Do yourself a favor, head to your local cinema and see the brilliant animated feature Triplets of Belleville. Somebody, perhaps the director Sylvain Chomet, really knows his cycling: whether it’s the poster of Fausto Coppi on Champion’s wall, the Tour de France stars of the 1940s-1950s in wee Champion’s scrapbook, Madame Souza truing a wheel old school style with a tuning fork, Champion sitting on a scale to weigh his food intake, the vivid alpine scenes of an early 1960s Tour de France, the resignation of entering the broom wagon, or the most realistic depiction of a cyclist in motion you’ll ever see in an animated film, cycling has never been depicted in such a fluid and poetic manner other than the art house work of Danish director Jorgen Leth (and his films such as A Sunday in Hell, Stars and Watercarriers, The Impossible Hour are all actual race footage, not a work of animation). I’ve been enamored by Genndy Tartakovsky’s minimalist, stunningly creative Samurai Jack (on the Cartoon Network) and it’s refreshing to see Chomet contribute a work of art equally as inventive to the world of animation virtually all done in classic frame-by-frame, hand-drawn technique.

Last night I watched the film American Splendor and it vividly brought back memories of watching Harvey Pekar’s confrontations with David Letterman on late night television. I was in high school in the backwaters of upstate NY, with only 1 tv station at my disposal, and Pekar’s recurring guest spots made for eye-opening television moments: raw, angry eruptions of a man who felt fucked over by life. I’d never seen anything like it on network television and was amazed to witness Pekar as one of only 2 guests (the other being the comic/magician duo Penn & Teller) who could go toe to toe with David Letterman and make him uncomfortable. (Well, come to think of it there was also Charles Grodin’s amazing appearance on Johnny Carson where he ripped into Carson, but that’s another story.) I don’t even remember if I knew about his American Splendor comics, I was just intrigued and fascinated by this character who kept showing up on Letterman until he finally exploded on his 8th and final appearance. If I had access to Pekar’s comics then I probably would have bought them, but I don’t know if I would have appreciated them (also kind of like how I was confounded by Ben Katchor comics until one day it all clicked) until I, too, was out on my own scraping to pay the rent and pursuing passions dwelling on the fringe of societal norms. Pekar slogged away as a hospital file clerk in Cleveland, OH and spent his free time reading, shopping for rare LPs and 78s at yard sales, and reviewing jazz records. A chance encounter at a yard sale led to his friendship with R. Crumb and inspiration to put his life’s story in comic form. Pekar could only draw the crudest of stick figures, but he has genius when it comes to dialogue and the narrative portrayal of daily events. His work depends on collaboration with comic artists such as R. Crumb to bring his vision to fruition. One other point, wait ’til you see Pekar’s friend Toby. And listen to him expound about his favorite film. Wow.

I whole heartedly recommend carving out some time in you day (or night) and treating yourself to the tale of an American original. If you’ve got even more time to kill make it a double feature with the equally excellent documentary Crumb. While our world is becoming increasingly digital, fast paced, and homogenous, American Splendor is a refreshing reminder to revel in joyous endeavors that don’t involve computers: walking, reading books, losing oneself in LPs, drawing, and thinking, all to the beat of your own jazz drummer, man.

Do Harvey a favor, buy his books at your local indy bookstore.

I recently came across a collection of New Yorker covers with a cycling theme and it always makes me think of the races I’ve done at the crack of dawn in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. There’s nothing quite like riding your bike to the park literally as the Sun rises. The city’s calm, eerily quiet, and devoid of people or traffic. Time permitting, I’d head over to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade afterwards for some people watching and Brooklyn Bridge watching before taking a nap and enjoying a full day of NYC. Today, I was cooped up inside doing school work, out of the glorious sunshine, and this cover picture made me wish I was riding my bike to the Promenade to daydream.

I came across this organization last night while web surfing, and I do believe I’ve found my life’s calling. Hopefully, when I’ve received my library science master’s degree in 1 year’s time, I can find some kind of archival profession where I get to lord over and coddle torrents of ephemera. I’ve amassed a small collection of bicycle racing programs from late 19th/early 20th century 6-day races plus regular track races in the U.S. and Canada as well as an assortment of tobacco cards with racing cyclists from the same time period. Thanks to newspaper databases with full text searching (particularly the New York Times), I’ve also located race results from my great-great (?, never know how many greats are necessary) uncle John J. Gillen who was a professional cyclist in the late 1890s New York metropolitan area. I think there’s a book waiting to be written about cycling in this time period…Maybe one of these years I’ll gather my thoughts, visit Somerville, NJ’s Bicycling Hall of Fame and Bainbridge Island, WA’s Classic Cycle shop’s collection of Pop Brennan material, and put pen to paper.

