Cycling Smackdown - Man vs. E-Bike

Introduction

If you’re a cyclist, you are probably now accustomed to being passed up by non-cyclists on e-bikes. When this happens, you may be puzzled, for a fraction of a second, by how some non-racer-type in a big puffy jacket sitting bolt upright on a humble commuting bike is so much faster than you, and then you realize. My eyes still dart to the down-tube of the person’s bike, to confirm the presence of a giant battery pack, as if to reassure myself that the universe still basically makes sense (if it does).

Mind you, I am 100% in favor of e-bikes … for adults. Especially for commuting. But I am also 100% not in favor of kids on e-bikes. If you agree, and particularly if you don’t, read on.

Cycling Smackdown – Man vs. E-Bike

I was on a solo road ride. I was not happy. I felt old and slow and fat. This isn’t very charitable and you likely wouldn’t call me fat, especially if I remembered to suck in my gut if I thought you were looking at me (but then, why would you be?). But being fat and feeling fat are entirely different things. I think anyone can feel fat. As a cyclist whose midsection used to be concave, I am admittedly unfair with myself.

I almost cut the ride short. I’ll confess I was indulging in a disgraceful amount of self-loathing and self-pity. Some days you have it, some you don’t, and I was really lagging, dragging a baggy, deflated ego behind me. I guess that’s the problem with ever having been really fast on a bike … you can’t help but compare. But enough of this.

At about the halfway point of my 30-mile loop, I turned onto Happy Valley Road to do “Half Happy,” which is halfway up what would be a pretty tough climb if you didn’t take the merciful turnoff down Sundown Terrace. The grade starts out at 1% for a tenth of a mile, then dabbles between 2% and 5% until a final really steep bit and then the turnoff. Half Happy is 2.5 miles at an average grade of 3.5%. (You can view the Strava segment here.)

As it happened, two teenagers on e-bikes turned onto Happy Valley Road just after I did (coming from either Happy Valley Lane or Hester Lane, just after Highway 24). One of the kids was on the kind of total cop-out e-bike that doesn’t even pretend to be a proper bicycle and that nobody actually pedals (see photo above). It’s more like a mini-bike, with the fat tires and the manual throttle. The kid yelled at me, something I didn’t quite hear (not expecting to be accosted). I said, “Huh?” and he yelled again, “You wanna race?!”

In the same millisecond that I parsed the question, I answered it. This was long before I devoted any thought to actually considering his proposal. It turns out my lizard brain is able to direct my vocal chords, tongue, and lips without needing to engage my neocortex, because I was surprised to suddenly hear myself yelling, “Yeah, I’ll race you! Let’s GO!” My naysaying inner voice—that is, the wimp in my brain that had been complaining the whole ride—said, “Oh boy. This is not going to end well.”

But my arguably better brain, the impulsive one that at least isn’t so pathetic, shouted down the inner voice, yelling (silently, internally), “GO! GO! GO! GO! GO!” And for better or for worse, this wilder, bolder part of my brain was, at this time, in charge of my body. I launched the hardest attack I’m capable of.

Here is where we started our race:

This is of course the part of the story where, according to classic narrative tradition, I am supposed to say, “I threw her in the big ring.” If this were fiction, that’s how I’d structure it. But full disclosure: I was already in the big chainring (i.e., higher gear range) because the climb is only 1% at this point. Nevertheless, as I accelerated, out of the saddle, I shifted up a few gears on the back so I could really dig in. It was crazy: out of absolutely nowhere, I just had this enormous rush of energy, like I was a surfer who’d just caught a 40-foot wave. I was flying! I glanced at my bike computer: I was doing over 25 mph!

The two kids, who’d been flanking me on either side, were quickly falling behind, and one of them—to my delight—yelled, “Oh, SHIT!” Needless to say, now I was fully committed and as the climb got steeper I had to go harder and harder. My suffering increased exponentially as the grade went from 1% to about 4%. I was still hauling ass in the big ring, and couldn’t believe how much energy I actually had. I felt strong like bull! But how long could this last? Of course I didn’t want to just start well and fizzle, because as we all know, he who laughs last laughs best.

