About a year and a half ago, as I was just starting to get really serious about cycling again after dabbling for about a decade, Michelle bought me every past issue of Rouleur and got me a two-year subscription. This is not a bike magazine. This is a quarterly publication for cyclists. It is printed…
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.
Michelle and I hit the trail on Saturday to take our newly acquired mountain bikes for their maiden voyage on the Grand Ridge trail near Issaquah, Washington. We were pleasantly surprised with the quality of the trail, and elated with our bikes. The only trouble we got into was with me going a bit too…
Despite their obvious utility, I’m not a big fan of Fixies. I understand they have minimal maintenance – which make them great for commuting – and the fixed gear forces excellent pedaling technique. But the wide-spread adoption of these bikes has less to do with those two considerations than they do with fad. But fads…
Phase I of Operation Get Back Into Mountain Biking is complete. This week, we bought Michelle a used Cannondale Prophet. Comparing this thing to my Zip is a study in how dramatically times have changed. Looking at the bikes side-by-side, it seems the only similarity is the fact that they both use wheels, are powered…
Fitting yourself to your bike properly and being comfortable while riding is probably the most important aspect of cycling. It doesn’t matter if you’re riding the Worlds Lightest Bike or your Clunker Rain Bike/commuter; if you feel good on your bike, it will be a pleasure to ride. My 10 kilo, 8-Speed Shimano 105, fender…
When I was growing up, my family and I did a lot of mountain biking. It was really just a matter of training; we were nordic ski racers and the heart-rate patterns in both sports seemed to be more similar than between road biking and skiing and the intense efforts to ride up steep, technical…
The Tour has wrapped up for 2009 and it fulfilled it’s usual place in the calendar as the biggest – but not greatest – cycling event of the year. It was strange getting up this morning and not having the Tour blasting on Versus while we got ready for work; I miss Phil and Paul…
Well, it’s time for predictions using my carbon ball, which is lighter if less effective for peering into than your typical crystal ball commonly used for these types of activities. Status Check: Condator has pulled off the impossible duality of being both the best climber in the world and the best time-trialist. Some people…
Today was perhaps one of the best days of bike racing of the season – brought on by my trusty favorite pair, the Schleck Brothers. As promised by the organizers, the last week of the race is shaping up to be a nail-biter, despite two incredibly boring weeks of racing. On paper at least, today…
Danilo Di Luca is the next in a long line of my favorite riders who have tested positive for banned substances. While some are more surprising than others, I have to say that at this point, I am a little surprised that the riders are still trying to get away with using drugs they know…
This Tour seems to have been dominated more by gossip than by racing, contributed to in no small part by a rotten route. The press seems to have whipped up more interest in who is leading Astana or Saxo-Bank than in the race itself. But some riders seem to love nothing more than complaining to…
As an objective, rational, and calculating cycling fan, I’ve never been able to get excited about any rider on the now-defunct Gerolsteiner team. This is mostly because they committed the unforgivable crime of employing teamwide, systematic ugly kit selection. Those guys looked so unbelievably ugly in those nasty, turquoise unitards that several of my television…
Cycling enthusiasts used to mash a giant gear for one, simple reason: it looked super cool. Do you want to ride like Lucho Herrera who is always falling off his bike or Eddy Merckx who is always winning races? Even as recently as the 90’s it was a common sight to see the pros riding…
In response to criticism that the Tour de France is too predictable and uninteresting, the organizers of the Tour have taken a novel approach to designing this year’s route: make the route suck so much that the biggest source of discussion and suspense about the race is who is the real leader of Astana and…
I haven’t seen a Tour de France stage as uninteresting as today’s stage to Arcalis since, well, since 2005. What was special about 2005? The Bruyneel/Armstrong team. Different teammates and different color jerseys, but what we got was the same uninteresting racing we endured for the 7 years between 1999 and 2005. One of the…
Well, here we are, on the eve of the first mountain stage. Tomorrow’s stage 7 will climb to Arcalis where we will begin to have a much clearer picture of what the Tour will bring over the next two weeks. Status Check. Armstrong is best positioned to take the Yellow Jersey, but his ace-climber teammate…
I’m going to come out and say it: Jan Ullrich is my favorite rider, ever. He had it all: class, strength, talent. On top of all that, he was also tall and he was big. He was Frank’s Perfect Storm of cycling. I am not a fan of doping in sports, especially in cycling. At…
Am I the first to make this pun? Probably, because I suffer from a condition called “Awesome”. I could validate that assertion by doing a search on The Google, but that sounds overly complicated and likely to yield results that I’m not interested in seeing. Mark Cavendish – or “Cav”, as those for whom uttering…
I wanted to take a moment to talk about my favorite Tour Favorites. And, the best way of doing that is to go over which of the Favorites annoy me or don’t look cool enough or have never raced on Cervelos. So, onto Frank’s inaugural “How Dost Though Annoy Me” list. Alberto Contador. Primadonna. I…
Jens Voigt can always be relied on for entertaining comments to the press. One of my favorite quotes of his was during an interview discussing the role that a rider’s mind plays during a race: When you go hard, your body says, ‘STOP!’ and your mind says, ‘BODY, SHUT UP!’ And, sometimes it works! And then…