know it took exactly this long because I only just made it onto the plane. They literally shut the door behind me and started taxiing off.

Perhaps predictably my luggage (which I intrusted to an Ice Cube lookalike at baggage re-check-in in Philadelphia) still hasn’t arrived. The fact that the luggage carousel wasn’t working and everything was being stacked into a fairly big heap pehaps wasn’t a good sign. That it’s current whereabouts isn’t exactly clear is a fact that didn’t go down to well with me when I enquired at reception a few minutes ago. It might turn up today. If I’m lucky… I literally have what I am wearing – an issue that can be sorted with a trip to Gap or some other store shortly. My concern is what else is in my suitcase – namely all my stuff for the conference and the power adaptor for this laptop. Arse.

Right then. This time tomorrow I’ll be in Boston, Massachusetts. A week of work and a little bit of time to check out what New England has to offer. Of course there’ll be a visit to Independent Fabrication whilst I’m in town and hopefully an opportunity to do a little bit of riding too.

Looks like there’ll be an answer on the Floyd Landis case by the time I get back too. As has been discussed elsewhere, who’s to say that Floyd doesn’t have above average testosterone? Maybe in this one instance he did, but it seems unlikely. If he had a naturally high level of Testosterone, surely this would have been picked up a lot earlier in his professional career? As Armstrong was always very clear to say, he was like a pin-cushion with all the tests he was having to take.

It may be that there has been some lifestyle change that has led to a recent increase, or maybe this year the UCI have lowered the threshold value. I sincerely hope that there is no foul play involved, but at the moment I can’t see how his body would suddenly produce a significant increase that has led to this positive test. I guess the world will find out soon enough. Keep an eye on cyclingnews for more news.

Finally there’s this. Maybe something to add to the to do list:

From: Tom Purvis of greatdividerace.blogspot.com
Subject: Great Divide race ends with only one finisher

The grueling Great Divide solo, self-supported mountain-bike race, run on 2,490 miles of trails that dissect the United States from Banff, Alberta, Canada to Antelope Wells, New Mexico, ended last week with only one finisher. Matthew Lee finished in 17 days, 22 hours, 30 minutes, just missing Mike Curiak’s record, which still stands at 16d 00h 57m.

Lee encountered lots of rainy weather and had a couple of key mechanical problems, otherwise he might very well have beaten the record. Matthew won the race last year in 19d 04h 17m.

In all, eight riders started the 2006 Great Divide Race. The next closest finisher, John Nobile, made it as far as Steamboat Springs, CO July 5 before dropping out. Kenny Maldonado made it to Rawlins, WY. on July 16th when he too stopped.

Good work by Matt Lee. If he’d had a more reliable bike, it looks like he’d have broken Mike Curiak’s record. I don’t agree with some of the riders trying to do the route by getting back to the ‘roots’. They weren’t trying to ride the GDR on bikes in the 1800s. They were too busy trying not to get killed by lots of nasty North American predators to be buggering about in the mountains on bikes. Mountain Bikes these days are the product of various cycles of design, testing and development which has actually let to all kinds of wonderful technological advances like cycling shoes and clipless pedals. When a custom frame builder tries to ignore all of this you have to think that they’re a bit off the wall.

The final selection of photos from the Chamonix to Zermatt Haute Route trip with Ride the Alps are now up on the site. I also set up a Flickr group for the trip so you can see the photos from the other members of the group. Check it out.

I like the sound of this. It appeals along similar lines as the trip across France to Luzern did. Not quite sure if I’ll ever be in a position to do what Mark, Ruth and a pair of Pompinos did:

It’s a dull day in the office. It’s winter. In London. I haven’t been out on the mountain bike for months. The only redeeming feature of sitting here with no work to do is having Internet access. Since finding Singletrackworld.com nearly 3 years ago I think I have spent more time in the forum than I have asleep. But even the flood of junk that appears there can’t make today seem any more interesting.

I decided late last year that following our partial move away from Landaan back to my home county of Worcestershire that I would eventually leave my salaried job and go self employed. At the same time, Ruth and I could take the opportunity to go on a trip. A long one. One that stretched from one end of the summer to the other. And it was going to involve bikes.