Why did I even care about this pointless duel? It’s because, like I mentioned earlier, I hate to see kids on e-bikes. Why do their parents think kids need this product? Kids throughout time (well, at least for the last hundred years or so) have gotten around just fine on regular bicycles. It’s a great form of exercise and, given that riding a bike replaces walking or running—undeniably slow, hard, and inefficient ways to travel—kids have historically loved the increased speed and range that a good old fashioned bicycle can provide. Perhaps modern helicopter parents (or recovering helicopter parents), having habitually driven their kids everywhere, have finally had enough, and now refuse to drive them—but feel guilty about adding difficulty to their kids’ lives, and thus get them e-bikes to cushion the blow. Or maybe these parents think the kids will have more energy for studying and extracurricular activities if they don’t have to pedal their way around. Maybe these kids are so oversubscribed that they don’t have time to ride regular bikes from one activity to another. Or it could be these parents are not only sedentary and out of shape themselves, but lack the imagination to think of their kids as able-bodied people perfectly capable of pedaling their own asses around. Whatever the case, these parents are clearly defective. The kids, for their part, are lazy and shameless. If, when I was a kid, my parents had offered me an e-bike (had such a thing existed, and had they been defective parents), I’d have been offended. Thus, when I see a kid on an e-bike, it’s as galling as seeing a cat on a leash, or a dog in a stroller, or a toddler with an iPad.

How could I keep this pace up? Could I keep this up? A boss once advised me, when I had an important decision to make, “Go with your gut”—but then, after a moment’s reflection (and likely remembering the business zeitgeist of the moment), he added, “but make sure your decision is data-driven.” Well, which is it? I guess you can do both: decide what to do based on intuition, but then keep yourself honest via whatever objective metrics are at hand. My decision to pick up the gauntlet having been purely impulsive, it was now time to look at the data side of things. I figured the e-bikes, if they hadn’t been tampered with, were configured not to go over 15 mph, therefore as long as I could average higher than that, I could hold the kids off. The climb was close to 5% in places so my speed dipped below 15 here and there, but overall this pace seemed doable. I now know this analysis was flawed: having reviewed my own research on this, and corroborating this with friends, I’ve confirmed that Class 2 e-bikes such as these kids were riding will actually go up to 20 mph. Fortunately, my oxygen-starved brain couldn’t really do math (e.g., calculating how long I could go below 15 mph and still maintain that average), so I had to err on the side of going as hard as I could anyway, numbers be damned.

I allowed myself a glance back to see how my opponents were doing. The kids were still at it, but my gap was pretty good. The really peculiar thing was how blasé their effort looked … until I considered what “going hard” on an e-bike means. On a traditional bike, of course, the rider is out of the saddle, his body thrashing as he rocks the bike, generally with an agonized expression. Often his mouth will gape open; sometimes I wonder, during an all-out effort, if I’ve managed to unhook my jaw the way some snakes can. But on a Class 2 e-bike the pedals are practically just for show, and once you’ve twisted the throttle to full-on, there’s not much more you can do … the bike is doing all it can, and its capability is governed not by pluck, grit, determination, or anything glorious like that, but just by the limit of its design (i.e., its governor). There is no “digging deep” on an e-bike … the outcome in a man-vs.-e-bike contest is in the hands of the real cyclist. I focused on the road ahead and kept the pressure on. My legs and throat were burning, but by God, I kept the speed up. Stroke after stroke, my legs kept turning over the big gear. It was like those trick birthday candles that relight themselves every time they’re blown out.

Protracted suffering ensued which there is no point describing other than to say it seemed to go on and on. Finally I got to the really steep part, just over two miles since the start, and still no annoying teens had buzzed by me. I looked back again … and they were gone. (There can be no fixed finish line in such an impromptu race; suffice to say, I gave the kids all the runway they wanted to try to beat me.) Looking down at my bike computer, I noticed I’d actually increased my average speed for the whole ride! On a climb! Frickin’ glorious. The hapless teens, through their hubris, had done me a solid!

