Go Clipless

Irate driver chases cyclist

How to Avoid the Bummer Life recounts this story of an irate driver that chased a cyclist onto a sidewalk. I love their assessment and advice.

The motorist fled the scene. Witnesses told officers the SUV might have been a Mercury Mountaineer, that the driver was a heavy-set blond woman in her late 40s and that the vehicle had a blue disabled placard hanging from the rearview mirror.

Poor thing prolly had an important meeting at Curves she was late for. Lets be careful out there, ok?

So true!

How can we sleep when our cranks need turning...

Mattmagic riffs on Midnight Oil's old song 'Beds are Burning.' Hmm...might make a good slogan for an IMBA advocacy campaign.

The time has come
To say fairs fair
To pay the rent
To pay our share
The time has come
A facts a fact
It belongs to them
Lets give it back

How can we sleep when our cranks need turning
How do we ride when our quads are burning

Original lyrics here.

Naked bike rider gives advice on cycling couture

Gotta love the irony! Jake from the Sydney Body Art Ride has a great post about why you shouldn't feel like you have to dress up in cycling clothes to go cycling. Why not just wear what you've already got on...it's much cooler, right? Check out his post...tons of great photos of cyclists in all kinds of gear.

Oh...and no. She's not the naked cyclist...just one of the photo's I stole from Jake's site. ;-)

Interview with Jason Berry, director of new MTB movie '24 Solo'

In Hollywood the saying goes 'art is only a reflection of life' each time the far right blames them for soiling our minds with sex and violence. Well if that's so, then why are there so few movies about cross country mountain biking? As exciting as freeride movies can be, most of us mountain bikers ride good old cross country style, yet this is so rarely depicted on film.

Until Gripped Films came along with it's first movie Off Road to Athens (ORTA) the only video you could expect to see from a cross country riding point of view were grainy helmet cam shots posted on YouTube of some dude's ass riding in front of the 'director.'

Jason Berry is one of the founders of Gripped Films and directed Off Road to Athens, a movie about the top American professional mountain bikers and their race to claim a slot on the U.S. Olympic team. The documentary style film gave mountain bike enthusiasts a rare insight into the heroes of the mountain bike world. Suddenly the riders many of us have read about on blogs and in bike magazines were depicted on film in a very real and personal way.

Berry is putting the finishing touches on a new movie titled 24 Solo to debut at the upcoming Sea Otter Classic cycling festival. While ORTA gave us some insight into the lives of several different riders, 24 Solo aims deeper with focus on a single rider, Chris Eatough, and his drive toward a seventh 24 hour race world championship. Eatough is essentially the Lance Armstrong of endurance mountain biking, yet I fear that he is not a household name save for the most ardent racing enthusiasts.

And that is exactly why this movie had to be made.

I thought it would be worth while to catch up with Jason Berry and get some insight into the inspiration for these movies and maybe stir some love for the cross country side of our sport:

Bicycle optical illusion

Modern sculpture used as bike rack meets optical illusion. Equals bike as urban art.

(Via Mighty Optical Illusions)

5 ways to break your way to the front of a concert

Ok, so Kgirl and I are here with Dr.P and Queen Michelle at the Snow Patrol concert at American University and we're like the oldest f*ckers here.

That band with the treadmills is the opening act and they suck. So we decided to find some seats on the side. Some a-hole student was saving 16 seats. I think he was just pretending to have friends.

Anyway, since we're old, we found some bleacher seats in the back and brainstormed some ways to make our way to the front of the pack when Snow Patrol comes on.

1. Push forward flailing your arms wildly while hoisting your body forward through the boisterous crowd.
2. Tap people on the shoulder one at a time and tell them you are trying to meet up with your girl/boy friend up ahead. This is very time consuming, however and requires that you lie to many people.
3. Be-friend a security guard by commiserating about how old you are and have him shine his light in front of you while you stroll right up like a VIP.
4. Tap the right shoulder of the person in front of you and scootch your way to the left. Its the oldest trick in the book, yet it can still be effective. Alternatively, crawl on your hands and knees.
5. Find a sound guy from the band and offer up your wife/girlfriend to sleep with the band if he helps you get to the front.

Here's hoping Snow Patrol comes on soon.

Update March 24: Guess which way actually worked?

Photo from Flickr by spinal_faun.

