Bozeman Alleycat

It's rediculous. I never thought that I would have more fun on a roadbike than on a mountain bike...BUUUTTT...on Sunday April 29th it happened in the form of an Alleycat race put on by a buddy of mine here in Bozeman. For those like me who don't really know what an alleycat is, I suggest you check out this website.

http://www.digave.com/

Our race had an open manifest, which basically means that we were given a list of places around town that we had to get to in any order we decided. It was fantastic, there were about twenty riders and the whole time everyone was riding as hard as they could, but still trying to help out all the other riders in finding checkpoints that were particularly elusive.

The race began with a foot race to the bikes about a hundred yards away. During the mayhem of the start, my chain got knocked off, unbeknownst to me. As I tried to lift the bike, clip in, and get on the pedals all in one motion, the expected resistance wasn't there and I found myself going over the handlebars before making even one full pedal rotation at the start of the race. The best part was that I dislocated my left shoulder in the process and had to do the first mile or so with one hand...awsome. I did, however win an award for my little bought of gracelessness

http://thebozemanfix.blogspot.com/2007/04/alleycat-results.html

Anyway, one of these days I'll do some mountain bike riding, but for some reason I'm really having some fun on the asphalt quad track for the time being...

Traffic

Today I planned a road ride with a couple of friends. While the ride itself was goooood, it was the ride to meet the people I was doing the ride with that was fully sweet. I road about a mile down Maine Street to pick up Jacque first, the whole time blitzing past traffic...23 miles per hour passing cars on both sides of the road. It makes you understand why these guys do what they do http://www.digave.com/videos/

Once I had my team together we set out of town to Nash road eventually hooking up with 19th. It was about 40 miles round trip, a decent ride. But the highlight of the day was blazing cars stuck in lines at traffic lights...I may never drive again.

Singlespeed Urban Assult

There's just something about riding a singlespeed...simple, light, effective. After an extremely brief bought of inexplicable mechanical failures, E-rock, Klaus, and I headed east on Durston tonight with the intention of first shredding some sick road construction gnar. The ultimate destination was Story Hill, which basically consists of a roughly one mile climb up a gravel road followed by what could be an incredibly tasty ribbon of singletrack downhill. Unfortunately it had been denuded by equine traffic while it was still soft from the spring snow melt, I can't imagine anything that can destroy a trail faster than horses.

Regardless...

Bozeman has a pretty great system of trail twisting through the east half of town. Unfortunately, I'm not extremely well versed in navigating these trails, but fortunately E-rock's got everything dialed in the routefinding department, so after navigating construction debris for a bit we were able to latch on to some relatively decent urban dirt track northeast to the Story Hill road. There is really an amazing rhythm to riding off road, even while riding through town, having smooth dirt under your tires is frankly blissful.

But the real point is how incredible it is to ride a singlespeed. DNA and I had a talk at some point about how quiet one's mind is while on a bike. To some degree I think that's why I love riding bikes in general and singlespeed's in particular. One certainly works "harder" on a singlespeed, but at the same time, one's mind is completely silent because shifting doesn't even occur to you. All you have to do is pedal, really hard...and fast.

It's basically everything that made you love to ride a bicycle as a child...