Bike Tribes

by Mike Magnuson

  This book is for the Heckawee:

  Executive Counsel Dale Aschemann, Roberto “Bob” Barrios, Big Tom Harbert, Michael “Molteni” Humphries, David “Champ” Neis, Mike “Napoleon” Pease, John “Chief” Reimbold, and Professor Darren Sherkat.

  May we forever not care how long it takes us to get there or how much Cave Creek we may drink along the way.

  CONTENTS

  We Shall Call Them Bike Tribes

  Minding the Store

  The Wrench Who Keeps Us Rolling

  BMX

  The Overwhelming Majority

  The Occasionally Dirty

  The Shrinking People

  One Part of Three Parts

  Riders of the Century

  Thousands upon Thousands of Us

  The Mothers of All Centuries

  Roadies

  Those Who Chase Each Other in the Woods

  When in Doubt, Cyclocross

  The Legend of Rando

  The Happy Wanderers

  The Commuters

  The Mass Is Critical

  We Can Fixie This

  What Vintage Do You Prefer?

  Beach Cruisers

  Together

  Acknowledgments

  WE SHALL CALL THEM BIKE TRIBES

  Sometimes the hardest things to understand are the easiest to explain. Like breathing. That’s easy enough to explain. If we stop breathing and don’t start breathing again in a jiffy, we’ll die. Little kids can understand that. Little kids can easily understand sunshine and green plants and where oxygen comes from, too. Their teachers have explained how the sun strikes the leaves and feeds the plants and the plants in turn feed us and how, when plants breathe, they make oxygen for us. Without sunshine, all little kids know, there would be no life at all.

  But how do plants breathe anyway? How can plants eat sunshine when human beings are getting burned by it? And why do schoolteachers say if we stare at the sun we’ll go blind? Little kids will blow their minds on the spot if they think about that sort of stuff too long. Same is true of grown-ups. There’s just so much we don’t know. In fact, I’ll bet probably fewer than one person in a thousand can explain, in accurate detail, the actual chemical process of human breathing, respiration—the way oxygen passes from our lungs into our bloodstream and makes us strong of body and of mind and of spirit and yet still crazy enough to ride bicycles with our friends 25 miles on the back roads to the next town to buy a Snickers bar and then ride the 25 miles back home. Because that’s what respiration does, right? Makes us want to ride bicycles? And is that what’s known as the Krebs cycle?

  Forgive me. For one thing, I’m obviously not a scientist. For another thing, I’m a lifelong cyclist and somehow have developed an involuntary habit of twisting all avenues of inquiry toward cycling. There are scientists who are cyclists, of course, as there are cyclists from every conceivable walk of life. I’ve known filthy rich cyclists with garages full of bikes, and I’ve known cyclists who were unemployed and flat broke and begging other cyclists for spare inner tubes and a new chain and a couple of extra energy gels to tide them over till they can catch a break. Some of the cyclists I’ve known have been brilliant, some not so brilliant. Some of them have been the nicest, most interesting people I’ve ever met. Some have been total jackasses in every possible connotation of the word. I have been a jackass from time to time, too. I admit it.

  Being a jackass is not unique in cycling. Ask any cyclists you know. They’ll say the same thing. We have nice people in cycling and mean people and middle-of-the-road people. We have every personality type you can imagine. What cyclists share, incontrovertibly, is this: Deep down, we wouldn’t be happy without cycling. In this sense, we are all the same.

  SO THIS IS a book about people who ride bicycles. I wish it were a book about bicycles without the people attached to them, to tell you the truth, because bicycles are not the most complicated things on this earth, at least compared to human beings, which are unbelievably complicated according to anyone who’s ever had anything to say on the matter.

