Alissa Bell has a fine piece about becoming a cyclist at The Cycling Independent.
She’s actually been one for quite a spell, and logged plenty of the hard miles, not just in the Benighted States of America but in places some hardcore cyclists will never straddle a top tube, like Vietnam, Egypt, and Sudan.
But Bell says she really started feeling like a cyclist when she began “riding less, but more intentionally.” She continues:
Riding my bike is the closest I’ll ever get to pausing time. As long as I’m in the saddle (or hiking beside if need be) there is time to think, to feel, to let the knots in my mind relax enough that there is hope of untangling them later. Whether for two hours or two months, cycling gives me a break from the relentless pace of a life that’s always been a little too fast for me.
How does one stop The Machine? By starting another one. Go read the whole piece. It’s liberating.
The fun and frolic continues apace here in the Land of Enchantment, a subsidiary of Netflix, Inc. Look for the miniseries “The Ten Plagues of Aztlan,” coming soon! “Episode 1: The Gabachos.”
Word is Ruidoso is getting some rain, which, yay. It’s the proverbial good news/bad news scenario — helps with the fire, but not with the flooding. You gotta play the hand you’re dealt, I guess. Meanwhile, it seems full-time residents may be allowed to return Monday morning.
We woke to a light rain here at El Rancho Pendejo. By 8:30 we’d recorded 0.10 inch of rain since midnight, and we will take it, thank you. Sorta throws a spanner into the ol’ training schedule, but what the hell am I training for, anyway?
If it keeps up I don’t think I’ll have to worry about whether a fellow cyclist returns my friendly wave today. My old VeloNews colleague John Rezell broached the topic yesterday at The Cycling Independent, but I beat him to it by nearly three decades (h/t Khal S.).
In my dotage I see this churlish behavior from all manner of knuckleheads. Wave casually at a brother roadie, get The Great Stone Face. Say, “Good morning” to another hiker on a narrow stretch of trail, nuttin’ but nuttin’. Everyone has the AirPods in their ears and an iStick up their arses, I guess.
It doesn’t bother me much anymore. I keep waving and yielding trail as though it matters. Which it kinda does.
Wind and other things that blow kept my bike mileage in the double digits last week, which would not be such a bad thing if it weren’t for my addiction to the news.
After spending too much time in front of the monitor and not enough behind the handlebar I came this close (finger and thumb so close together that you couldn’t slip the homepage of the Albuquerque Journal between them) to canceling all my subscriptions. Bad news, badly written, barely edited, and poorly presented.
The motto of The New York Times used to be “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” At lesser journals wiseguys often revised it to “All the News That Fits, We Print.” In the Age of the Bottomless Internet it might be “All the News We Print Gives You Fits.”
Practically nobody needs to know most of this stuff, much less write about it.
“The rise of executive butlers.”
“At-home IV drips are the latest luxury building amenity.”
“We tried to pet all 200 dogs at the [Westminster Dog Show]. Here’s what it all felt like.”
Newspapers have always provided a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, of course. But once the sheer volume of treacle was limited by the traditional 60/40 ratio of ads to news, which constrained page count; editors’ desire to focus on what was actually important, like, uh, the fucking news; and publishers’ insistence that the final package turn a profit.
There is no bottom to the Internet, no satisfying its endless appetite. Ever fed a baby bird? Imagine one the size of NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building, but with a basement that extends all the way to Hell.
Whew. Now. All this being said, I have stumbled across two items you might enjoy reading over your morning coffee, shot of whiskey, or morning coffee with a shot of whiskey in it. And surprise, surprise: They both come from the godsend that rescued me from pulling an oar in the sinking longboat of daily newspapering, the wonderful world of bicycling.
First: The Washington Post presents a fabulous report by Peter W. Stevenson on Indiana University’s annual Little 500 bicycle race, made famous by the only cycling movie worth the price of a frame pump to put it into the ditch, “Breaking Away.”
It’s not clear who shot all the video and photos — Stevenson, a video producer, is credited on some, but not all — but they really help tell the story. And I love the still of the Kappa Alpha Theta rider hovering in midair over her saddle during a remount.
Second, The Cycling Independentgives us an essay by Laura Killingbeck, “A Good Time at the Dollar Store.” Killingbeck, free to explore after three months of housesitting, sings a soggy hosanna to the joys of the open road, a song I’m always eager to hear.
I’m supposed to do a short ride in the foothills with my fellow geezers this morning, but Killingbeck makes me want to strap some camping gear to a Soma and wobble off on a skull-flushing tour of wherever. Shucks, it’s not even sleeting here.
Your Humble Narrator in the salad days, covering a race in Bibleburg.
A bitter wind continues to thin the herd of cycling journalists struggling to make headway in the bloody gutter of vulture capitalism.
Yet even as the ravens screeched “Nevermore!” for Zapata Espinoza and two colleagues at Hi-Torque Publications, Wade Wallace and Caley Fretz were crowing over the news that they had signed up enough committed members to launch their new venture, “the best damn cycling website on the planet,” a.k.a. Escape.
Turn your radio on.
The notion of journalism underwritten by membership is not new, not even for cycling journalism. The Greater Outside Globe-Spanning Vertically Integrated Title-Killing Paywalled Conglomerate relies on memberships (and vulture-capitalist beggary), and The Cycling Independent (which we help prop up with a monthly tenner) strives to get by on subscriptions.
It’s a rough old road, no matter how you ride it. The sport is pricey to do, and even more so to cover. Memberships and subscriptions can only take you so far. Advertising is a hard sell.
And the vulture capitalist? Basically a pimp who says things like “synergy,” “scale,” and “best in class,” instead of “bitch,” “hoe,” and “Shit, it’s five-o.” He might not take a straight razor to your lips if you don’t bring in the Benjamins, but he will cut the hell out of your masthead. He didn’t add you to the stable because he liked the look of your legs, honey; he thought you’d be a good earner.
The wild card in this bum hand at Casino Velo is the audience. A lot of people think information wants to be free. They want to be paid for whatever they’re doing for work, when they can find it, and actually show up to do it. But you, pal, don’t you bogart that information.
Lucky for you, you’ve stumbled into the cheap seats. We’re serving up another episode of Radio Free Dogpatch, absolutely free of charge, and we guarantee it’ll be worth every penny you paid for it.
Sad news: Garrett Lai, one of the cycling journos, has gone west.
Garrett was running Bicycle Guide back when I was a minor cog in the VeloMachine, and from time to time we’d bump into each other, exchange compliments, usually at Interbike.
I can’t claim to have known him well, but I knew for sure that he was a top-shelf scribe with a finely honed personal style. And his curiosity, enthusiasm, and expertise were not limited to the bike world.
Once or twice we talked about doing some work together, but this never came to pass, more’s the pity.
Mad Blog Media 