In a perfect world, those teenagers would declare my victory “iconic,” and—inspired by what’s evidently possible even for an ancient guy like me—they’d go get real bikes and become athletes. But surely the more likely scenario is they’ll tell their parents their e-bikes suck, and demand better ones. Or, they’ll go on YouTube and learn how to disable their bikes’ governors. But whatever their story is, I’m sure I have the better one to tell!

Epilogue

At what point did the kids give up? Who knows … but if they’d stayed at it all the way to my turnoff, they’d necessarily have beaten me. Going back to the data, I see that the KOM for this Strava segment, set by a far faster rider than I, was at an average speed of 19.4 mph ... that is, below what the kids’ e-bikes were able to sustain. I find it remarkable that the kids quit the effort even though it didn’t cause them any pain or suffering. I guess they weren’t being “data driven.” Maybe without the opportunity to consult ChatGPT, they just didn’t know what to do...

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Cycling Spotlight - Stealth Training

Introduction

The term “stealth training” has been thrown around by bike racers for decades but perhaps hasn’t ever been formally defined. At the risk of diluting the intrigue by getting overly analytical, well … here I go.

The essence of stealth training

Stealth training, most would agree, is extra riding to get a leg up. Often, it’s done by a member of a team who thinks an extra workout here and there, done solo, might help him or her improve more quickly than his or her teammates. (A fellow blogger offers this description, which suggests that riding in the dark and/or cold is an essential part of stealth training. I don’t agree that it is.)

Of course everybody trains solo at least some of the time; where stealth training comes in is when you could be riding with your pals but aren’t. I was accused of this when I rode for UC Berkeley in 1991; every week I’d see a group of teammates cruising down Pinehurst while I was on the way up. When questioned, I explained I had to ride earlier due to my class schedule. This met with a skeptical “mm-hmm,” as though skipping class was no big deal; i.e., the real explanation must have been the idea of getting higher quality training on my own. (I didn’t, and had no illusions to that effect.)

Sometimes stealth training is simply a matter of tact. When I was at UC Santa Barbara I’d skip riding with teammates once a week when I had to do intervals, as I couldn’t bear to be around anybody when I did them. At first I tried to be up front about it, but others insisted we could all do intervals together and still get the job done. That lasted exactly one ride and then I went back to stealth training (i.e., “Sorry, I can’t ride Tuesday afternoons anymore … I have to work.”)

Sometimes stealth training targets friends instead of teammates. In high school, I started riding every day with my new friend Pete (whom I’d met at a bike race). We were fairly well matched (though he was faster). The problem was, Pete had formerly ridden every day with another friend, and when he three of us rode together, this friend just couldn’t keep up. Pete could have made some excuse for breaking off their arrangement, like something to do with his schedule, and then Pete and I could have started our own ride that met somewhere else, but Pete didn’t want to lie—at least, he didn’t want to tell that particular lie. Instead, he told his friend, “You can’t ride with us anymore because Dana doesn’t like you.” This wasn’t entirely false, but it wasn’t the whole truth, and sure wasn’t very nice. (In case you feel bad for the third guy, don’t worry: a few years later he came past me in the collegiate national championship road race, whacked me upside the helmet, told me to get a haircut, attacked, and soloed to victory. I kid you not.)

The funniest accusation of stealth training I’ve had was from the leader of the UC Berkeley team. This came the day after a road race in which I’d beaten him. I hadn’t intended to beat him. We had a guy up the road in a two-man breakaway, so we weren’t chasing. Toward the end of the race I figured our star could win the field sprint for third, and I offered him a lead-out. He was still sulking about having missed the break; he was one of these guys who thinks that getting third when your teammate wins is still losing. He turned down my offer, so I got a sweet lead-out from another teammate and won the field sprint myself.

When I encountered this team leader at the next day’s criterium he said, “So, did you go out for a little stealth training ride yesterday evening?” I was taken aback. What kind of idiot did he take me for—I mean, who thinks it’s a good idea to get in extra training between two days of racing? Moreover, he seemed irked by the idea, as if after beating him in one race I decided to totally overturn our team hierarchy via secret solo rides. It was bizarre.

