Cycling across America on fixed gear bicycles is surely no easy task. I can imagine the Knees took an absolute pounding! So much respect to you guys.
I can see 2010 being the year of the fixed ‘mega tour’ ( Mega Tour. That has a real nice ring to it non? ) after such rides as the Fixed Gear London ride to Paris, Mash’s Tour of Cali and the Nabiis Tour de Taiwan.
Loving this scan taken out of a magazine that’s title and date escapes me.
I do however have all of the scans of this making it a full readable article so if anyone wants to read about Steve Hegg’s $40.000 Olympic monster just shout me a holla and I will post… or maybe I’ll just email to you as they don’t really make great viewing, you know being a bunch of scanned words and all that!
Yup, that’s right Simon Peplow another Midlands export has an exhibition in Boston U.S.A man!
I will be showing some bicycle related drawings next month at bike boutique SUPERB in Boston. MA. Curated by the radical Meighan O’ Toole of My Love For You is a Stampede of Horses.
Great work Si! Also previously on Spinwell.
Saw this real nice post over at Freeman Transport of some of the wise words from inspirational champion track rider Major Taylor.
Major Taylor’s celebrated values remain relevant to this day — not just for those who strive to succeed as a champion, but for those who desire to achieve in all aspects of life:
Don’t try to “gyp.”
Don’t be a pie biter.
Don’t keep late hours.
Don’t use intoxicants.
Don’t be a big bluffer.
Don’t eat cheap candies.
Don’t get a swelled head.
Don’t use tobacco in any form.
Don’t fail to live a clean life.
Don’t forget to play the game fair.
Don’t take in unfair advantage of an opponent.
Don’t forget the practice of good sportsmanship.
“These rules may seem simple enough, but it will require great morale and physical courage to adhere to them. But if carried out in the strict sense of the word it will surely lead to a greater success than could otherwise be attained.“
–Major Taylor, The Fastest Bicycle Rider In The World, 1928.
“The Launchpad” is our new “trick specific/700cmx/fixed freestyle” frame. The first frames are nearing completion and should be trickling out to paint in the next week. All of the first batch is spoken for but some will be available in shops that have preordered them. Our friends in LA, Orange 20 are first on the list to have some in stock. The bros at WBASE ,Chari & Co. and Tokyo Fixed Gear are all on the list to have frames soon too. If you can’t get your hands on one from this first run, we will be taking orders for the next, hopefully to be completed in the very near future.
“The Launchpad” is going to be offered in long and short top-tube versions with the option of either a Mid or Euro bottom bracket shell with a 45×45 integrated headtube. Color options are black, red, and clear. The long version has a taller standover and slightly steeper HT angle than the short. Overall, the geometry of this frame isn’t a much of a departure from the “Gangsta”. This thing is more stout than it’s older brother and has ample tire clearance. We’re pretty stoked on it and the addition of our “Clusterfork” is going to make for a kickass frameset that sells for $850MSRP and is handmade here in Brooklyn.
Slowly beginning to feel the top tube that slopes the ‘wrong’ way!
More info here.
Cycling is sport and transportation and transformation. And cycling is vantage. A position and condition that when combined, offer a Point of View. The position, seated on a bike, slightly bent and pointed forward, is engaged. Moving through time and space at an average speed of 18 miles an hour, engaging the world at just the right speed, the rider experiences great vision, hearing and feeling. Part “zone”, part metaphysical and part synchronicity, the cyclist experiences a powerful Point of View. In the same family as suffering and freedom, this Point of View is one of the fundamental reasons we ride. Riding is fun.
Read more and see more… Rapha.
Massan. In my opinion always has the nicest looking ( Aluminium ) track bikes – Always with drops and always, always in Black. Exactly how they should be.
Spotted at Leeds Fixed.
150 miles.
One hundred and fifty miles.
No matter how you say it or write it, 150 miles is a long day on the bike, especially with 12,000 feet of climbing attached to it.
Boise, Idaho, was the last ride of the Rapha Continental summer tour, and after riding more than 3,000 miles in the past few months, this “last” ride is both a welcomed and melancholy end. When you get into the rhythm of riding back-to-back-to-back and traveling together, it’s difficult to imagine the end and a return to the realities of riding amidst the pressures of work, family and so on. I’m sure it’s the same way the pros feel the last day of a Grand Tour, where that last stage is a double-edged sword— on one side relieved that the race is soon to be over and the other side wishing for it to continue to go on. Your body and mind become accustomed to the hours, the pain and the beauty, so to end is a bit of a shock.
To celebrate the finale, Greg Johnson who started the first section of the tour back in May out of Austin, TX, returned. Aaron Erbeck, who rode the Midwest portion in June also made the trip. We were 16 strong, with our two hosts Bret and Jason, Dave Christenson – our cinematographer, Jason a friend from Seattle, a handful of locals, and nine Continental riders. It was going to be a good long hard day.