If W. headed this advice the world would be a better place. And everyone would have really nice bikes, too.

I’m a member, how about you? Read all about professional cyclist Erik Saunders and his fan club. Professional cycling desperately needs characters like Erik…

January Nationals

Harkey won. I survived in the lead group. 53 miles of pain and suffering in Chatham County. Damn that hurt. If there was a prize for highest finishing place with the least amount of training I can’t imagine anyone even coming close to me. I think I’ve ridden my bike about 250 miles in the past 4 months. Most of my fellow January Nationals competitors probably rode that much in the past week alone.

It boggles my mind how much phlegm and mucus exited my body in the 2+ hours of “racing” (remember, this is only a coincidental gathering of 70 cyclists out for a brisk ride with a nominal cash payout at the finish…) At first I tried to consciously make sure my expectorations were carefully aimed to avoid myself and those nearby, but after about an hour I was getting so fried that the gooey mess just shot out without any real regard for it’s final target. I was not a pretty sight at the finish line.

I wish people would learn how to go around corners without using their brakes. Hello, it greatly reduces the acceleration you need to stay on the wheel in front of you! I think people were somehow freaked out by seeing snow on the side of the road and thought that it would surreptitiously migrate into the road and take them out, even though repeated laps of the course should have confirmed that the roads were indeed dry and ice-free.

Muscle memory and experience got me through, but there’s nothing like actually doing some training to make races easier. Imagine that…

Surprisingly, UNC’s Davis Library has a fairly impressive collection of cycling books. While I should have been immersed in my Spring semester’s library school readings, I instead read several of these fine books in rapid succession. Here’s my first review:

Put Me Back On My Bike: In Search of Tom Simpson. William Fotheringham. London: Yellow Jersey, 2002.
Tragically, Briton Tom Simpson is best known for being one of only three cyclists in Tour de France history to die while competing and the only competitor to die without being involved in a high-speed accident. Tom Simpson expired near the summit of Mt. Ventoux on July 13, 1967 due to heart failure induced by the lethal combination of dehydration, exhaustion, sweltering heat, amphetamines and alcohol. His shocking death brought the insidious specter of drug use in the professional peloton front and center, and sadly, to this day, drug use is still an issue in professional cycling. The title of the book is supposedly Simpson’s last words to his mechanic who ran to Tom’s aid after he collapsed on Mt. Ventoux.

Professional cycling had always been a sport dominated by continental Europeans. Tom Simpson, from 1959 to 1967, was one of the early English-speaking pioneers to compete on the continent and to this date his palmares have yet to be equalled by any UK professional: victories in the World Championships, the Tour of Lombardy, the Tour of Flanders, Bourdeaux-Paris, Milan-San Remo, the Tour du Sud, and Paris-Nice, the first English-speaker to wear the maillot jaune in the Tour de France, podium finishes in Paris-Tours, Paris-Brussels, Ghent-Wevelgem, Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne, Baracchi Cup, Fleche-Wallonne, G.P. du Midi Libre, plus a top 10 finish in the Tour de France still stand as the benchmark for any English-speaking professional to emulate.

Tom Simpson was in many ways a man ahead of his time regarding diet, team structure, financial investments, and technical innnovations. Simpson was obsessed with his weight and he maintained a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and lean meat. Perhaps his greatest dietary staple was a daily dose (1 liter) of fresh carrot juice. Incredibly, this required his wife to peel and juice 10 pounds of carrots everyday. Simpson had a revolutionary approach to financing a professional cycling team which never got off the ground in his day (due to his untimely death), but is now the model for the successful Basque squad Euskaltel-Euskadi. His idea was to sell subscriptions to the public to foster a sense of regional/national pride. Also, not satisfied with the Brooks leather saddle which was really a rider’s only choice for a seat, Simpson designed his own saddle which is the model for contemporary racing saddles: a plastic shell, thin layer of foam padding, and a thin leather covering stitched to the shell.

Of course, no summation of Tom Simpson’s career and life would be complete without commenting on the tragic ignorance on the part of pro cyclists regarding drug and alcohol use plus the dangerous practice on the part of race promoters regarding the limited amount of fluids allowed to riders during races in stifling heat. Amazingly, on hot days racers would actually stop in bars along the route and steal water to drink since the race caravan provided no neutral water to the riders and prohibited handups from team vehicles. Also, there was a belief that small amounts of alcohol were beneficial in the heat. On the day Simpson died he was severely dehydrated, had consumed brandy at the base of Mt. Ventoux, and popped some amphetamines for an added boost sealing his fate. Simpson’s defenders, his wife and some former teammates, claim that it was the race doctor’s fault that Simpson died due to medical incompetence. Sadly, they seem to be in denial about the drugs in his system. Their prevailing belief is that since Tom Simpson had used drugs before and hadn’t died that he knew what he was doing. Ergo, the amphetamines in his system couldn’t have been the cause of death. Simpson was a pretty bright fellow, but he had no medical or pharmaceutical training and therefore was in no position to properly self-prescribe performance enhancing drugs.