  I’m not necessarily an authority on people, either, other than I’m 49 years old and am foolish enough, and proud enough, to believe that age adds up to wisdom. Some days, I’m not sure it does—like when I’ve forgotten my list at the grocery store for the third time in a row or when I can’t remember my own phone number (and who calls themselves anyway?) or get hopelessly lost on a bike ride in the countryside. But not even the wisest soul is wise 100 percent of the time. I’ve seen some things over the years, I guess, and like most people my age, I’ve spent considerable periods of my life trying to understand why people think the things they do and why they do the things they do. My general conclusion about people is not very encouraging, but whenever I lay it out there for discussion, I receive support for it. Here’s what I believe: People are difficult. That’s just a fact everyone agrees on. The other fact people agree on is that no human being, ever, anywhere, has figured out exactly why people are so difficult.

  But bicycles are just bikes. What could bikes possibly do wrong? What could bikes possibly say to offend you? Or misinterpret what you said?

  In the most general sense, a cheap bicycle for sale at a department store chain is essentially the same machine as a fancy carbon-fiber road-racing bicycle that you might see in a Pro Tour cycling event. The fancy bike and the cheap bike both have two wheels, a frame, a fork, a crank, pedals, a chain, a seat post, a saddle, and a handlebar. They both smell like rubber and grease when they’re new. There is some relatively complicated engineering associated with even the simplest bicycle, for sure, and with a Pro Tour bicycle there is some profoundly complicated aerospace-style engineering involved. But these differences in engineering are salted-in-the-shell peanuts compared with the intricacies of people who pedal these machines. I say this with nearly complete ignorance of engineering, mind you, and with only the fanatical belief that human beings are always more interesting and important than machines. Not all cyclists, it goes without saying, agree with me on this.

  But even a dog, the sworn enemy of cyclists since the invention of the bicycle, can wrap its mind around this kind of math: Bicycles + People = Cycling. This means that understanding cyclists should be easy, but the hard truth about cyclists is that very few of us understand each other.

  This is how the misunderstanding happens: Millions of people are involved in cycling worldwide. Some ride bikes for transportation. Some ride for exercise and fresh air. Some ride for competition, racing bikes on the road or on the track or on trails or in fields of mud or across the United States or on a long loop around France every July. Some people are as dependent on their bicycle as a heroin addict is on heroin. Some people ride their bicycle one time a year and think that’s enough. In general, cycling itself is a highly individual, highly idiosyncratic activity—the type of sport where people quite regularly get into it by riding alone and without having to submit to the greater will of a group. And as a consequence, the people who are drawn to cycling seem to be spirits who follow their own advice, their own guidance, their own ways of thinking about the world and how they ought to be riding bicycles in it.

  Nevertheless, for very human reasons, because we don’t want to be alone, cyclists tend to gravitate toward other cyclists with whom they feel the highest degree of “alikeness.” People who race mountain bikes hang out with other people who race mountain bikes. People who ride bikes for fun hang out with people who ride for fun. It’s a matter of group self-selection. Once cyclists become comfortable in their groups, they identify with these groups to the point where they occasionally think things like This is the way we do it. That means this is the only way to do it. Once cyclists think things like that, it becomes harder for them to appreciate that they are
part of a larger community consisting of millions of people who ride bikes; instead, they are part of a smaller community consisting of a specific type of cyclist.

  Most cyclists typically spend their entire cycling lives functioning within these small units: road riders or mountain bikers or fixie riders or triathletes or cyclocross racers or track racers or people who load their Chihuahua in a basket on a beach cruiser bicycle and ride off in the direction of sunshine and music and groovy people who don’t want to sweat life’s details.

  Each of these groups has its own culture and history and a set of rules and normative behaviors. Let’s call these groups Bike Tribes. Each of us is part of one tribal group. Each of us is curious about the other Bike Tribes, too, because in that one special way, because we love having two wheels under us, we’re all the same.

