Category: Other cycling

Let's not get into the reasons why I found myself crashing onto the pavement; as with any of my bike crashes, the circumstances are far too embarrassing to repeat.

But after I picked myself up and hopped around my Rockhopper repeating the mantra “sonofabitch,” it occurred to me that I should write up a piece about how to cure road rash.

Sometimes these blogging ideas come to me as easily as falling off a bike. The cleansed and treated wound is at left. It doesn't look as cool as when it was all bloody.

When I did some research on road rash, the first thing I learned is that conventional wisdom — stuff I learned when I was a kid — no longer applies. Some of the old-style treatments actually are counter-productive. …

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Here it is Thursday evening, four days after Sunday's start of the Race Across America for solo cyclists, and Jure Robic has passed the halfway point in the 3,000-mile race.

Robic is the 43-year-old ultra-endurance athlete from Slovenia who is attempting his fourth solo win at RAAM. Early estimates put him across the finish line in Annapolis, Maryland, sometime on Monday afternoon or evening.

The live coverage of RAAM notes that Robic had been bucking stiff winds in western Kansas overnight, yet he's still some 180 miles ahead of the closest three solo men trailing him — David Haase, Mark Pattinson, Julian Sanz Garcia. From the start in Oceanside on Sunday, Robic is averaging 15.2 mph, including catnaps …

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Would a new bicycle set you free?

Just explain how in an essay and you might just win a new set of wheels if you live in Seattle, Portland or San Francisco.

The three cities are among five that have been chosen in Bicycling magazine's BikeTown USA this year. The others are Columbus, Ohio, and Lincoln, Nebraska …

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One of the loneliest movies I ever attended was “Stop Making Sense”, which featured a concert by the Talking Heads, led by David Byrne. My future wife and I were the only people watching that particular screen at a Cineplex in Modesto, California, that evening in 1984.

Today, David Byrne is still a musician and artist in Manhattan and is known for riding his bicycle everywhere; and I'm still showing up at the least popular movie at the local cineplex.

In writing about his current project of turning a building into a musical instrument, The Village Voice reports that Byrne recently fell while cycling and broke a couple of ribs …

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The Seattle to Portland bike ride always reminds me of a tub of warm beer.

STP was my first big bike ride after moving to the Pacific Northwest 8 years ago. I had done plenty of centuries, but never 200 miles in a single day.

I had trained hard, but stayed at the half-way point too long and finished the ride around dusk. When I arrived at my motel room in Portland, I discovered that my TransAmerica bike ride buddy had room service set up a six-pack of Corona on ice in the room for me.

Unfortunately, he must have thought I would arrive much earlier in the day because the six room-temperature beers were sitting in a bowl of room-temperature water that I can only assume had been ice at one time. I drank a couple anyway…

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Most bike ride events have a logo and a T-shirt. Why should the World Naked Bike Ride be any different?

The World Naked Bike Rides are scheduled in cities in the US and Canada in June, July and August to protest oil dependency and the car culture by a show of nakedness on two wheels.

It may seem like bare irony that organizers are selling about 100 T-shirts to raise money to pay expenses. But they say participants may want to wear those T-shirts 40 or 50 years from now when they're sitting in a rocking chair reminiscing about the olden days …

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The ancient proverb — “He who rides a glass bicycle shouldn't take the bumpy road” — doesn't apply to the glass bicycles hand-sculptured by Leo Lyman.

From his home studio in Wildomar, California, Leo makes a wide variety of small glass bicycle gifts in the styles of road bikes, tandems, recumbents, and more. He even makes glass cake tops; I understand the glass tandem is popular for wedding cakes.

Examples of his work are displayed at his Bicycle in Glass website. I recently asked Leo how he got started making glass bicycle-style jewelry.

“I have been doing the bicycle glass since my son Scott was racing BMX, which  has been about 22 years ago,” he wrote. “He then moved up to cross-country and down hill. I used to sell the bicycle glass at the races to pay for his races and accommodations. …

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On May 28 the curtain goes up on the 8th annual edition of the Bicycle Film Festival with a five-day run in New York City. From there it takes off on a seven-month tour of the US, Europe, Australia and Asia before landing in Portland in December for this year's final show.

There's more to these events than films about people riding their bicycles. We're talking parties, bands, art shows and more parties.

But at its heart this festival is about bicycling films. The New York City program shows sessions that encompass everything from animated shorts, 5-minute films about bike advocates to feature-length documentaries such as Adventures for the Cure(see trailer above). …

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Services are scheduled later this week for John Cuchessi, a Southern California bike shop owner remembered for his enthusiasm for bicycling and generosity to customers and others in the community.

Cuchessi, owner of the San Clemente Cyclery since 1974, was riding with the San Clemente Renegades bike club on Sunday when he inexplicably made a sharp right while heading downhill and hit a fence. He died on the way to the hospital.

Anyone with comments or stories about Cuchessi is encouraged to send an e-mail to San Clemente Cyclery at info@sccyclery.com …

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If you browse the bicycling blogs — and if you're here, you must — then you're probably familiar with FatCyclist.com. Day in and day out, his is the most entertaining blog of them all.

The blogger's name is Elden Nelson, and just a few weeks ago he and his wife Susan learned that the cancer …

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