(Parentheses Are The Fenders Of Punctuation)

After Monday's be-jorted ramble I recovered on Tuesday by taking a little detour with the kiddies on the way home from the school pick-up:

The older human child is showing some form, the younger human child is getting the hang of his own pedal bike, and inasmuch the only wisdom I possess is bicycle wisdom it means I've officially taught them everything I know.  So from here on in it's, "I don't have a fucking clue, go ask your mom."

With my work as a parent essentially complete, I headed out for a ride yesterday.  I started out on the paved path:

Left it for the open road:

Took in some old-timey signage:

And then hit the dirt trail for the return trip:

Yes, that's right, in a flagrant display of disregard for my own safety I defied the bicycle industry and rode on a gravel surface with a non-gravel bicycle:

That's my Ritte, by the way.  I've now had this bike for eight (8) years.  The stainless steel has proven to be anything but (in fairness to them, it was a prototype frame):

Nevertheless, it has been more that serviceable, and despite its short-reach brakes it easily accepts a pair of 28mm tires.  Its in this guise that the bike seems happiest, and no matter how I set it up it always seems to find its way back to being my "dirty road" bike.

Of course the Milwaukee also serves that purpose:

But what happens there is that, no matter how I set that up, it always seems to find its way back to being my "fender bike" since it accepts them so easily:

Anyway with the imminent arrival of my new-to-me "forever bike" (more on that when it arrives) I may have to permanently cement the Ritte and the Milwaukee in their respective roles.

As for the remainder of the ride, it was rather enjoyable:

There are certainly more exotic locales than the greater New York City area, but I manage.

N E W W I D E R T I T L E S F O R E X T R A T R A C T I O N

Firstly, I can assure you I'm not in the market for a new car.  However, the Internet is the Internet, one click leads to another, and before you know it you find yourself on an automobile manufacturer's website.  Anyway, all of this is by way of asking an important question, which is:

If you're using the concept of the "active lifestyle" to sell cars, why top them with crappy bicycles?

Now, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against crappy bikes.  In fact, if you want to get technical, any bike that gets ridden regularly is by definition a good bike.  Nevertheless, we're talking about marketing here, and appearance is important--so important that "food stylist" is an actual career.  So how does this even happen?

I mean I realize Subaru doesn't sponsor IMBA anymore, but someone there has to know that nobody's driving a pair of department store bikes into the mountains like that.  And perhaps most vexingly, I'm reasonably certain the same bikes are on both cars, which means they're just moving the same crappy bikes back and forth for each shoot.  It's just weird is all I'm saying.  They might as well just use cardboard cutouts of bikes.  The only thing missing from the whole ersatz "active lifestyle" tableau is a dog, and they should have used something like this:

I guess what I'm saying is I'm ready to farm myself out as a professional "bicycle stylist" to any company that will pay me, no matter how reprehensible.  I'M READY TO SELL OUT, DAMMIT!

Even so, I maintain I'm a person of my word.  For example, yesterday I vowed to fuck off for a jorts ride--and that's just what I did!

From my Bronx abode and back this extremely mellow and pleasant mostly-dirt-with-some-token-singletrack ride is around 30 miles, and I daresay it would make a pretty good Fondon't route.  (Indeed, previous Fondon't routes have utilized much of this terrain.)  And it was quite good to get back on the Jones SWB complete:

Which continues to be one of my all-time favorite bicycles:

Since taking delivery last summer I've changed virtually nothing on this bike, nor to I feel the need to do so.  (Though some new tires are probably in order for the season.)  Being the terminal weenie I am I occasionally catch myself contemplating the acquisition of some sort of fattish-tire drop-bar "gravel" whatever, but the fact is that for any terrain beyond what a regular road bike with 28mm tires can handle the Jones is pretty much ideal.  It's not at all onerous to ride for miles at a time on pavement, and it's also a perfectly capable mountain bike.  In all, I stand by what I said in my official "review," which is that if I had a whole week off to do nothing but ride, this is the bike I'd choose. 

Finally, in my last Outside column I mentioned my formative years as a BMX racer, and in the process of curating it I dug this out of the closet for inspiration:

I'm 99% certain that's the last bike race I ever won.

If you'd like to see this trophy for yourself, it's currently mounted on the hood of my car.