  THE PEOPLE YOU will meet in this book are part of one Bike Tribe or another, whether they know it or not, and some of them most certainly do not know it. They are not exactly real people, either; they are what is known in the writing trade as composite characters, meaning they are fictional people based on a number of real people I have interviewed in the process of preparing this book. I have placed these people in composite situations, too, and have in the process poked more fun at them than their real-life counterparts probably merit. Then again, if it ever comes to pass that cyclists lose the ability to poke fun at themselves and at our sport in general—the odd bikes we ride, the odd clothing, et cetera—the sport of cycling itself will lose its magic.

  the Small Shop Owner: ED

  Sandals with socks.

  Bike-company shirt, obtained free from a sales rep, untucked.

  Random clutter throughout the shop.

  Tranquil expression, possibly contemplating a sandwich in the near future.

  MINDING THE STORE

  From the street, you can see more than 30 road cyclists in garishly bright spandex arranged in various semicircles in the parking lot of Big Ed’s Cyclery on a Wednesday evening, 5:25 p.m., in late spring.

  Some of the riders are skinny to the point of being gaunt and are squatting on their top tubes; some aren’t so lean, and they’re standing next to their bikes looking apprehensive.

  Now Big Ed himself opens the bike shop’s glass front door and steps outside. He’s tall, 6 foot 4, and he looks happy, especially in the eyes, which are warm and brown and scanning the parking lot and acknowledging all the riders because he knows all of them. Like Tom, the guy who just lost 80 pounds riding his bike. Or Charlotte, who must have lost 50 pounds. Or Bill, the masters state road champion for 4 years running. Ed’s customers. His friends. He takes the time to stroll around the lot, greeting everyone and yucking it up, and you would think the guy was the president or something, he’s so popular with the riders.

  He looks at the sky—overcast but not dark—and the riders keep their eyes fixed on him. He scratches his head finally and announces, “I think we’ll go around the lake today!”

  Everyone nods or says something on the order of “Right on, man.”

  Then he steps back in his shop.

  He’s got about 50K worth of bikes and merchandise in here—a few high-end road bikes and mountain bikes, but most are in the 800-bucks-or-under range because this is a college town. The kids need bikes to get to class a heck of a lot more than they need to show up for the shop’s group rides with the local racers. Ed believes that cycling is about people getting from here to there on two wheels, in whatever way suits the individual cyclist best. That’s what he tells people, anyway. He’s trying to make a living here, and you can’t make a living selling $5,000 bikes in a college town.

  Still, he loves his Wednesday group ride, which is fast and crazy and sometimes pure-D joy. Sometimes it ends up with people getting grumpy with one another for dropping each other or not waiting up for somebody with a flat tire. You never know what you’re going to get, and for the rest of the week, the people who went to the group ride talk about what happened on it. Ed loves that. He loves the college kids. He loves the mountain bikers. He loves the fixie riders and the triathletes and the cruiser riders and, really, anybody who rides and anything having to do with bikes. That’s why he’s in the business: because he loves it. It sure as hell isn’t because he wants to get rich.

  Ed’s been in the shop since 8 this morning, starting the day by wrenching with George, his mechanic, for 2 hours before opening the shop. Not a bad day at the cash register, either. He sold a cruiser bike and a couple of hybrid bikes and some tires and tubes and whatnot. That’s not a great day—after he pays his bills, he’s barely breaking even.

  Ed pokes his head in the repair area and takes a look at George—55 years old and sturdy and wearing a shop apron and always happy to fiddle with bikes—and says, “How much longer you staying, George?”

  George says, “Just finishing this one up. Then I’m out of here.”

  “Cool,” Ed says. “I’m suiting up and rolling with the group. Lock up when you’re done, will you?”

  George says that he will. Ed didn’t need to ask him to lock up, but that’s the way Ed is, always finding a way to touch base with people and try to encourage mellowness and happiness in all things. Ed considers himself to be an old bicycle hippie from way back, and he’s proud of that.