Most people who come and read this blog will have got here either through a link at STW or by following a link I will have emailed you which makes you either a cyclist of some sort, related to me, or fully versed of my cycle addiction problem.

The plan was to ride the length of the Danube but the obvious topographical predictability of riding along a big river’s flood plain and the fact that most of Germany try and do it each year lead us to change our plan into something a little more adventurous.

Our itinerary is not over planned as the unknown will be as important as the trip, but the gernal plan is to ride along northern Spain, down the French side of the Pyrenees, across into Provence and then northern Italy. From here we will either turn left up through teh Alps and Bavaria back to northern Europe, or south down through Tuscany and into the Mezzogiorno of Italy. When we work it out, you will be the first to know…

Finally, just to add a little quirkiness we are going to be doing it with hardly any gear. R and I always travelled light anyway, but one thing I have no intention of doing is dragging a bike laden with bar bags, low riders, rear panniers and rack packs, weighing 100lbs up a col or mountain pass. So we are only taking bar and saddle bags. For the technical junkies around the first few weeks of this blog will bore for Britain about the gear we are taking. R will almost certainly write something more interesting a little later. Once we are on the road of course, it will be much more of a journal and a photograph repository.

Oh, and the bikes only have one gear. Each.

We like a challenge.

Five riders: Cris, Paul, Phil, Tyrrell & Gilly, the latter two of whom had never raced mountain bikes let alone raced a 24hr event. One goal: To finish the first ever Bontrager 24/12 event as a mixed fun team. The result: 2nd place in class (finishing just minutes behind the 1st place team too) with 30 laps. If we’d entered in the mixed team category we’d have placed in the top three too. Everyone’s really pleased and it was a good course and event.

The Indy and me lovin’ the tech. First Lap photo from Simon Barnes.

It wasn’t without glitches. When there was a water pressure problem in the night and I ended up drinking beer (it was a tough call) rather than waiting in line for people to fill 100 litre containers, there were sensitive sleepers sleeping in the noisy campsite (why?) and part of the course ran over a former landfill site, as a consequence there was a lot of glass on the woodbark covered trails (fortunately we only had one puncture as a team all race).

During Gilly’s second lap the heavens opened, with a 30 minute cloud burst which turned a technical course into a sliptastic mudfest. The course spent the rest of the event drying out and it didn’t take long for those people with the right tyres on to be able to ride the whole course again. By noonon Sunday the rain plus hundreds of riders taking the same lines had probably actually improved the course in some places, ironing out the tractor treads and bumps in the sun baked clay fields, it might have been faster, but I think my legs were a bit too tired to make the most of it.

Landis won the Tour. I haven’t really followed the event this year what with being away for two weeks and being really busy before that. With the scandal and all it’s fairly amazing the race went on. I suppose there will be a lot of European people wondering how in the vacuum left by Armstrong it has fallen to another talented American to win the most prestigious bike race in the World. Meanwile Ullrich and Sevilla are a bit miffed about being booted out of T Mobile…

Update

My handful of photos from the race are up here. My photography skills seem to have gone out of the window this weekend so most of them were pretty crap. Fortunately we had a residential camerameister in the team. Ace shots courtesy of Chilly (and Imogen) are over at Giant Pygmy.

Congratulations! Your lottery entry to ride The Cape Epic 2007 was successful.

Kind Regards
The Cape Epic Team

The race is the largest full-service mountain bike stage race in the world. The Epic, presented by adidas, will kick off for the fourth time on 24 March 2007 in Knysna and lead over 900 mountain bikers from across the globe through the magnificent scenery of the Western Cape. Finishers will have to ride more than 900 gruelling kilometres and climb some 16000 vertical metres during their adventurous eight-day journey ending on 31 March 2007 at the Cape Winelands just outside Cape Town.

Went to Europe. Rode the Alps. It was ace. Can’t wait to go back and do it again.

The first half of the photos from the fantastic Trans Alp adventure along the famous Haute Route are now up. The trip was run by Ride the Alps and led by the rather handy bike rider and former XC racer Jamie Carr. Props to Jamie for being a solid guide and all round top bloke. The photos can be found here. The second half of the set will follow soon…