Going places

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
The Air Force Academy as seen from the New Santa Fe Trail.
The Air Force Academy as seen from the New Santa Fe Trail.

People often ask me how I can bear to live in a stony-broke garrison town full of Bible-thumpers, Birchers and boneheads, a place that can’t afford to keep its streetlights on unless you care to adopt one, where economic development seems confined to the crucial tattoo, pawnshop and medical-marijuana sectors and nearly half the respondents to a recent survey think we’re headed in the wrong direction (unless you’re ripped to the tits and pawning your deployed sister’s iPod to get some fresh ink).

I ask myself the same question every time I venture out of our little enclave northeast of Colorado College. Here the streets are wide, the trees tall and the neighbors friendly. It feels like the sort of small-town America that probably never existed beyond the confines of a black-and-white TV screen — until you head north, east or south and experience the real Bibleburg in full color, 3-D, with SurroundSound, a collaboration between Steve Spielberg and Terry Gilliam with an assist from Stephen King.

So mostly I don’t do that. Beyond the once-weekly dash north to Whole Paycheck my north-south peregrinations are generally restricted to cycling along the Pikes Peak Greenway/New Santa Fe Regional Trail, which offers a 35-mile auto-free roundtrip if taken south and a 60-mile out-and-back if ridden north. I used a portion of the trail for a time trial to the North Gate of the Air Force Academy on Tuesday and failed to medal even though I was the only contestant.

Greater cosmopolitan Bibleburg as seen from Palmer Park.
Greater cosmopolitan Bibleburg as seen from Palmer Park.

East I head mostly never, having learned in the Seventies that the real Bibleburg stops somewhere around Hancock Avenue, about six blocks from here. But I will venture in that direction as far as Palmer Park, a trail-rich, 730-acre reminder of what that side of town looked like before Bibleburg dropped trou’ for the developers. I spent an hour and a half there yesterday trying to remember how to ride a mountain bike.

This is a survival mechanism learned from Ernest Hemingway, Jim Harrison and other word-slingers who often longed to be somewhere other than where they were. “Do not scorn day trips. You can use them to avoid nervous collapse,” writes Harrison, who should know.

In fact, I feel a day trip coming on as we speak. I just put new tires on the Nobilette and I am so out of here.

You can’t beat our meat

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
From "The Best of the Rip Off Press, Vol. II: The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers," © 1974 by Gilbert Shelton
From "The Best of the Rip Off Press, Vol. II: The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers," © 1974 by Gilbert Shelton

Seems it wasn’t Chinese pork that tripped up Alberto Contador after all. In what’s sure to give a boost to the Spanish beef industry, El Pendejo — disculpame, El Pistolero — says he tripped the Dope-O-Meter® after dining on a chunk of homegrown carne the team chef ordered up during the Tour ’cause the French hotel’s meat tasted like ass.

I don’t know how they ever caught that steer for butchering, full of clenbuterol as it must have been.

His story brings to mind an old Gilbert Shelton gag, first used in a “Wonder Wart-Hog” strip and then reprised in “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.” The initial version involved a motorcycle race; the encore featured a police chase.

Here’s my riff on the joke:

Two cowboys on roundup stagger back to the ranch with their chaps shredded, their hats in tatters and generally looking like they’d been et by a coyote and shit off a cliff.

“What the hell happened to you fellas?” asks the foreman.

“Aw,” replies one, “this cow we was a-chasin’ ran away from us so fast we thought our horses had stopped so we got off to see what was the matter.”

• Late update: Meanwhile, Contador’s homeboys Ezequiel Mosquera and David Garcia Da Peña are also deep in the mierda, but for hydroxyethyl starch. The fiesta never stops.

Steel we got; Campy, not so much

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Lots of chat in comments about The Good Old Days®, when men rode steel and Campy.

I missed those halcyon days of yesteryear, having come to “serious” cycling late in life (I didn’t start racing until I was in my mid-30s). During high school and college I rode a series of Schwinns — five- and 10-speed Varsity and Continental behemoths — but when I took up cycling again in the early 1980s it was astride a Centurion LeMans (either a 10 or 12).