  Ed changes into bike kit and grabs a vintage Steel Colnago—his baby, with down-tube shifters and hand-built wheels—and he rolls it toward the door. He pauses to look around his shop, all the bikes, the wheels, the accessories, the smell of rubber and grease, and he’s barely getting by. Every month he covers his financial nut, and that’s about it. He works 6 days a week year-round and never takes a vacation. But hey, he loves this life. He wouldn’t trade it for anything.

  So with this in mind, he opens the door, rolls his bike into the lot, and says to the cyclists gathered there, “Okay, let’s go!”

  the Big-Box Shop Manager: PHIL

  Arms crossed.

  Shirt tucked in.

  Irreversible corporate frown on the face.

  Merchandise displayed in perfect, anal-retentive rows.

  Brightest possible lights.

  Saturday afternoons are the worst at Rock Cycles.

  Phil hates everything about them. He’s not the owner here. He’s the manager, just working for somebody else, some corporation that owns this place, some board of directors who as sure as bikes have wheels are making a mint off his labors. And Saturdays are a horrible circus at best, an insult to his professional injury—to a guy like him who used to love bikes and race bikes and ended up managing a big-box bike shop at the mall.

  Look what he has to put up with. This woman at the counter? She disgusts Phil. She looms over him and sneers, with her 10-year-old, future-criminal-looking boy next to her. Phil worries that if he were to extend his index finger over the counter, the woman would bite his finger off and spit it back at him.

  She says, “You’re the owner. You can give us a better discount than this.”

  Phil takes one of the many deep breaths he has taken today and says, “I am the manager, not the owner. Four hundred dollars is the best I can do for that bike.”

  “But I saw that same bike on the Internet for 300.”

  “True. But we will service the bike for a whole year.”

  “For free?”

  “For free,” Phil says. “It’s included in the price.”

  “That’s not what I heard. I heard you jack up the prices and promise all sorts of service, then when the bike breaks down, you still charge an arm and a leg for repair.”

  Phil’s eyes drift away from her, past the racks of bikes and clothing and accessories and the wall-size posters of the Tour of California and Lance Armstrong, through the window, and into the parking lot, where Phil sees the woman’s shiny new Mercedes-Benz sport-utility vehicle. That car must have cost 80 grand. And she’s dickering with him over a hundred bucks?

  On other sectors of the shop floor, his classically youthful sales staff of three guys,
in matching shirts, is busy dealing with customers. This world, it occurs to Phil, is a hermetically sealed form of medieval bicycle torture.

  The woman says, “I think you’re arrogant.”

  Phil says, “I’m sorry, ma’am. But 400 dollars is final. It’s a good price and a good service plan.” Phil now gazes at the 10-year-old boy and locks eyes with him. “And this guy will really go fast on this bike.”

  The kid brightens, but the mother darkens.

  “Nope,” she says. “I’m taking my business to someone more willing to do business with me. Come on, Jayden. We’re going to Big Ed’s.” Phil watches her make a call on her cell phone in the parking lot before she gets in her Benz and drives off.

  Damn. What’s Phil going to do about people like that? And what’s Phil going to do about Big Ed, the old hippie with his hippie bike shop near the university? Big Ed doesn’t have to make money on his shop. That’s why everybody likes him. Big Ed can ride bikes and be a cool guy and give everybody great deals, and Big Ed’s customers will probably nominate him for sainthood, eventually. Phil has only one concern: the bottom line. If Phil can’t manage the shop into a profit, the company will find somebody else to do it for him.

  He sighs again and wonders how many hundreds of times a day he sighs on this job. Then he wanders into the service area, where his wrenches are working through the backlog.

  He stops near the new kid, Steve, a Cat 2 road racer the shop sponsors. Phil asks, “Did you hear that?”

  Steve says, “What a pain in the ass.”

  “That’s the problem with the customers,” Phil says. “Most of them aren’t even cyclists in the first place.”

  Someday, Phil wants to be a cyclist again, someone who loves bikes and everything associated with them. But for now, the mere thought of a bike is almost too much for him to bear.