Tag: Bicycling

Burning down the house

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 39 Comments
These adventure-starved kids are burning down our house!

These kids today. Why aren’t they out there riding their damn’ bikes like we did when we were their age?

Why, when I was a pup. …

Sigh. It’s the same old song; music they’ve never danced to. “I said, ‘Ride, Sally, ride, now. …”

Writing at The Atlantic, freelancer Erin Sagen says today’s kids are very much not riding their bicycles, and for a variety of perfectly defensible reasons, too:

Since the 1990s, speed limits have ticked upward. Each year (minus a few temporary dips), drivers have progressively clocked more collective miles and driven ever larger cars. According to a 2023 report by the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, “Over the past 30 years, the average U.S. passenger vehicle has gotten about 4 inches wider, 10 inches longer, 8 inches taller and 1,000 pounds heavier.” These machines may be protecting drivers and passengers, but they can be much more intimidating to people on bikes. The annual number of children killed on bikes has actually fallen, a 2021 CDC report found, but the report acknowledges that this is likely in part because fewer kids are out riding.

Boy howdy. Citing stats from the National Sporting Goods Association, Sagen writes that during the 1990s, an average of 20.5 million children ages 7 to 17 rode a bike six or more times a year. By 2023, a few decades later, that number dropped to about 10.9 million. And of those kids, less than 5 percent rode their bikes “frequently.”

Six or more times a year? Sheeyit. We hopped on our bikes six or more times a week. Some of us still do. It’s fun, it’s exercise, it’s transportation … it’s liberation. Damn The Man! Let’s get big air at the gravel pit! Using one chain to break another, as it were.

No mas, no mas. !Que triste es la vida velo!

No wonder the Adventure Cycling Association has put its storied headquarters up for sale. Once a must-see for the membership, it’s only visited now by a handful of overripe saddle tramps in saggy wool shorts who just herded a 36-pound steel bike, hung about with tattered ripstop sacks stuffed with camping gear, canned beans, and one change of underwear, from Miami to Missoula without once stopping for a shower.

According to the ACA board of directors, the group’s membership has been dwindling for at least five years as its demographic “ages out” of bike travel. Tours and map sales are likewise struggling, and the association is failing to attract a younger crowd because ACA’s “brand” is seen as a raggedy-assed herd of sunburnt old roadies who just aren’t hep to the latest jive (gravel, bikepacking, insert your thrill of the minute here).

So, bam! The ACA HQ goes on the block, listed for $2.7 million, reports The Missoulian, its hometown newspaper.

I don’t know how this sale might save the ACA, because I haven’t seen any actual rescue proposals put forward. Just some MarketSpeak® in Bicycle Retailer about how ACA is “facing a crossroads,” “grappling with challenges,” and “addressing brutal truths while maintaining faith in the mission,” and how selling the HQ will “help us adapt to our reality, giving us the runway to reshape our programs and resources to continue inspiring transformative bike travel experiences.”

Friend of the Blog Diane “The Outspoken Cyclist” Lees is among those not convinced. She has viewed with alarm at her Substack, and former members of the organization — including its founders — are among the people who put together this petition urging that the sale be stopped.

Now, $2.7 mil’ may sound like a lot of money, especially if you don’t have it. But since Bikecentennial hit the road in 1976 I have, despite an appalling shortage of investment capital and absolutely no plan at all, pissed away at least that much on cigarettes, booze, drugs, guns, comic books, actual literature, albums, CDs, stereo gear, Toyota trucks and Subaru cars, road trips in three countries, moving violations in one of them, cheap motels, pet-friendly rentals, real estate, meals remarkable and questionable, vet bills, drawing paper, pencils, and pens, countless Apple products and peripherals, cable TV, streaming video, Internet hookups (no, not that kind of Internet hookup), blog/podcast hosting, and audio-visual gear.

And the only person who got any bicycling out of it all was me — in 1976, because I had been doing without a driver’s license for a few years thanks to a minor traffic accident (hit by a train), and afterward because I learned to love it (the cycling, not being hit by trains).

By the time Bikecentennial blossomed into the Adventure Cycling Association in 1993 I had settled down a great deal. It helped that after 15 years of newspapering I was officially and permanently unemployed, building a second career of sorts as a freelancer peddling vicious libels, ugly scribbles, and outright lies to niche magazines with the circulation of a week-old murder victim. I had also begun racing bicycles, and acquiring them, the latter a jones which haunts me to this day.

And after a decade and a half of that, thanks to the risk-taking spirit of the late, great Mike Deme, and his successors, Alex Strickland and Dan Meyer, I even sold some word count to Adventure Cyclist, at a time when the decline and fall of the for-profit bicycle magazine had left me short on runway and having trouble adapting to my reality.

Those dudes, and the other great advocates for and facilitators of bicycle travel I met while scribbling bike reviews for Adventure Cyclist, have all left the building that ACA plans to sell for … whatever. I’m sorry that I never visited them there, because now I never will. The building will become a bespoke hotel, law office, or assisted-living residence, whose half-daffy inmates will swear to their keepers that in the wee hours of the darkening night they hear the clicking of wide-range cassettes and catch a whiff of overworked chamois cream.