The old Pinarello ’cross bike. It went from me to Dr. Schenkenstein, who eventually cracked the top tube doing something manly.
The old Pinarello ’cross bike. It went from me to Dr. Schenkenstein, who eventually cracked the top tube doing something manly.

I had the chance to do the right thing when I went shopping for my next bike. But instead of buying a Bianchi from a local shop that is no longer in existence I went to the Dark Side and bought a Trek 560 from Criterium Bicycles. it was a purple-and-yellow monstrosity that looked like a rolling pustule. An acid flashback must have driven that particular purchase.

A couple more Treks followed. First came a mountain bike (an 830 Antelope, I think), then a 1200 (broke the frame at the right rear aluminum dropout in a city-limits sprint outside Española), and finally a 1500 (a courtesy upgrade from Trek with steel dropouts).

I finally went Italian with a Campy-equipped Pinarello Prologo TT time-trial bike (an old Team Crest machine bought used from Denver Spoke), but this was a mental lapse, on a par with a bald-headed fat bastard who thinks that driving a Maserati will get him laid.

Next came a series of road and mountain Specializeds in steel, aluminum and carbon (we had an amazingly compliant rep in Santa Fe, ol’ Special Dave). My first “real” cyclo-cross bike was a steel Specialized Sirrus road bike that a frame-building acquaintance doctored, adding canti’ posts and subtracting the chainstay bridge.

’Cross is what finally put me back on the road to steel for real. My first really real ’cross bike was a Day-Glo yellow Pinarello, bought cheaply with the assistance of Tim Campen, then at Veltec. Then I met Brent Steelman at Interbike Anaheim and all hell broke loose. First it was a Steelman CC in Excell steel, then a series of Eurocrosses in Dedacciai, Reynolds and True Temper, even a time-trial bike (another mental lapse, but screw it, I’ll start racing multisport again, just you wait and see).

I’ve since ridden a ton of aluminum, titanium and carbon bikes from a variety of manufacturers — Bianchi, Voodoo, LeMond, GT, Look, Cannondale, Jamis, you name it — but I still reach for the steel first. Usually it’s the Nobilette or one of the Eurocrosses, but I even like the inexpensive steel from outfits like Soma and Voodoo, and it’s hard to find a shop rat who doesn’t ride something from Surly.

And there ain’t a Campy-equipped bike in the lot. Not among the rolling stock, anyway.

Choices, choices

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 32 Comments
The Jamis Supernova sporting Conti road rubber. The other ’cross bikes laugh at it, calling it sissified.
The Jamis Supernova sporting Conti road rubber. The other ’cross bikes laugh at it, calling it sissified.

Man, fall is here with a vengeance. When Dennis the Menace and Dr. Schenkenstein popped round this morning at the start of a cyclo-cross ride, The Menace was sporting ear warmers and a jacket while the good Herr Doktor was in full winter kit, complete with tights.

I was supposed to join them, but there were Saturday-night leftovers to be posted on VeloNews.com and nobody around to post them other than Your Humble Narrator. That’s the bad news. The good news is that I get to ride when it’s 60-something instead of 40-something.

And the question of which ’cross bike to choose for a bracing fall outing gets easier to answer every day, thanks to evil spirits and my neglect of basic maintenance.

The Jamis Supernova has been outfitted with road rubber and press-ganged into temporary pavement duty while the road bike languishes at Old Town, thanks to Ritchey’s inability to provide a properly built fork.

The Nobilette’s Michelins are balder than I am, the red Steelman looks like a dusty relic from some pharaoh’s tomb and the mango Steelman needs brake pads that don’t go skreeeeeeeeeeeeeek when I hit the binders.

The Soma Double Cross is in fine condition, but remains in a loaded-tourer configuration. And the Voodoo Wazoo is still a foul-weather townie, with straight bars and fenders.

So my choices are buy some tires, wash a bike or endure bad noise.

Right. A road ride it is.