Fotheringham truly admires Simpson and his book meticulously documents Simpson’s professional career and family life without sugar-coating his tragic death. Drawing from the journalism of Simpson’s era plus recent interviews with Simpson’s wife, former teammates, mechanics, soigneurs, and professional cycling peers, it was interesting to note the raw emotions and sense of loss still vivid and unresolved after 37 years. I’m a student of cycling history and was duly impressed by Fotheringham’s masterful job of situating Simpson within the larger milieu of 1960s professional cycling, a period characterized by the domination of Jacques Anquetil (whose dandyism inspired Simpson) and the dawn of Eddy Merckx. Simpson was a phenomenally gifted athlete; driven, focussed, and professional. Unfortunately, while undoubtedly not the only champion of his era to dope, the extreme pressure to succeed coupled with the financial uncertainty of the professional athlete in the 1960s forced Simpson to utilize any means to win. The monument to Tom Simpson near the site of his death on Mt. Ventoux should be a warning to the pros who still race past this hallowed ground, yet 37 years later the pressure to win and feelings of invulnerability still claim young lives. What a waste.

One last tidbit which I found fascinating: the only professional cyclist to attend Simpson’s funeral was his young teammate, the immortal Eddy Merckx.

The past couple of weeks I’ve actually made a conscious effort to get back on my bike after letting it lie out to fallow ensconced in cobwebs during my first semester of grad school.

Have I just forgotten how pervasive traffic is even in the rural areas surrounding Durham/Chapel Hill, or are we totally overrun with the vehicular menace? I thought, “Hey, it’s a weekday and the afternoon. The roads will be all mine!” Wrong! Even at 2pm up near Butner or Hillsborough on back roads the traffic kept coming. And coming. I was trying to have a conversation with our new tenant/fellow Cooperstown transplant/younger doppelganger Ben and it was hard to actually ride side by side without getting buzzed by cars. What are all these people doing in the middle of a weekday afternoon driving around in the middle of nowhere? I guess I’ve always had this odd notion that the roads were like school hallways. When everyone’s in class, the halls are deserted. Therefore if everyone’s at work, the roads should be deserted. Oh well, so much for that idea…

“Why don’t you bikers ride single file…”
“Why don’t you suck me off, lady!”

That lovely quote was uttered at the end of last Saturday’s Performance ride to a motorist who had been delayed for a fair amount of time as we began our warm down on the outskirts of Chapel Hill on Jones Ferry Road.

Sometimes, probably way too often, cyclists are their own worst enemy in the eternal struggle for respect and acceptance on our public roads. I don’t understand why we just can’t be a wee bit more disciplined and maintain a double paceline along Jones Ferry Road to allow some of the traffic we backed up to pass. At this stage the ride is basically over. The final sprint has been decided and at this point we’re just cooling down and shooting the shit. There’s only about 1 mile on Jones Ferry Road from the final sprint to our left turn onto Old Fayetteville Road and then the road fans out with ample room to chat and ride slow out of motorists’ way.

I was shocked, embarrassed, and disgusted not only with the ignorance so publicly displayed by this moron but also with the venomous rage in the guy’s voice. That’s no way to speak anyone with such minimal provocation, much less an elderly woman. Now whenever she sees a cyclist she’ll immediately think “why don’t you suck me off” and want to run us off the road. Great job. The group was pretty big and he was a bit in front of me so I never identified the guilty party. Mostly, I was just numb.

I’m having serious second thoughts about ever doing the Saturday Chapel Hill ride again. Over the years I’ve seen the negative encounters with motorists gradually become more numerous and it’s only a matter time before something serious occurs. It’s usually spooky enough just keeping out of harm’s way of the sketchy riders who take part in the “Saturday Morning World Championships” without motor vehicles in the mix. As much as I hate driving in a car to do a training ride, I think it’s time to try out Raleigh’s legendary Saturday morning Mission Valley ride. I don’t know if the cyclist/motorist dynamic is any better or worse, but I’d like to try some new roads with new training partners. Maybe the grass is always greener, or the roads are always more deserted, on someone else’s training rides…