CommonWheels Bike Co-Op

Tonight on the way back from the Roll It Forward bike mines, I stopped by the Commonwheels bike co-op over in Allston to pick up a bike from a BigBikes Mobile Bike Repair client. It was awesome. I got a little turned around on my way in, I was standing in a dark parking lot, calling Chris Ditunno to have her talk me in. Unlike an air traffic controller she was...awake and able to make sense of my garbled coordinates. "Ya, I'm standing in a kind of courtyard next to a...dune buggy with a...deer head on the hood, and I can hear a band." "I can hear a band too" Chris said and two seconds later she walked out the door. 

SingleSpeed-A-Palooza Cyclingdirt Coverage Is Up!

Watch more video of 2011 Single Speed-A-Palooza on cyclingdirt.org

It took me a while but it is done. This video sort of captures the fun, flow, and fucking magic of Stewart State Forest and the SingleSpeed-A-Palooza course.
You'll have to sit through the end credits of the highlight vid if you want to witness perhaps the best karaoke version of ABBA's "Dancing Queen" ever performed.

The rest of the vids, including one of a not-so-magnificent karaoke version of Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child O mine are RIGHT FREAKIN HERE DUDE.

Putting The 'Looza' In Single Speed-A-Palooza 2011

When people say they have not been riding their bikes, they are generally full of shit, like Mark "The Shark" McCormack. Back when he was our Shimano rep at IBC, he would come in at some point in the early spring and go on about how he'd only been riding a half hour a day on the trainer and that he was totally out of shape. Then he'd go out that weekend and win Charge Pond or be ripping legs off at Marblehead. He was executing a calculated misinformation campaign in order to catch his rivals off guard. The Shark is a smart man and an immensely successful bicycle racer; I am a stupid man who has stumbled into a good result here and there along the way. I don't have the capacity to pull off calculated misinformation campaigns.The night before Single Speed-A-Palooza, I was telling my drinking mates (Kerry Combs, Matt Myette, Ronnie Steers, and Matt Aumiller) at Irish Eyes that I really hadn't been riding and how I've basically devolved into some kind of

Gravel Grinder Wrap Up Or The Beast With A Million Photos

I'm tired. I mean, my fingers and hands hurt too much to write in any kind of vigorous way. I would never use the word "vigorous" in speech, in that context. The blog-o-verse version of me is such a douche. The new job is the ultimate excuse for getting out of blogging...or anything. It's like having a kid or a dog, but it's not...because people only have a small number of kids or dogs; I have hundreds of kids I have to put on bikes. It is literally like I am raising hundreds of children, so all parents and pet owners can pretty much suck it, because I am a better, cooler, harder working person than all of you motherfuckers put together. Even if you had mutant powers and Nobel Peace Prizes, you still wouldn't have shit on me. 

See, what did I tell you? Blog-o-verse me...such a douche. 

I Rolled It Forward today, I rolled it backward today, I rolled it every which way, and now I am just going to lay down some photos, lots of photos, and talk about them. 

What's My Name And Wookie Bean Bags

See all those bikes there behind my oddly shaped head? Those are what's inside my head these days as well. I've been working with Roll It Forward and Boston's Youth Cycling Program, which are both initiatives of  Mayor Menino's Boston Bikes. I split my time between plowing through the repair of 100s of bikes, ranging in quality from Magnas with rusty, angular chains to classic GTs hooked up with all the sweet upgrades the 90s had to offer. Roll It Forward procures bikes from various places and distributes them to people in need of bicycles through programs like Boston Bicycle School and the Boston Center For Youth And Families.Youth Cycling Program goes to schools and provides kids with bicycle safety training, utilizing a fleet of bikes donated from places like International Bicycle Center, Wheelworks, EMS, and Giant Bicycles. I fix most of the bikes for RIF and manage the fleets for YCP. I get some help from other RIF and YCP employees, and from volunteers, like the ones who are coming down this Saturday from 10-5. Hey, if you want to come down and volunteer, we'd be glad to have the help. You don't even need to know how to work on bikes, I'll teach you. I'm serious here. Contact link on the sidebar. Seriously.

I'll talk more about all that later and give updates as things go on in that realm, but we have much more important things to discuss today. 

I Went To Vermont And All I Got Was This Stupid New Name

 Saturday afternoon I was feeling a little lost. I haven't talked a lot about it here, but I basically can't ride a bike to save my life right now. Can't train in any kind of serious way anyway. I'm a mess. So I was driving around, doing work-related things (we'll talk about the new work, i.e.: "my good excuse for not blogging" later this week). I was thinking about how the Ronde De Rosey was the next day, and how, if I rode it, I would destroy my knee for the entire season and how that would suck more than the big suck I am experiencing currently. I thought about how the Gravel Grinder charity ride was going down in Waterbury, VT the next day as well, and how I was really sad that I wouldn't be riding bikes and drinking beer up there. But then I got a call from Gravel Grinder organizer George W. Bike29 and he was like "Aah! Come up and drink beer and hang out, you don't need to ride bikes to have fun!" And I said