I confess, as the owner of a business designed to empower transportation focused cyclists, I have barely spent any time attempting to teach my daughter to ride a bicycle, and she is almost six. Her birthday is next month. So I’ve resolved to get her a nice bike and make things right. When my daughter…
For this first edition of the Commute by Bike News Roundup, I’ll be presenting the life of the bike commuter chronologically. That takes us back to when our two-wheeled adventures began … The Birth of the Bicycle by Alex Q Arbuckle on August 29, 2015 So we have bicycles, now what are we supposed to…
[You might enjoy listening to this Woody Guthrie track whilst reading this blog] This week I have been in the forests of Sweden. I’ve been listening for wolves, and following the tracks of moose. I canoed down the Black River valley at sunrise looking for beaver, and saw long-horned roe deer prancing at dusk. This was…
I have a confession: I could probably count the number of days in the past year I’ve ridden a bike–I mean really clicked off some miles–on one hand. Life, as it so often does, has provided its fair share of roadblocks. I bought a fixer-upper first home, started a new job, got engaged. There is…
This is the kickoff off roundup post that I’m experimenting with. The plan is that each week I’ll gather interesting stories from the last month or so within one of the 5 cycling niches we cover, Commute by Bike, Family Cycling, Bikepacking, Road Touring or Utility Cycling. I’ll be keeping notes of interesting stories that…
“White Man: He sit down, walk like hell.” That was how one Native Alaskan described Ed Jesson riding a fixed gear bicycle down the frozen Yukon River in the winter of 1900. How a man with practically no supplies and the simplest of bikes could ride over a thousand miles in the dead of an…
It can be difficult sometimes to do the simple things. The ones that could make us happy. Like checking out of everyday existence with a lightly loaded bike for a few days. With a nod to our busy and distracting lives, this month I’ve tried to list some tactics for getting rolling with the good…
A 30-mile climb rises out of the prairie in front of you. The last town is 50 miles behind. The next is on the other side of this mountain. Your stomach grumbles. It’s going to be a long day. Among the touring cyclist’s worst nightmares, the dreaded bonk comes in near the top. Any cyclist…
Gore-tex that doesn’t go damp, Treads that don’t wear flat, Chains that never skip or squeak, These are some of my favorite things. When you ride for long enough, you settle into habits and gear. Maybe it’s a brand of socks that don’t bind, or bib shorts that don’t chafe, or gloves that keep your…
But is there a future for the bicycle in warfare? In a word, yes. When the fuel tank is empty, and the gas station has been bombed, then the bicycle is a mighty fine choice.
There will always be a need for lightweight, reliable, stealthy, low-cost transportation.
I received a phone call from my youngest sister in England this January. We don’t talk all that much, especially now we live on different continents. But she was calling because she had met someone special. His name was “Pedro.” Pedro, she assured me was handsome, fast, and blue. And she wanted us to go…
“So I forgot to clip out of my clipless pedals and fell over.” A well-worn pedal. To anyone who isn’t serious about cycling, the above phrase is nonsensical. In the minds of snobibsh cyclists, nothing distinguishes them more from their casual brethren on wheels than their clipless pedals. Switching to clipless pedals is as momentous to an…
I’m sitting in Bites on Broadway in Skagway, Alaska, a hundred-year-old saloon-cum-coffee house, watching tourists walk down the wooden boardwalks. For every dozen tourists, there’s a local guide biking past. The guides look lean compared to the typically tubby cruise ship passengers. They ride up to the post office mailbox across Broadway to drop off…
Riding The Route of the Condor was one of those reckless bar-talk ideas that wouldn’t normally have got traction beyond the hangover. Like most beer-charged plans, it should have been added quickly to the graveyard of other wonderful yet fantastical ambitions such as unicycling the Pan American Highway, or cycle touring the Kamchatka Peninsula. Yet somehow…
It has taken me thirteen previous posts before I got round to writing this one. So far I’ve mainly described some of the rides I’ve been lucky enough to take through the wilds of Patagonia, the smoking volcanoes of the Atacama Desert or the bear country of the Great Divide. The bike itself has been…
It’s cute, but is it practical? That’s the question many folding bikes elicit. Sure, it looks neat, but how well does it actually function? Form follows function. Ergo, the form of a folding bike should follow its function. Folding bikes are designed to be compactly carried and stored in other vehicles, but still provide reliable…
Last month I wrote about my bikepacking expectations. We were about to head down towards Chilean Patagonia on our retro-fitted 1980s Thorn touring tandem. In the weeks building up to the trip I had done away with the bulky Ortlieb panniers and kitted it out with slicker, lighter-weight, snugger fit and generally far more fancy…
Bicycles are almost as Swiss as Swiss Army knives, and the Swiss Army proudly maintained a front-line bicycle infantry regiment into the 21st Century. While it was disbanded in 2003, The Swiss Army continues to use bicycles for base transportation
For a long time it seemed that boiled-down living couldn’t get much simpler. Anytime I wanted to travel, all I had to do was clamp those brightly coloured, slightly unwieldy, boxes onto the side of my bicycle and I was away. I bought my shiny red panniers in 201o. Today they have dust and holes…
In the wake of World War II, the militaries of the West left bicycles behind for the automobile and the armored personnel carrier. Bicycle infantry units in the German army were disbanded alongside the rest of the defeated forces.
“You can laugh at them now, Wesley,” my biking buddy Liz had told me a decade ago on a group ride, “But someday youre going to be one of those old guys on a recumbent.” Well, that day has come. I’m a certifiably older, slightly goofy guy on a recumbent. On my first sandwich delivery…
A few months ago I got into a bit of a rut. Not an all consuming black cloud rut. Just your typical too much work, not enough sleep kind of overcast feeling. Normally when I start to feel like this I self medicate with a long run in the mountains, or put some uplifting energy…
Recumbents. You’ve seen those oddball, laid-back bikes being ridden by slightly goofy guys (yeah, it’s usually guys). They’re smiling. They’re waving. And they’re looking suspiciously comfortable. Recumbents are practically the opposite of everything that bicycling is supposed to be about. There’s no crying in baseball, and there’s blessedly little comfort in bicycling. Right? Well, maybe…
Joe Grant cycled away from his front door in Gold Hill, Colorado this July with everything needed for a month of mountain travel. He travelled in “self propelled” style by bicycle and foot, linking up and summiting all of Colorado’s 14,000′ peaks along the way. The bikepacking racer set a new record of 31 days…
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