Update: On Monday, July 18th, this product has been demoted from Reverence status due to imprecise machining of the 3mm and 4mm allen wrenches. Please see the updated Reverence article for it’s worthy successor. My apologies to anyone who has purchased this product based on this article. I am truly sorry. Yours in Cycling, Frank — In…
Author: frank
The founder of Velominati and curator of The Rules, Frank was born in the Dutch colonies of Minnesota. His boundless physical talents are carefully canceled out by his equally boundless enthusiasm for drinking. Coffee, beer, wine, if it’s in a container, he will enjoy it, a lot of it. He currently lives in Seattle. He loves riding in the rain and scheduling visits with the Man with the Hammer just to be reminded of the privilege it is to feel completely depleted. He holds down a technology job the description of which no-one really understands and his interests outside of Cycling and drinking are Cycling and drinking.
As devoted aesthete, the only thing more important to him than riding a bike well is looking good doing it.
Frank is co-author along with the other Keepers of the Cog of the popular book, The Rules, The Way of the Cycling Disciple and also writes a monthly column for the magazine, Cyclist. He is also currently working on the first follow-up to The Rules, tentatively entitled The Hardmen.
Email him directly at rouleur@velominati.com.
Whenever I send out an Out of Office reminder at work, I take special care to indicate where I’ll be, which is always Awesomeville. It amazes me how few questions this raises, but I chalk it up to it being a foregone conclusion. Imagine my surprise, then, when upon my return from Maui someone asked me where, precisely,…
Shifting is perhaps the most pure expression of our art as Velominati. It is the conduit through which we control our cadence; it effects our power, our breathing, our heart rate. When those essential things come together with the rhythm of the road, we are cast in the spell of La Volupte. The more in-tune with our bodies…
I didn’t think this article would ever need to become reality. I thought we could safely file this one in the “Obviously Not Allowed, Fucktards” bin alongside the Rules for reflectors, kickstands, and recumbents. But I stand corrected. I’ve been playing around with clever, subtle ways of phrasing this, looking for the right touch to…
There’s an air of Shakespearean tragedy to the death of Marco Pantani on Saint Valentine’s Day in 2004. Once the most famous cyclist in the world, he died alone in a hotel room on a day devoted to love. But his love – Cycling – had betrayed him. Once a fixture of the Nineties European…
All I can do is quote @michael: $27,250 for this POS. Don’t know if it’s worth an article or just a post, but for that price, I’d like my really cheap saddle set back properly. The beautiful thing for us is that an Anatomy of a Photo piece can almost be the same as a…
I don’t enjoy the races in February on the Arabian Peninsula because I like watching other people ride in the sun while I spend my afternoons looking for a sliver of daylight that coincides with some fragment of my day where I don’t also need to work or engage in some other activity. I also…
Flying into Maui, the first thing you see are the tops of the volcanoes on each of the Hawaiian islands. An awesome sight, they appear as massive domes that stretch high above the clouds. Descending, as the plane passes through the cloud layer, one is struck by how far below the ocean and island still…
Sitting at the top of Haleakala, I thought of this photo with the staunch realization that there are no words to describe the agony of exhaustion, except Graham Watson’s caption in Visions of Cycling: Paul Sherwen’s mother cried when she saw this picture of her son, taken after the finish of the 1983 Paris-Roubaix
Although we find our way to the bicycle by different path, we all share the fact that at some point, this simple and elegant machine captured our imaginations. It became something more than simply a means to travel about, get exercise, or compete – it became something central to our lives. Somehow and by different…
One of my favorite pass times is to chuck a cycling term into Google’s Image Search, set the filter to Large, and see what turns up. It is incredible how much porn you have to sift through, by the way. I would really think words like “shaved” and “hardman” would be innocent enough, but take…
In the interest of full disclosure, I feel it is my responsibility to warn you that this article might accidentally make you a better cyclist. Even though it breaks protocol, the subject of this edition of Look Pro involves the power of the mind, not just aesthetics. As we established previously, The Rules can be transcended if the…
More than crashes or the myriad other problems anticipated before embarking on a ride, the threat of a puncture is the most tangible. I could be persuaded to leave for a ride or start a race without my trusty multi-tool or even my bidons, but never without at least one tube and a means to inflate it…
We’ve been busy at work on some new features for the community. When we announced the last set of features, we got some great feedback which was incorporated into this release. Some of you may have already noticed the features as we rolled them out silently over the course of the last two weeks, but we…
I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more Rule #5. Thanks to Michael for bringing this matter to our attention.
It is a telling sign of the state of our sport that picking the Anit-V moment of the year was a more difficult task than picking the V Ride of the Year. Best ride of the year? Clean, unanimous vote among The Keepers on that one. Low point of the year? Dissention in the ranks…
Passo San Boldo lies in the northern reaches of the Italian Alps, and was a walking path until World War I, when the Austrians realized that traffic accidents were a less conscience-laden approach to controlling population growth than chucking mortars across a border at people who drink different alcohol than they do. Access to the steep,…
From everyone here at Velominati, we wish you a very Happy Holidays, and temporarily suspend Rule 11 for December 24 and 25. Cheers, and thanks for being part of our little community. Merckxy Christmas to all, and to all a good ride.
Simplicity. There is little in this world that I find more exciting than a complicated problem solved by a simple, elegant solution. Focusing on simplicity is particularly useful when weighing intricate competing facts because it allows you to say, “None of those complicated factors are likely to work out in my favor, so I'll ignore them and…
It's been an interesting week in the Velominati Archives of Awesomeness, after a freak discovery of boxes containing “photographs”. After conducting some research, we've come to understand that “photographs” are like pictures, except they are stored neither on the Geekbox nor on the Interwebs, but instead reside on a special kind of shiny paper that…