Ello | stephenfitz | They say bikes make you
Source: Ello | stephenfitz | They say bikes make youContinue reading
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.
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.
Belgium day 2: Good roads, great company.
It is not difficult to go on a good ride, and it is not difficult to take a good photograph (or at least a decent one). It IS difficult however to go on a good ride while taking good photos. Good rides involve momentum, flow, and that feeling of covering copious amounts of countryside. Good photographs involve putting some thought into what it is you are trying to show and doing it with intention… and some luck.
On yesterday’s ride I didn’t do that, I just rode around in a state of awe and waved my camera around while holding the shutter button down. Zero thoughfulness, zero intention. Click, click, click. Hope something turns out.
As they say on the internet: Sorrynotsorry.
Lost in the Land of Eagles: Off and Away
I would like to thank Steven and everyone at Rodeo Adventure Labs for giving me a chance and providing me with a platform to share this story. Ideally this will be the first of many entries detailing my exploration of and adventures in one of the last great cycling frontiers on the European continent; the wilds of the Balkan Peninsula and, and in particular, the Republic of Albania. I hope you enjoy.
Of cycling, friends, and fun
Cycling is so great because, at least for Rodeo, it’s fundamentally about having fun and spending time with like minded people. Yes, it’s also about rad gear and exploring and racing and the outdoors, but who cares about any of that if you don’t have friends to share it all with?
Rodeo is fundamentally not “pro” in the traditional sense of the word. We don’t field the fastest race team, our feats will never come close to being mentioned amongst the top ranks of the sport. That’s fine with me. We are “pro” at a couple of less traditional things though. One of those things is having fun. We hold our w00ting skills in high regard. Bonus fact: Nobody wins or loses at having fun. There is no leader board, there is no way to accurately measure it. There is no KOM of fun. You just go out and do it and you know you’ve done it right if you come back from a ride and you feel like maybe you are levitating and you can’t stop talking to people about what just happened. When you’ve had fun you feel compelled to share it, and therein lies some of it’s value: Sharing our best experiences with each other is one of the simple joys of being human.
#Topobunny debut + Boulder Cup
Our much maligned, much loved, much misunderstood, much understood CX.1 team kits arrived on Friday, just in time to debut at Boulder Cup on Saturday. w00ts! Instead of doing our first CX race of the year the normal way (drive there, warm up on rollers, race, drive home), we decided to ride 40 miles to the race course, race, and ride 40 miles home. That’s a Rodeo style day of CX racing.Continue reading
Mount Evans Chill Climb.
We did it. At first it was a joke, just something funny someone said on a ride.
“Let’s climb Mount Evans on B-Cycles!”Continue reading
Rodeo Rally Series: May
The planning for the May Rodeo Rally began serendipitously back in January, when, as you might recall, I took advantage of a warm winter Colorado day and set out on a solo dirt adventure south of Denver. The beautiful route and photos must of stuck in the craw of one Matt Deviney to such a degree that he worked tirelessly on finding a way back to Denver so as to avoid the treacherous no-shoulder/pucker-inducing-death-ride segment of Santa Fe north of Sedalia, between the small town of Louviers and Titan Road. We both recon’d different routes over the ensuing months, but neither could completely pre-ride the route and were skeptical we could find a better way back to Denver.
Rodeo Kokopelli
By Chris Joseph
Kokopelli Trail May 1-3 2014
- 136 total miles (218 km) in 22 hours ride time, 50 hours Total time
- Lessons learned:
- Good people and water are very, very valuable
- Bike shoes are not made for hiking
- Garmin doesn’t always know the way
- Cliff bars make a good adhesive for gluing teeth back in
- Taking photos requires energy. Less energy = less photos
- The comfort of sleeping on the ground increases exponentially depending on how tired you are
- When very dehydrated and hallucinating rocks can sometimes look like boxes stacked neatly on the trail in front of you
- The words “man up” can be humorous or humiliating depending on the point of origin
- Chainring wounds look similar to shark bites, only with a little grease mixed into the blood