Sell the real estate? That’s what vulture capitalists do when they add another newspaper to their portfolio. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. A storied newspaper building becomes office space, condos, or a parking lot, the printing gets outsourced, and the few remaining journos who produce the paper are exiled to some soulless strip-mail shithole with all the joie de vivre of a happy-ending massage parlor — chances are the space used to be a happy-ending massage parlor — because the vulture capitalists don’t have any souls of their own and can’t imagine why anyone would want one. Bad for the bottom line.

Sell the real estate? Would the pope sell the Sistine Chapel? Puh-leeze. Dude won’t even Airbnb his summer place at Castel Gandolfo. Even a fucking Realtor will tell you it’s all about location, location, location.

Sell the real estate? It’s like eating your seed corn. Nothing down that long and winding road except for maybe one big dump and then death. Remember the wisdom of another intrepid traveler, Buckaroo Banzai, who has taught us: “No matter where you go, there you are.”

Is it too late for all these weak-in-the-knees whippersnappers askeered of the big, bad cars to revisit their cushy lifestyles, take a big ol’ bite out of life, savor the flavor of adventure cycling? And save the Adventure Cycling Association’s venerable headquarters, the hub around which America’s bicycle-travel universe revolves?

For the love of Deme, put that smartphone down, Rain, Drain or Spokane, whatever the hell your helicopter parents named your sorry ass, unless you’re calling Soma Fabrications to order up a damn’ Pescadero. Listen to the Voices. Here’s your panniers, there’s the door, what’s your hurry?

Don’t make me stop this blog and come back there.

Lift with your legs

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
And a-one, and a-two, and. …

I got to throw a rare double bird during a ride this past weekend.

Rounding a corner I saw a yard sign for TFG to my left … and then another across the street to my right.

“O! The Joy!” William Clark must have felt like this when he thought he’d finally seen the Pacific “ocian.” In honor of the Corps of Discovery I gave the placards the salute they deserved.

It’s little things like this that keep me on a slow simmer instead of a rolling boil.

As a longtime observer and occasional chronicler of our national political bed-wetting, I have felt compelled for some years now to watch and describe what appears — to me, anyway — to be a brain-damaged orangutan dry-humping the Statue of Liberty.

But damme if the lifting doesn’t get heavier every day. And I’m an old man, with a bad back.

So I lift with my legs. Which is to say that when I feel some crucial part of me starting to give way, I go for a ride, letting my legs lift my flagging spirit.

A bicycle can bear a lot of weight. You can trust me on this: I was a great fat bastard when I returned to cycling after a long absence, and that first two-wheeler had to carry a lot of baggage.

So have its descendants. But the tonnage these days is less Marlboro breath and whiskey sweat, more inchoate rage and existential dread.

That’s hard weight to shed, and not even the bicycle can get it all off you. But it definitely helps, especially if you try not to put the pounds right back on as soon as you get home.

• Pro tip: Try wearing a heart-rate monitor when you scan the news. When you find yourself surfing a hate-wave through Zone 5, remember that there is no Zone 6. Not in this lifetime, anyway. Grab a bike and get the hell out of the house.

Spring training

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

I haven’t ridden this one yet.

It was a good week on the bike.

Actually, make that “bikes.”

The red Steelman Eurocross, Jones, and Sam Hillborne all enjoyed some quality springtime during the week, and the New Albion Privateer got the nod on Sunday.

Nothing outlandish, mind you. I’m not training for anything; just trying to avoid collapsing into a smelly heap of bone splinters and bad ideas. We’re talking 90 minutes per outing, or thereabouts, with a thousand or so feet of vertical gain, and an average speed that wouldn’t impress anyone, especially me.

I’ve never been what you would call fast, but I’ve been faster.

“Listen up, you kids, don’t make me stop this tree and come back there.”

Still, who cares? The idea is to be above ground and moving around, amirite? You know what my dad was doing when he was my age? Nothing! Because he had been dead for seven years.

So when Herself and I rolled out for our Sunday ride we were focused not on heart rate, average speed, or mileage, but on how many Gambel’s quail we might see (that would be a half-dozen, plus a couple deer).

Back at the ranch we have hummingbirds re-enacting the Battle of Midway around our three feeders, finches of various types bellied up to two tubes of birdseed while the doves prowl the ground for dropped morsels, and a northern flicker feeding babies bunkered up in a dead limb on our backyard maple.

And our young Chinese pistache tree is coming along, too.

It’s starting to get warm, so I expect we’ll start seeing buzzworms soon. But it’s OK. Every garden has its snake. Just steer clear of the fruit stand.

Clubbed

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

Your Humble Narrator working a race for VeloNews Back in the Day®, when subscription fees and advertising revenue were enough to make the nut.

Steve-O raises an interesting question:

Your thoughts (and everyone else’s) on Bicycling’s new $40/year membership model?

This seems to be the flavor of the month. VeloNews is doing something similar for $99 a year, along with most of its cousins in the Pocket Outdoor Media group.