Little Ado About Nothing

It's been a whirlwind week of kids-not-having-school-ness, capped off by an early bicycle cycling race on Sunday, which I'm proud to say I passed:

There's something to be said for riding plastic bikes in circles really fast.

I mean I'm not sure what it is, but it's definitely something.

Anyway, as much as I love the Fredding about I'm long overdue for a slow "jorts" ride on a metal bike with fat tires, so that's what I'm about to do.  (Between the Fredding and the rain it's been far too long since I've been on the Jones.)  Rest assured the publication of the Eroica California Outside story is imminent.  Also, I expect to take delivery of a new-to-me "forever bike" by week's end, and I will tell you all about it.  But not now.

In the meantime, I invite you to check out the Bike Forecast for the latest in the sublime shit-show that is New York City cycling.

Yours in Jorts,


--Tan Tenovo

New Outside Column!

I'll let you know just as soon as the Eroica California story is up, but in the meantime here's a new Outside column about my latest Fredly relapse:

And I have owned a used Saab so I know what I'm talking about.

It was pretty much exactly this one:

I'll never get any of that time or money back.

With the Thule roof rack I did have a whole Scandinavian thing going on though, and on the infrequent occasions it was working properly it had a lot going for it.

Well, okay, it had some things going for it.

And yes, I realize this is ostensibly a bicycle-themed blog, and that a fair amount of my output is on the subject of how cars are destroying humanity, but as a human born in America who likes stuff with wheels I have had my share of vehicles with internal combustion engines over the years.  In fact ,at my peak I had one (1) car, two (2) motorcycles, and one (1) two-stroke Vespa clone that my wife used to ride.  However, this was A) before I had kids; and 2) when we lived in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the pre-Sandy, pre-Ikea, pre-Fairway days when you could do that sort of thing because there was an oversupply of free parking.  Hey, there's something to be said for coming home from a bike race in the morning and then spending the rest of the day attempting to work on your motorcycle on the sidewalk as the occasional gawker saunters by and then launches into the "You know, I used to ride..." schpiel that makes you want to hit them with a wrench.  Of course, now I'm the "I used to ride..." guy, though in my defense I know how to keep my mouth shut, and when I pass people working on their bikes I don't say anything.  (Though I realize I'm saying something now, but this is a blog whose sole purpose is to serve as the repository for my bloviating, musings, and other self-indulgences, and in that sense it's you who's sauntered over, not me.)

Anyway, there's a lot less space on the streets of Brooklyn nowadays to tinker with the crappy gas-powered conveyances you bought on Craigslist, though this guy I happened upon in Greenpoint a few weeks ago still seems to manage:

Sort of amazing that people in Brooklyn have even managed to make fixing your car in the street pretentious.

At least he's not in the bike lane.

Heavy Is The Fred That Wears The Crown

Schools here in New York City are out this week, which means I've got my parenting helmet on pretty much full time:

(By 2021 we'll all be wearing connected helmets for everyday life, just you wait and see.)

This means if you're looking for me and I'm not here, you'll be able to find me over at the Bike Forecast, where you can also get a good sense of what we're dealing with here in this town.  Specifically, you can read about our dolt of a mayor, who regularly says things that reveal the only walking he ever does is from the SUV to the entrance of whatever building he's visiting:

"You don't see cars drive on the sidewalk a whole lot." -- Bill de Blasio pic.twitter.com/Qsfel7xjnI

— Bike Snob NYC (@bikesnobnyc) April 19, 2019

The above mayoral quote was by way of explaining his continued crackdown on delivery people riding ebikes.

And speaking of crackdowns:

NYPD Seizes Bikes Without Bells, Arrests Cyclist Leading Group Ride #bikenyc #VisionZero https://t.co/CbkULD2GYl pic.twitter.com/Xs0HrCohjU

— Gothamist (@Gothamist) April 22, 2019

So basically that's the current state of affairs here in the fairest big city in America.

As for me, I entered a bicycle racing competition this past Sunday, which I'm pleased to report I passed.  In fact, not only did I pass, but I also got a Strava KOM!

This absolutely has to be a mistake, because firstly there's no freaking way I was 23 seconds faster than the next-fastest person:

Secondly, I was clinging desperately to the back of the race the whole time.  So while I suppose it's possible I happened to be moving from the very back to the middle back of the group during that segment and had the benefit of a tailwind on top of it, it's far more likely that my GPS or Strava or both are both wildly inaccurate.

