Rodeo In The Buff
It was an excellent weekend of camping, trail riding, unicorn hunting, and s’more roasting in Buffalo Creek, Colorado.
And then we road East
Dirty Kanza cometh, and five Rodeo guys will be heading east from Denver to test ourselves against the 200 mile course.
Recently I had posted a journal entry lamenting the fact that I hadn’t ever really ridden east of Denver before. On Saturday that was remedied. We road East with a capital E.
Lost in the Land of Eagles: First Impressions
Helmet? Check.
Glasses? Check.
Tire Pressure? Feels about right, though there’s no way to tell for sure.
Headset? Seems tight.
Shoes? Right, they’re still in my bag…
A burst of giggling erupts as I kneel to unzip the suitcase. Maybe I should have waited to don my kit until after I finished fiddling with my bike, or at least put some sweatpants on over my bibs. It’s too late now; there is already a gaggle of Albanian school girls, friends of my host-family’s daughter, gathering outside the open door to my room. They avert their eyes as I exit, shoes in hand, and return to my bicycle in the yard. It has similarly attracted a group of neighborhood children who scatter when I approach. Taking the handlebars, I swing my leg over the saddle, but before I can clip Eduart, the patriarch of my host-family, stops me. He’s spent the last hour silently watching me assemble my bicycle, but now he’s clearly concerned. He doesn’t speak English, and my Albanian is still pretty poor, so he simply points to my brakes and inquires with a thumbs-up. I squeeze the levers and return the hand gesture to assure him that everything’s fine, then aim the bicycle down the gravel path which serves as our driveway and kick off.
You ain’t seen nothin’, son.
*Blip!*
My phone lit up. Text from Peder.
“Looks wet”
His timing was uncanny. It was Monday, I had cleared most of my to-do items for the first half of the day and I was beginning to consider whether or not I’d be able to head out for a ride. My monitor glowed with the Doppler loop of Weather Underground’s precipitation map. Even though we’d been hit with a couple of days of solid rain and the clouds still sat threateningly low, the map actually showed surprisingly few green and yellow blobs of wetness.
“It’s not as wet as you think.” I texted back. My attention was fixed on a spot on the map thirty miles south of me. For about a month I’d been drawn to a place where the flowing undulations of Colorado’s prairies are suddenly, unceremoniously violated with sharp spires of sandstone sticking out of the ground at sixty degree angles. That place was called Roxborough State Park. I had never been there and I had no good reason why not. The idea of finally visiting for a first time has been a dripping faucet in the back of my mind for a better part of a month and on Monday I was considering shutting the faucet up.
Touring the Native Lands
The Native Lands Classic.
Where to even start on a day like this? To put it simply, this is the kind of day that you look forward to on a bike, yet you can never fully prepare for. Lately, it seems, there is the rise of the self-supported bike event/race. But on further thought, is it a rise? Or a reprisal? Almost everyone has heard or read stories of the old Tour de France days of everything being fully self-supported doing whatever it takes to simply finish. Because before it was a race, the Tour really was just a bunch of crazy guys on bikes seeing if they could do the distance/route. So maybe it has come full circle. Maybe the over-abundance of super serious races and events and rides has spawned some people to come up with events like the Native Lands Classic. Not only to showcase an area of a country, but to bring people back to the fundamentals of riding. To spark that inner thought of, ‘that sounds insane, but let’s do it’.
Rodeo Road Trip: Tulsa Native Lands Classic (Gentlemen’s Race : 22 March 2015)
So, apparently, this is how plans/ideations for road trips for amateur bike racing start these days:
<Facebook> “A good friend is running a new event for the first time that is very much in the spirit of what Rodeo is about. 100+++ miles of Oklahoma’s paved roads, flat roads, gravel roads, back roads, hills, oil fields, open pasture land, long horns and tall grass to challenge you. We’ve been invited. Roadeo trip, anyone? https://nativelandsgr.wordpress.com/about/” </Facebook>
The entire road trip logistics to race this event as a team were hashed out on one long stream of collective consciousness comment thread, which atomic mushroom clouded into over 150 comments (now 200), questions, quips, and retorts. I hadn’t road-tripped like this with friends since college, and I was in.
Belgium day 2: Good roads, great company.
It is not difficult to go on a good ride, and it is not difficult to take a good photograph (or at least a decent one). It IS difficult however to go on a good ride while taking good photos. Good rides involve momentum, flow, and that feeling of covering copious amounts of countryside. Good photographs involve putting some thought into what it is you are trying to show and doing it with intention… and some luck.
On yesterday’s ride I didn’t do that, I just rode around in a state of awe and waved my camera around while holding the shutter button down. Zero thoughfulness, zero intention. Click, click, click. Hope something turns out.
As they say on the internet: Sorrynotsorry.
Lost in the Land of Eagles: Off and Away
I would like to thank Steven and everyone at Rodeo Adventure Labs for giving me a chance and providing me with a platform to share this story. Ideally this will be the first of many entries detailing my exploration of and adventures in one of the last great cycling frontiers on the European continent; the wilds of the Balkan Peninsula and, and in particular, the Republic of Albania. I hope you enjoy.
Pilgrimage: Donkey does DeRonde. Belgium Part 1.
It’s almost midnight as I try to post this while it is fresh in my mind. What a day it’s been. If kids have Disneyland and Muslims have Mecca, then cyclists have Belgium. The most difficult and storied one day races in our sport’s history have happened here. Outside of the Tour De France it seems to me that there is no bigger crown for a rider than to knock off one of the big Spring Classics that are held here. Stories of cobbles, brutal elements, and gladiators waging bike to bike combat are burned into the minds of those who follow this sport, and most of those stories happened here, in Belgium.
White Rim in a Day
“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” – Sir Edmund Hillary
An epic adventure has equal parts pain, suffering, and elation. It is easy to classify an adventure of epic proportions. If the pain, suffering, and elation of an epic adventure are not enough of a clear indicator, the constant thoughts and smiles of said adventure many days and weeks after the fact solidify the experience. The White Rim Trial in Moab is one such ride that easily falls into this category. More than a week has gone by since we finished the ride, and I am still thinking about it.Continue reading