Not every ride can be epic. Some are merely excellent. That is what the lunch ride is, or #lunchrad as we call it around these parts. @rodeo-labs
Source: Ello | stephenfitz | Not every ride can be
Flaanimal sneak peak.
A new bike showed up at The Lab this morning. The first of 10 test Flaanimals has arrived. Originally conceived as the Unsinglespeed, this bike that we are working on was later named after the hearty animals seen when Rodeo went to Belgium earlier this year. The diversity, ruggedness, and beauty of the animals of Flanders made us laugh all week long, and a name was born.
And then we road East
Dirty Kanza cometh, and five Rodeo guys will be heading east from Denver to test ourselves against the 200 mile course.
Recently I had posted a journal entry lamenting the fact that I hadn’t ever really ridden east of Denver before. On Saturday that was remedied. We road East with a capital E.
Lost in the Land of Eagles: First Impressions
Helmet? Check.
Glasses? Check.
Tire Pressure? Feels about right, though there’s no way to tell for sure.
Headset? Seems tight.
Shoes? Right, they’re still in my bag…
A burst of giggling erupts as I kneel to unzip the suitcase. Maybe I should have waited to don my kit until after I finished fiddling with my bike, or at least put some sweatpants on over my bibs. It’s too late now; there is already a gaggle of Albanian school girls, friends of my host-family’s daughter, gathering outside the open door to my room. They avert their eyes as I exit, shoes in hand, and return to my bicycle in the yard. It has similarly attracted a group of neighborhood children who scatter when I approach. Taking the handlebars, I swing my leg over the saddle, but before I can clip Eduart, the patriarch of my host-family, stops me. He’s spent the last hour silently watching me assemble my bicycle, but now he’s clearly concerned. He doesn’t speak English, and my Albanian is still pretty poor, so he simply points to my brakes and inquires with a thumbs-up. I squeeze the levers and return the hand gesture to assure him that everything’s fine, then aim the bicycle down the gravel path which serves as our driveway and kick off.
Back to Falcon today. More 2.0 testing.
Source: Ello | stephenfitz | Back to Falcon today. It
You ain’t seen nothin’, son.
*Blip!*
My phone lit up. Text from Peder.
“Looks wet”
His timing was uncanny. It was Monday, I had cleared most of my to-do items for the first half of the day and I was beginning to consider whether or not I’d be able to head out for a ride. My monitor glowed with the Doppler loop of Weather Underground’s precipitation map. Even though we’d been hit with a couple of days of solid rain and the clouds still sat threateningly low, the map actually showed surprisingly few green and yellow blobs of wetness.
“It’s not as wet as you think.” I texted back. My attention was fixed on a spot on the map thirty miles south of me. For about a month I’d been drawn to a place where the flowing undulations of Colorado’s prairies are suddenly, unceremoniously violated with sharp spires of sandstone sticking out of the ground at sixty degree angles. That place was called Roxborough State Park. I had never been there and I had no good reason why not. The idea of finally visiting for a first time has been a dripping faucet in the back of my mind for a better part of a month and on Monday I was considering shutting the faucet up.
Today we climbed…
Today we climbed up to the snow. Thanks to Colorado it wasn’t very far away. @rodeo-labs
Today we climbed up to the snow. Thanks to Colorado it wasn’t very far away. @rodeo-labs
Source: Ello | stephenfitz | Today we climbed up to
Traildonkey 2.0 testing
Yesterday I took Traildonkey 2.0 prototype to the trails that inspired her creation. This climb up Falcon is brutal even on a mountain bike and kind of stupid on a CX based bike, but that is why I love it. Modern MTB rigs are marvels of engineering and performance, but riding a bike like Donkey that removes all the driver aides and leaves it all to skill (and some luck) is more rewarding for me. Every trail becomes a potential puzzle to solve, especially when they are this steep and rocky. I love/hate this climb because it calls my bluffs and gifts me nothing.
Touring the Native Lands
The Native Lands Classic.
Where to even start on a day like this? To put it simply, this is the kind of day that you look forward to on a bike, yet you can never fully prepare for. Lately, it seems, there is the rise of the self-supported bike event/race. But on further thought, is it a rise? Or a reprisal? Almost everyone has heard or read stories of the old Tour de France days of everything being fully self-supported doing whatever it takes to simply finish. Because before it was a race, the Tour really was just a bunch of crazy guys on bikes seeing if they could do the distance/route. So maybe it has come full circle. Maybe the over-abundance of super serious races and events and rides has spawned some people to come up with events like the Native Lands Classic. Not only to showcase an area of a country, but to bring people back to the fundamentals of riding. To spark that inner thought of, ‘that sounds insane, but let’s do it’.
Rodeo Road Trip: Tulsa Native Lands Classic (Gentlemen’s Race : 22 March 2015)
So, apparently, this is how plans/ideations for road trips for amateur bike racing start these days:
<Facebook> “A good friend is running a new event for the first time that is very much in the spirit of what Rodeo is about. 100+++ miles of Oklahoma’s paved roads, flat roads, gravel roads, back roads, hills, oil fields, open pasture land, long horns and tall grass to challenge you. We’ve been invited. Roadeo trip, anyone? https://nativelandsgr.wordpress.com/about/” </Facebook>
The entire road trip logistics to race this event as a team were hashed out on one long stream of collective consciousness comment thread, which atomic mushroom clouded into over 150 comments (now 200), questions, quips, and retorts. I hadn’t road-tripped like this with friends since college, and I was in.