As I near the end of my first season of racing, let’s look back on the knowledge gained and lessons learned during the Cyclocross Race Season of ought-eight, which Alan Greenspan wearily describes as “irrationally exuberant”. These nuggets of wisdom contain a number of words that I do not understand, but I...

Last month I randomly purchased a carbon fiber bicycle. I know, crazy right? I wasn’t really in the market for any sort of new bike, but I ended up borrowing this one from a friend and loving it. It fit perfectly and just felt right. So when she mentioned that she was selling it, I threw caution to the wind, and with the help...

In light of recent preemptive attacks on my beloved coffee shop of choice, The Black Cat, I feel a certain responsibility to leap in with  a defense plan.  First of all, allow me to assert the controversial  reality that The Black Cat is the greatest coffee shop of all time.  Yes, I said it.  THE GREATEST. No, the coffee...

Despite my obsession with all puns, the name Coffeehouse 5 did not initially sit well with me. Calling a coffee shop a “coffee house” makes me think of weird, fake-Beatnik types, like Mike Meyers in So I Married An Axe Murderer. But Coffeehouse 5 (Or CH5 as Cait and I call it in our text messages) has slowly...

I love my Garmin GPS thingy. I kinda like it because it tells me how far I’ve gone and how fast I’m going and what time it is. But I really like it because it lets me map out my ride, just like that kid in the Family Circus. And unlike the kid in the Family Circus, I can make my route spell out swear words if I...

If there’s one thing I learned from watching 72 straight hours of VH1 countdowns over the holiday vacation, it’s that people love numbered lists. And seeing as how the esteemed editor of this fine website has flatly refused to run my steamy Rachel Maddow fanfic (despite the bike connection involvement of a sexy vintage...

I already like the Albina Press as a pre-ride meeting spot. And I already wrote about it. But now there is another one. It’s almost exactly the same. Except it’s on Hawthorne. Not Albina. But it’s called Albina Press. On Hawthorne. I know, I don’t get it either. But stay with me. Just like the other...

I like to talk a lot of shit about the Powertap, but I think I need to make my motivations clear. I don’t hate the powertap; I just don’t know how it works. It’s new and scary and confusing. And rather than learn how this devil tool does it’s voodoo magic, I’d rather treat it the same way that Joe...

Bishop is where people who live in LA go to rock climb. It’s actually where lots of other people go to rock climb too, but the LA people are easy to identify becayse they walk around the grocery stores, tan and shirtless, with bleached dreads, saying “bra” and “sick” a lot. They like to use...

Last year the only cycling shoes I had were some road shoes two-Euro-sizes-too-big for me (but I got them for free!). I filled the toes with crumpled up napkins or newspaper, and for short rides it was kind of okay. But for anything over 30 miles my feet would go numb and shortly after that my back would start feeling like it...

It was the existentialist poet and avid cyclist Donald Rumsfeld who described in his magnum opus, Press Briefing Feb 12, 2002, that there are things that we know and things that we don’t know. But “there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” As the war in Iraq rages on,...