Nevertheless, I'm choosing to file all of the above under "redacted" and wear the crown anyway.  It's the American way.

And finally, speaking of a lack of moral fiber, I've derided both plastic bicycles and cars extensively on this blog (as well as Strava, come to think of it)--and yet I can't speak highly enough of both my plastic bicycle and my Saris SuperClamp EX hitch rack, which I also used in tandem this past weekend:

I don't really drive my bikes places all that much, and for that reason the SuperClamp has proven more or less ideal.  Previously I'd been using a roof rack, and while it does go on and off pretty easily without tools, in practice I'd just been leaving it on there, which seemed like a waste given how infrequently I was using it--and on top of that I couldn't use it to carry a bike like my Jones without resorting to adapters.

The Saris on the other hand is overall less of a hassle to install when needed and then remove when not in use--all you do is unscrew the pin, slide the rack out of the hitch receiver, and you're done.  Plus it carries every one of my bikes, even when they're of wildly disparate sizes:

And while it's not even remotely hard to remove a front wheel and lift a sub-20lb racing bike onto the roof of a car, it's even less hard to put it on a hitch rack without removing anything at all.  And really, isn't being incredibly lazy what driving to the ride is all about?

Of course it is.

Yet at the same time it's also anti-lazy, since I can't just say "Fuck it" and leave it on there, because if I did the extra foot it adds to the length of the vehicle would insure I could never find a parking space ever again.  So I'm diligent about taking it off and returning it to the basement after every excursion.

So I guess what I'm saying is don't get a car, because that way you won't have to worry about this sort of thing in the first place.

You're welcome.

New Outside Column!

Happy Friday, and Happy Good Friday!

(Aren't they all?)

Here's a new Outside column, and it's all about how much we love parking and how much we hate children and bikes:

We really should just change the name of this country to The Land of Guns and Parking already...

The Way We Were

So this morning my phone did that weird "Black Mirror"-type thing where it tells you that you have a "memory" and then sends you down a Proustian nostalgia hole by showing you a bunch of photos it has somehow figured out are significant--and as it happens the photos that my phone chose were from a Gran Fondon't some two years back:

A look back into my archives (if it weren't for my phone and my blog I'd remember absolutely nothing) reveals that I billed this particular ride as the "BSNYC BOOMB!* Pre-Fondon't Ride," "BOOMB" being an acronym for "Beers on Old Man Brooks," because we all got beers at the Bronx Alehouse afterwards and I stuck Brooks with the bill.

I then did an extensive write-up for the Brooks Blog, which didn't appear until October, and when it did finally appear they deleted almost all the photos because, as it was explained to me, "the brand have been pushing for using high quality images within our blog articles and the website in general" and "a lot of the pics were not quite up to the new 'standard' as it were."

Of course asking me to blog for you and expecting good pictures is like buying a pet badger and thinking your couch is going to stay intact, but the fact is that there was some staff turnover at Brooks between the time I started blogging for them and the time I got that email, and I suspect the new people didn't really "get" me.  (Or, more likely, they got me perfectly well and realized my shitty sense of aesthetics was fucking up their blog.)

Also, now that I think of it, if I recall correctly a precondition of the ride was that everyone had to take pictures along the way and give them to me to use in the Brooks Blog, so I don't even think it was my shitty photography.  (Not that it matters--though I thought that was a fun element, and it's too bad Brooks didn't appreciate it.)

None of this is to say that I have any hard feelings.  Sure, they really did fuck up what had been a pretty good blog post, but you don't last as a semi-professional curator of words if you're precious about what you write.  And of course Brooks and I did continue to work together.  In fact, since they weren't into my shitty photos, they went so far as to have my next post professionally illustrated:

Still, my stock-in-trade is rambling ride narratives illustrated by shitty photography (whether by me or others), and they wanted me to blog on specific themes that they suggested, so it never really came together.

I still love Brooks and Brooks saddles, and I'm sure they still love me too, because who doesn't?

All of this is to say that the derailleur failures:

And token gravel sections:

And forced dismounts:

And fixie riders feeling justifiably pleased with themselves for braving the OCA on skinny tires:

And of course beer:

Has, until now, been lost in the mists of time.

In fact, it's all enough to make me consider curating another Fondon't, just for old time's sake.

I'll keep you posted.