Category: Other cycling

It will still be snail mail, but it will have the illusion of speed when the U.S. Postal Service releases four bicycling themed stamps in 2012.

The post office says it chose the bicycle because it's one of the nation's most popular outdoor activities.

A press release reminds us that the Postal Service delivers mail by bicycle in locations throughout Arizona and Florida. That same press release doesn't remind us that it once sponsored a professional bicycle racing team that won six Tours de France …

Usually the bicycling scenes that blow me away are the photos of a tiny speck of a touring bicyclist dwarfed against an awesome landscape.

But these simple pen and ink drawings created by Englishman Frank Patterson tell a truer story for most cyclists and maybe get more to the simple pleasures of bicycling.

They just show a person with a bicycle enjoying the time and place.

As you can probably tell from the outfits worn by the bicyclists, these drawings of bicycling and the English countryside date from the period before World War II. They've been assembled by Molly Sanders into a YouTube slideshow …..

My early years as a writer were all in print media, so it's a thrill to see one of my blog stories appear in the March issue of the magazine Riders' Collective.

Actually, Riders' Collective is a web-based publication; an e-zine. But publisher Paul Kramer gives the stories inside such a full-blown print magazine treatment with snappy graphics, large photos and stylish fonts that you can imagine it's something sitting out on a coffee table.

And Kramer does it all without felling one tree.

Kramer has coined the term “aggrezine” to describe his publication. That word is protected by a trademark.

Essentially, he scours the Internet for a wide variety of web stories ….

Continue reading

Into every tragedy a few nuggets of positive news often appear. Tsuna Kimura is one of those nuggets from last week's earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan.

CNN found the 83-year-old woman in a shelter in the town of Hachinohe, one of the coastal cities partially swept away by the tsunami that followed the 9.0 earthquake.

The life-long rice farmer lived alone in a house, now flooded, when the earthquake and tsunami hit. She told CNN …

Continue reading

Bicycling historian David Herlihy isn't resting on his well-earned laurels after completing his books “Bicycle: The History” and “The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance.”

When I talked with him at the Seattle Bike Expo on Saturday, Herlihy said he's been working on another book. This one is about French cyclist Octave Lapize, one of the early winners of the Tour de France.

“Lapize was the best all around cyclist of that pre-war era. It will be his story and his generation of cyclists.”

All three winners of the Tour de France during that four-year period — 1907 to 1910 — met tragic ends; they were killed in World War I as members of the French Army ….

Continue reading

Yesterday I reposted a video from the 2010 Seattle Bicycle Expo showing part of an artistic cycling routine by three bicyclists from Germany.

It's a popular and respected competition in some parts of the world, and Corrina Hein has earned the right to wear the rainbow jersey of a world champion.

Then I stumbled across this video of an unknown person performing his own style of artistic cycling to a funky drumbeat outside the BM Chez Kiki cafe in Senegal.

His stunts look every bit as difficult as those performed by the Germans. I especially enjoy how he commands his bicycle to stand up with his finger.

Continue reading

It took a Colorado jury eight hours to issue a guilty verdict against a man accused of threatening a group of bicyclists and hammering one of their bikes with a bat.

The LovelandConnection.com reports the jury found the man guilty of criminal mischief and menacing. The jury reduced the criminal mischief charge to a Class 1 misdemeanor, while the menacing with a deadly weapon charge remained a Class 5 felony …

Continue reading

Some Australian cyclists have caught the attention of the media down under with their use of bicycle-mounted video cameras.

Simon Hookham (that's his video at left) and Nathan Besh say they can use the videos to record near-misses or collisions with cars or pedestrians.

Police in New South Wales told the Sydney Morning Herald that the video footage is useful in crash investigations and might even be used as evidence.

Cyclists have been doing this for years. The growth of digital video makes it easy, and relatively inexpensive, to record your bicycle rides ….

Continue reading

[Note: Here's another story about a couple of early bicycle explorers. Written by noted bicycling author David Herlihy, the book was published this past summer.]

If you're looking to travel by bicycle vicariously this summer by reading about someone else's adventures, I'd recommend “The Lost Cyclist” by David Herlihy. But I'll warn you that, as the title implies, it ends badly.

From the opening pages, you can tell “The Lost Cyclist” is not going to be your average book about a bicycle tour. It's an historical account of Frank Lenz's around-the-world bicycle adventure gone wrong, possibly made worse by attempts to make it right again.

Herlihy starts by describing how one of the main characters in the story walks out of the mists of time and into a newspaper office in 1953 to take care of some business. He's recognized by the editor. They chat, and the editor asks if he'd like to talk to a reporter about his attempt to rescue a missing bicycle traveler halfway around the world a half-century earlier …

Continue reading

If you enjoy riding a bike, imagine the joy it must give someone whose mobility can be challenged.

I observed that several years ago when my special needs daughter and her fellow classmates got to ride adaptive bikes that were brought to the school for the day by the Seattle-area nonprofit Outdoors For All.

Many of these kids don't have the muscle tone, balance or coordination to handle the regular bikes they see other kids riding, but they laughed and squealed to roll around on adaptive trikes and two-seaters.

Recently, Seattle orthopedic surgeon Sean Adelman, wrote about “Biking and Independence” at his blog Raise Expectations. …..

Continue reading