Read more of the final leg of the Rapha tour and all of the Rapha rides here.
Continuing the theme of what seems like a weeks worth of historical images are these, taken in San Fransicso circa 1963.
My favourite photograph is the lowest one… that guy on the left in the Belmont cycling cap and what appear to be Ray Bans has got to be the coolest looking motherfu**er I ever saw. If he didn’t get victory that day then he must have been robbed of it.
These photos are from a day of races at the Polo Fields in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in around 1963 or thereabouts. The morning started off at Shinn’s bike shop out near Ocean Beach where we met the Western Wanderers touring club. They took us on a liesurely tour of the Lake Merced area including a stop for a memorable breakfast at Joe’s of Westlake (which survives intact today). And then on to the Polo Fields in the Park for a day of bicycle racing. The Polo is a multi-use recreational facility consisting of a large grass playing field ringed by a slightly banked bicycle track a little over a kilometer in length. There was no functioning velodrome in the Bay Area at this time, so, the Polo was used for both road and track races. (Jim Manning informed me that the track was on the narrow side and that the chainlink fence could act like a cheese grater.) This was my first attempt to photograph bike racing with my fixed-lens Rollieflex in what turned out to be a less than photogenic site. Unfortunately, no program survives from the day’s mix of criterium and track events. I’m guessing that the host club was the San Francisco Wheelmen.
See more goodies like these over here.
Sorry about the lateness of this, I perhaps should have thought about posting it BEFORE I left to go cycle and get lost on the way to Malvern… but I’ll save that one for another time.
After yesterdays post on the joys of road cycling I stumbled across the following.
I typed in the URL of my new favourite blog and what was presented there before me was one of the best posts I have come across in a quite a while so I had to share it with you.
As a spindly-legged kid, I spent most of my summers tucked in my Austrian father’s broad slipstream while we pedaled up and down New Hampshire’s winding back roads. Saddled atop his dinosaur of a Motobecane, ragged cycling shoes wedged into his toe clips and his unruly grey hair flapping in the wind (he never wore a helmet, which, he assured me in his heavily-accented English, were for loozahs), he’d ramble on about all the epic Alpine rides he and his fellow farm boy buddies had done as teenagers. Then he’d crack open a can of Coors when we got home, drain it and tell me more. I knew ‘em by heart: The time they’d hooked their hands onto the back of a bus in order to coast the last few rain-soaked kilometers into Munich just to buy an LP of Revolver; the time they’d stumbled into a Swiss gasthof, cycling caps askew and faces full of grime, only to be fed for free by the matronly proprietor who’d pitied such a worn-out and weary-looking crew; and of course the many occasions on which they’d outmaneuvered slick Italian sport coups down Passo di Stelvio’s 48 hairpin turns. Sure, just the other day I blew a few too many freelance checks on this carbon fiber racing rig, but no matter how modern my tastes have become, I’m still – thanks to dad – obsessed with vintage bikes, no-frills cycling apparel and leg-breaking rides.
Which is why I was so psyched to find these photos. Snapped by (and in some instances starring) Jobst Brandt, a former mechanical engineer for Porsche and the author behind wheel-building bible The Bicycle Wheel, these photos chronicle the Californian’s 20-something Alpine cycling trips dating back to 1959. Despite Jobst’s techy background, however, you won’t find anything in the photos below but rawhide tans, long surfer hair, wool jerseys, vintage touring bikes, gravel roads running wet with Alpine snow melt and summer snow banks piled higher than a set of stacked Suburbans. No route was too daunting for Jobst and his buds. Pretty refreshing stuff.
But what really makes these photos so interesting is that they serve as testament to America’s love affair with cycling and adventure. Long before anal-retentive endurance athletes hijacked the sport with their scientifically engineered training programs, heart rate monitors and recovery shakes, laidback westerners were going nuts for two-wheeled competitions like Colorado’s Red Zinger Classic and California’s Nevada City Criterium, and, just like Jobst, many headed for Europe to retrace the pedal strokes of their heroes. Packing their jerseys’ with spare tires, passports and enough Schillings, Liras and Francs to buy a few post-ride rounds at whatever bar they found themselves in, these guys had a boyish mentality to riding and a real sense of two-wheeled camaraderie, proving that a bicycle’s true value isn’t measured in pounds or price tags, but merely by where it can take you.
See more fantastic scanned photographs of Jobst’s Alpine cycling adventures right here.
I have a couple of Lomos myself so as you could imagine I am into these BIG. Real creepy stuff… reminds me of Leatherface for some reason!
Via Zlog.
… In Arena Homme Plus.