It’s tough to get readers to pay for “content.” Most people who read a daily newspaper Back in the Day® had no idea that their subscriptions didn’t cover the cost of the ink on the newsprint, much less the tab for all the technology and people it took to make the blat land on the stoop every morning. For a reader, the daily paper was a cheap date, with the real cost borne by advertisers.

Advertising is a tough sell these days, for newspapers, magazines, and websites. So what’s left? “Memberships.”

The New York Times has had some success with digital subscriptions. Likewise The Wall Street Journal. Two real powerhouses that can serve up the goodies you can’t get anywhere else.

I see value in the NYT and The Washington Post, so I subscribe to both. I also subscribe to The Atlantic, and Charlie Pierce’s blog at Esquire. All of these outfits provide things I want and need. I wish there were some Flyover Country version of The Atlantic so I could subscribe to that too.

But when you get down to the enthusiast-publication level, the pitch for memberships gets a little tougher. What do Bicycling or VeloNews have that I want/need badly enough to pay for it?

I like reading Joe Lindsey and Andrew Hood. And I like them as people, too. But with all due respect, I’m not sure that I want to spend $150 a year with their employers. There’s a bunch of stuff in both magazines/websites that I couldn’t care less about. It would feel like signing up for cable TV. I pulled that plug back in 2006 and now we buy our TV a la carte.

Perhaps the biggest issue with hawking memberships, subscriptions, and advertising is the one that started cropping up toward the end of my freelancing career. I was fortunate to be earning steady, predictable money as a regular contributor to both VN and Bicycle Retailer. But there were lots of other hired guns who were starting to get ambushed by what we called “fans with keyboards.” People who’d work for chump change, a T-shirt, or even just the byline.

Today there are so many talented amateurs and semipros out there who are willing to create wonderful stuff for free, or for pennies, that paying for the pros — who so often find themselves consigned to following the dictates of some uninspired editor or an advertising-driven calendar of theme issues — can seem extravagant.

“OK, guys, time for the annual stationary-trainer roundup, the ‘How LeMond won using aero bars’ retrospective, and who’s doing this week’s ‘fitter/faster in 10 seconds a day’ piece?”

Everybody thinks they’re working hard, and that you should buy what they’re selling. Not everybody is right.

12 Days of ’Toonsmas: Day 7

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

Just more trashy humor, from the July issue of BRAIN.

Back in June, Gloria Liu wrote a piece for Bicycling headlined, “Hey, Bike Shops: Stop Treating Customers Like Garbage.”

The article had its roots in a survey about rider experiences in shops, which found that way too many people had had a bad day at the IBD, some of them more than once.

General condescension or snobbery was the most commonly cited behavior: “The bike shop employees … made me feel stupid for not being an expert,” said one respondent. Another said, “Shop employees tend to socialize with known customers. Until you’ve been to the shop a few times and made purchases, the employees tend to ignore you.” Other comments included being pressured into purchases or feeling looked down upon for having inexpensive bikes or being beginners.

“Core/bro culture,” mansplaining, and a smirking approach to the gravity-challenged were among the issues Liu discussed with customers and shop people. So, naturally, being core/bro, a mouthy know-it-all, and a relentless Lampooner of the Large whose next cartoon collection should be titled “Moby-Dickhead,” I went straight to the cheap joke for the July episode of “Shop Talk.”

The story reminded me of a passage in my favorite Thomas McGuane essay, “”Me and My Bike and Why,” reprinted in his collection “An Outside Chance: Essays on Sport.” The essay was about motorcycles, and those who ride and care for them, but it could have been about cameras, computers, guns, guitars or bicycles.

A fascinating aspect of the pursuit, not in the least bucolic. was the bike shop where one went for mechanical service, and which was a meeting place for the bike people, whose machines were poised out front in carefully conceived rest positions. At first, of course, no one would talk to me. …

One day an admired racing mechanic — “a good wrench” — came out front and gave my admittedly well-cared-for Matchless the once-over. He announced that it was “very sanitary.” I was relieved. The fear, of course, is that he will tell you, “The bike is wrong.”

Specialty shops tend to attract a specialty employee, the sort who is deeply immersed in the product and its use, and these people are not always a pleasure to be around when they’re in the throes of their particular ecstasy. It’s like walking into an unfamiliar church and announcing you’d like to get right with the Lord, and everyone starts laughing at you.

“Which one? You look like an Episcopalian to me, Tubby.”

“That a Bible you got with you? It better be the King James Version.”

“Tired of dancing on Sundays, huh?”

And it’s the same on the group rides. Swear to Eddy, some of these bozos want to crawl into your jersey with you and tell you how to sweat.

I think there’s always going to be a certain amount of this condescension in your life unless you’re one of these Renaissance types who don’t need no help from nobody. People who know things often like making sure you know that they know. And if you have a long fuse you can learn from these people.

But it ain’t easy. One of the best copy editors I ever worked with was also the biggest asshole I’d ever met. He’s since slipped off the podium; I was young then, and my sample size was a good deal smaller than it is now.

That said, I couldn’t take more than nine months of his bullshit, and I was getting paid to do it. I can’t imagine having to pay for the privilege.