Urban Biker

Four weeks into training, and the work is finally starting to pay off. I’m beginning to feel like a bike rider again. The first couple of TNT Saturday rides were miserable by the end. My ass hurt and my hands were numb. I just wanted to get off the bike and never get on again. [...]

The Tour of the California Alps — better known as The Death Ride — is 129 miles and 15,000+ feet of lung-busting climbing.

As they say, “That Which Does Not Kill Us.”

For the first time since I was a kid, I am raising funds for a good cause: The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) as a participant in their Team In Training program . This July, we’re going to ride our bikes 130 miles through the High Sierras and over five giant mountain passes (15,000 feet of climbing). [...]

Inventor of the telephone, the light bulb, the stock ticker. Obsessive milk-drinker. Fixie nut. Here’s Thomas Edison doing some tricks on his fixed-gear bike, circa 1899. Watch it and wish you were this bad ass.

This short video of track bikers in San Francisco is beautifully put together, with great shots set to lovely music,. It makes biking in San Francisco look extremely romantic and attractive. Watching it, you think to yourself, “I wish I biked there.” And then you remember, I do — and it sucks! There’s potholes and SUVs [...]

My broheem lives and works in Japan’s Okayama prefecture, a calm little corner of the country next to the sea. On April 5, somebody dropped their key at the bike parking area. This is how they got it back.

This video was shot at my alma mater, the University of Vermont. A.k.a. “Groovy Youvee.” I don’t know what’s more Vermont about this guy — the obvious white boy clueless haircut-and-shades combo or the tricked out boom box MTB combo blasting the roots reggae. This guy pulls some serious wheelies all around the UVM campus. [...]

The Italians have you covered. I have to say, those arm warmers are freaking fantastic. Might want to consider something a little more substantial in the pants department, though.

I can only imagine riding this sick-looking machine on my morning commute. Makes me want to find a job where the wifey and I can work together so we’ll have a good excuse… From Bohemian Bicycles in Tuscon, Arizona. Full gallery here.

Pic by Joan Veldkamp/L.A. Times Great story from the L.A. Times about the Tokyo police nabbing a bicycle thief, then tracking down the bike’s owner and returning it personally.

“But the guy who stole my bike from outside a Tokyo train station one recent Saturday night wasn’t looking for anything flashy. He was drunk — it was payday [...]

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The Dude Abides: a Big Lebowski-inspired Alley Cat flyer from Boston.

Swobo, the San Francisco bike clothing company, has rolled out three city bikes — a coaster, a fixie and a 3-speed — the first bikes the company has made. Designed by former Bianchi product manager Sky Yaeger, the bikes are neither mountain bikes nor road bikes. they’re city bikes. For example, each has a bottle opener [...]

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Richard Masoner again: “Jeff, Ode, and Monsieur took the train down from San Francisco to visit the 2007 North American Handmade Bicycle Show in [...]

“This bike is is (one of) Craig Calfee’s personal ride and is built up of individual strands of carbon fiber. I’m told he keeps having to add more strands because it’s not quite stiff enough.”

So writes Richard Masoner , who was at the 2007 North American Handmade Bicycle Show in San Jose Calif this week. More detailed pic [...]

Picture: Serotta’s carbon fiber MeiVici The cost of high-end bike materials like carbon fiber and titanium are on the rise, the Wall Street Journal recently reported. But it’s not a problem for a fast growing segment of the bike community — those with wads of cash.

Cycling enthusiasts can expect to see prices head uphill for bikes made of [...]

Mercedes-Benz has released three top-dollar bicycles — a pair of city bikes and a road bike. Merc’s road Racing bike is Campy equipped and has a carbon-fiber frame. It starts at $5,200. The “Fitness” and “Trekking” are aluminum city bikes, starting at $1,300 and$1,700 respectively. Both have disk brakes, front shocks, Shimano Alivio drive trains [...]

Picture by Zeelix Posts are not secure places to leave your bike. My friend’s bike was stolen. Cheeky buggers dismantled the posts and lifted the bike up and over. Reporter Justin Jouvenal goes in search of his stolen bike , which leads him to an “urban underworld of open-air chop shops, steal-to-order thieves, and brazen fencing networks, where San [...]

New to me, but probably no one else on the planet, is Veloroutes, a great mashup of Google Maps that lets you draw your route over the top of a map and it calculates the distance, elevation and estimated time. The site allows users to create, share and find cycle routes, and works with kml data from Google [...]

“Everybody’s in a rush and no one cares. It’s like every man for himself. It’s like a war zone,” says one commentator in this great little film about biking in New York. The film is a call for separate bike lanes in the city, preferably ones with physical barriers to protect bikers from traffic. From [...]