Cycling magazine circulation statistics

I'm trying to hunt down the circulation numbers for the major cycling magazines for a future post that I am working on. Unfortunately, this data is harder to find than one would think it should be. Here's what I've got so far, but I wonder if there is anyone out there that may be able to help me out:

The chart is ordered from greatest circulation to least with the unknown mags sequenced by my best educated guess. A few things to note.

1. I included Outside magazine because they cover mountain biking in at least every issue that I have seen so far, although it is not their primary purpose.
2. The data is from 2005. It comes from the Magazine Publishers Association which appears to be the largest auditing bureau for magazines in North America.
3. The statistics are circulation numbers per issue and include both subscriptions and newsstand sales.
4. Mountain Bike Action is published by Hi-Torque which claims to have several hundred thousand readers of its bike magazines which includes MBA but also BMX oriented magazines. I'm guessing they have about 100,000 MBA readers.
5. I believe Dirt Rag's numbers are about 50,000 based on a press flyer I picked up at Interbike, but I can't be sure since I have lost it.
6. I'm not insinuating that the magazines whose numbers I cannot locate are not being straight forward, I just have not found them yet.

I put a copy of the original source spreadsheet out on Google Docs so you can reference it in case you're interested in any other popular magazine numbers.

Anyway, thought you might find it interesting. I'll save some analysis for later, but I didn't want to sit on these numbers too long. Besides, I thought maybe some of you savvy Internet types or industry insiders might be able to fill in some of the holes. Thanks.

MTB video games, pro baseball vs. pro cycling, and Lance's ladies

Finally hacked my way through my feed reader after being on the road for the last week. More than 6,000 unread posts...can you say machete! Time to trim those babies up all Ryan Seacrest, manscaping style...

Here are few of the relevant stories that caught my eye:

Mountain Bike Adrenaline looks like a pretty cool game for the PS2. Would love to see a game like this for the Nintendo Wii. Imagine using the Wii-mote and the Numchuck as the handlebar with the buttons for things like bunny-hops, jumps, and trials moves. Seems like a no-brainer. (via Bike-Community.net)

Missing Saddle had a pretty cool story comparing the salaries of pro baseball players vs. pro cyclists. Tom Boonen's $2.6 million dollar salary barely matches that of Steve Kline, 69th ranked relief pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Did you ever notice that Lance's ladies have a striking similarity to one another? TMZ.com lays it out for you, but TdFBlog is a bit more freudian in its analysis.

Oh yeah, on Monday, TypePad featured this humble blog. It's a good thing too since it was a quiet week around here. Check out what they had to say.

Capturing 'flow' in mountain bike photography

I just can't get enough of great bike photography. Marco Toniolo is a free spirit mountain adventurer form Italy who happens to take great photos. I found him in my travels to Linda Morgi's blog (that's two things I've referenced from her blog...time to add a link) in a post that went over her feed, but seems to be pulled from the site itself.

Back to the reason I draw your attention to Marco Toniolo's photography. One of the things that is difficult to capture about mountain biking - either in photography or video - is the flow of the trail and the rider. The Collective is the master at capturing this feeling on video. To my mind, Toniolo does an excellent job of this in photography.

Check out the following galleries:

Trail riding at Lake Garda
Marzocchi riders at Lake Garda
Nepal Expedition
Riding with Hans Rey in the Phillipines

Explore the 9rules community, find cool things

I was reading this note on the 9rules site about a photo of a woman with riveting eyes. That led me to this photo I've copied here, originally published in JPG Magazine. I think the photo is cool and all, but I can't describe why. I guess I'm not sure what it is supposed to mean, but I'm sure it is supposed to mean something.

By the way, if you haven't checked out 9rules in a while, I'd encourage you to do so. What's 9rules? Only the greatest blog network chronicling the best of the independent blogosphere. A network, of which this blog is proud to be a member. Well enough of this puffery and largess, why should you visit 9rules? The site has been completely redesigned to help you uncover some of the best content on the Web today. You can now create your own reader profile and participate in the community of both 9rules bloggers and readers. I've been playing around over there a bit and it's pretty damn cool.

So here's what you should do:

1. Head over to my.9rules and create a profile.
2. Make friends with me...and while your at it befriend Publicenergy and Velochimp too (you can find their profiles from my 9rules profile page).
3. Check out my fellow sports bloggers.
4. Browse around...find some new blogs and make some notes.

You won't be sorry.