We meticulously care for our bicycle, stopping only just short of pampering it. Through ages spend coveting, building, and riding it, we become attached to it and its beautiful finishing details – the luster of the frame’s finish, the angle and sweep of the bars, the gleaming white tape, the tires, the wheels – all…
Category: Folklore
Why would any sane person choose to suffer? The answer to this question is a primal one and of particular relevance to society in the current age: control. With chaos and uncertainty creeping from every corner of life, cycling provides us with control over physical suffering; to suffer at our own will provides us the…
With Keepers Tour: Cobbled Classics 2012 stitched up and in the history books, the challenge of documenting the trip became immediately obvious; how do you take the myriad impressions, experiences, and perspectives and put them down in a meaningful way – let alone in a way that can somehow be digested. Surely, to document even…
Finally we can speak to this Paris-Roubaix mythology. The Keepers Tour group rode twenty-one sectors at something much slower than race speed. After the first sector we regrouped and we were all stunned by how bad it was. Twenty more sectors of that? That was horrendously tough. The first sectors are the easy ones. The…
You don’t have to be in Flanders very long before you start to breathe in the history of the area. Horrible things have happened in the fields across Northern France and Belgium, like the Battle of Waterloo and the Battle of the Bulge. These are the kinds of things that hang in the air for…
It was a simple time. Team kit was understated, with black shorts and a few colored panels on the jersey. Race Leader and National Championship jerseys were plain, and often even lacking in the name of the sponsor. National Championship jerseys in particular were a matter of national pride more than sponsorship; it was an honor…
As Keepers Tour crossed from dream to reality and routes over the cobblestones of Northern Europe were sketched out, with it came the familiar tingling in my fingertips and uneasy sensation at the base of my spine as my mind starts its irrevocable journey towards categorizing as mandatory an unnecessary indulgence. I was going to need a wheelset and…
Andrei Tchmil got so tired of the palpable disappointment of not being Belgian that he decided to become one. Envision the world the way you want it to be, then make it so. People are cynical when I talk about Belgium. They think I’m only Belgian on paper. That is not true. Yes, I was…
I can’t understand the American obsession with finger food in general and sliders in particular. Finger food, in its strict interpretation, should be food for your fingers, not food which is eaten with one’s fingers. While “finger food” is inaccurate as a generality, sliders are basically just hamburgers that never got the Rule #5 Talk….
Rule #22 is perhaps the most complicated Rule amongst the (currently) 85. Part of the complexity springs from the fact that we are all very attached to this small cotton cap. Off the bike, it was once a badge used to recognize one of our own; now it has been taken over by the hipster crowd which…
I did not expect the test to go well. To begin with, no beer holds up well at 96 degrees, and the Fahrenheit mercury outside of the light rail station at Arizona State University in Tempe read 96 degrees. 96 degrees stands far too close to 98.6 degrees, familiar to us all as body temperature,…
The power of hair is not to be underestimated. Especially when it comes to having it carefully disheveled, with little bits poking out of the vents of your helmet. Indeed, hair sticking out of your helmet vents can be thought of as a conduit to The V; the strands reaching into the Ether, channeling its power like…
Making a name for yourself in the pro ranks during the heyday of Merckx, De Vlaeminck, and Maertens would have been tougher than making a name for yourself in the pro ranks during the heyday of Merckx, De Vlaeminck, and Maertens. Especially, I would think, if you also happened to be Belgian. But with somewhere…
We are not hard. We may espouse the values of the mythical hardman, but we are merely pretenders to the throne of the Kings of V. While it is ok to talk about hardness, suffering and toil on the bike, when it really comes down to it we are mere mortals who would rather be…
Cyclists can be a twitchy lot. Able to both endure and dish out pain for weeks on end in a grand tour takes considerable fortitude, or what we call The V. The cyclist must know their body and measure out its effort carefully. The pros we look to as the Giants of the Road, the…
If ever there was a photo that illustrated why anyone would be given the monicker, “The Canibal”, this is it. I devoted a full seventeen seconds to ‘finding out the history’ of this picture, and came up empty. G’Phant sent this my way with a short but clear note, “This photo looks like it was taken…
I posted this picture as a joke in yesterday’s Anatomy of a Photo piece, but I find myself going back to it over and over, captivated by the way the light gleams off the peloton as they race by. Gleaming metal bits – hubs, cranks, spokes, handlebars, stems, frames, toe clips, all reflecting light from a thousand…
As cyclists, our legs bristle with anticipation at the sight of a hairpin turn. Stitch a series of them together in close succession, and we lose the ability to speak in complete sentences. Show us a road that resembles a goat path, and we start to wonder aloud in fragmented sentences what it might be…
We gather here today to pay our respects to one of the icons of our great sport, the cycling cap. The perfect union of form and function and an excellent example of why the former follows the latter, and why together they are beautiful. The brim is just long enough to shield the eyes from the elements,…
There are several moments in my childhood when I realized the bike held a more meaningful place in my life than the other fancies and desires one experiences growing up; those instants that somehow stand out from the others in the endless stream of memories that hold greater significant than the rest. One such moment…