As a cycle tour leader, I was recently asked to participate in a magazine article about “green travel”.  “Green travel”, “going green”, and all the corresponding consumer terms making up the “green” movement are an endless source of exasperation for me, but I decided to brush aside my cynicism and leap at the win-win opportunity to make money garnering publicity for my bicycle advocacy nonprofit. Fueled by fierce company loyalty and an earnest belief in the mission statement of my seasonal employer, ...

Bishop is where people who live in LA go to rock climb. It’s actually where lots of other people go to rock climb too, but the LA people are easy to identify becayse they walk around the grocery stores, tan and shirtless, with bleached dreads, saying “bra” and “sick” a lot. They like to use climbing terms for everything. Like “Do you have any beta on this marinara sauce, bra?” and “I just redpointed the oatmeal isle… is was SIIIICK!” I once took a break from being a lousy cyclist ...

SAC CX (the Sacramento, CA cyclocross series) is pretty much as different from the Cross Crusade as it could be:  *The biggest category, A Men, consisted of maybe 25 people.  *People are very serious. *Everyone seemed put off when I cheered loudly  *I only saw one cowbell, and I actually never heard it *No free oatmeal The Women’s categories consisted of 2 A’s, 4 B’s, 3 C’s, 1 Master, 4 Juniors, and 5 Junior Men. Our small group assembled at the start line, and were then informed that the masters, C’s, and junior women would be starting fifteen minutes ...

I went to high school in Western Nevada, between Reno and Tahoe. I was new to the area and everyone hated me. I think that I may have threatened the Okies with my big city ways, including pegging my pants and listening to Bell Biv Devoe.  Or they may have just hated me because I’m a prick. But I’m pretty sure that the pants pegging didn’t help. At one point during my freshman year, after coming to terms with the fact that no one would ever want to be my ...

The cool thing about going to college is you get to look forward to all the times that you don’t have to be in college. With an epic 3 weeks of winter at my disposal, I headed to the Bay Area for a vay-cay and some warmer weather. Before I left I visited the internet and googled myself up the Northern California bike race calendar. As luck would have it, there was a cross race happening in Folsom while I was in town. And for some reason I decided that ...

Sometimes we have to leave Portland to realize that there is another world out there. A world very, very different from the cycling utopia of Portland. A world where things don’t revolve around coffee, bikes, and bridges. In Ashland, Oregon things revolve around coffee, bikes, and patchuli oil. Lots of patchuli oil. It had been a long time since I lived in Ashland, and the things I remembered were vague. I remembered that everyone had blond dreadlocks, and the panhandlers generally offered to send you “positive vibes’ in exchange for change. ...