“No, I didn’t do any ‘stealth training’ yesterday,” I assured him. He glowered at me. “Dana, I saw you,” he said acidly. Turns out he’d seen me riding home from my girlfriend’s apartment (still in my team kit, as I’d gone there straight from the race). It was just a misunderstanding, easily cleared up when my girlfriend vouched for me.  (Yes, this guy actually fact-checked me. That’s how convinced he was of my treachery.)

Fortunately, accusations of stealth training are usually given (and taken) more lightly. Here’s an exchange from an old bike team email thread: 

Ceely:  Anybody got tomorrow (Memorial Day) off? Wanna ride?

Lucas [early the next morning]: No riding for me today, enjoy.

Kromer: Look for Lucas doing stealth training today. Probably a double Morgan [Territory].

Lucas: Today that’s Dana and Craig, I heard they were meeting at Wildcat and San Pablo Dam Road at 5:30 this morning.

Can stealth training involve more than one rider? Sure, if a few are going rogue together. Did this 5:30 ride count as stealth training? Yeah, I suppose it did. Craig and I were training for the Everest Challenge, which means riding Mount Diablo twice, so in the interests of not taking the whole day (which would piss off our wives), we needed to make our ride “surgical”—i.e., minimal time spent waiting around for stragglers, latecomers, or people who think it’s perfectly reasonable to stop in Danville for coffee. By scheduling the ride at 5:30 and notifying teammates only by word of mouth, we kept the group small (i.e., limited to a select crew of complete nutters).

My favorite stealth training technique, back when I rode more with the team, was to do tons of hard winter riding on the indoor trainer so that, during the early season, I could miss several team rides in a row, then show up saying how out of shape I was, and hope to surprise everyone in the famous Walking Man sprint. (This almost never worked, by the way.)

Modern stealth training

The email exchange quoted above was from before everybody was on Strava. I’m not actually a Strava user myself, so I’m no authority on how it fits in with stealth training, but this article suggests that some riders will withhold posting some of their workouts as a stealth training technique. I polled my road team on this topic, and right away a teammate replied, “It for sure goes on!” He even named a local team that’s apparently fairly notorious for this. Another teammate replied, “I don’t post any ride where I maintain more than 500 watts for over 60 minutes. So I throw away a lot of rides.” I think he’s kidding. (Or is he?)

Of course, a lot of the value of Strava is that you can see how fast a rider has been going, and thus how hard he’s been training, even when you’re not able to witness it firsthand. This could help you spy on your rivals, but also makes you vulnerable to being spied on yourself. I coach a high school mountain bike team, and during a recent ride, I brought up the topic of Strava and stealth training to a fellow coach. As we watched Lincoln, our fastest rider, leave us in the dust, the fellow coach said, “To really throw people off, Lincoln and I should just trade Garmins at the beginning of the ride!”

Coaching and stealth training

As a coach, I encourage extra training because I hold practice only three times a week, and the more advanced riders ought to be doing more. Not all riders are comfortable hitting the trails solo, so a couple of times I’ve loaned a trainer to a rider who is coming back from illness or injury, to help him or her return to fitness faster.

Several times I’ve had an ambitious rider email me asking if he or she can meet up with the team but then break off and do a totally different ride (perhaps even a road ride) with another teammate. I ignore these emails, and explain later, “Look, if you two want to cut practice, and go do some ride I don’t know about, that’s fine. But the moment you show up for the team ride, I’m responsible for you, so no, you can’t go off in other direction where I can’t provide supervision or assistance.” It’s surprising how hard it’s been for me to get this idea across. What part of “stealth” do these riders not understand?

At least half of my team’s riders do extra workouts on a regular basis, which begs the question, why not just add another practice? The convenient answer is that it would be hard to line up enough coaches. Beyond that, it might make it harder to recruit new riders, who might not want that much training, thank you very much.

But there’s a bigger reason not to add another practice: I love the initiative that stealth training requires. Recently, on a non-team-practice day, I headed out for a solo ride of my own. Fifteen minutes in, I encountered one of my riders at the Summit Reservoir in Berkeley, a common cyclist gathering point, waiting to meet some others. I’m not sure how she arranged this, because she wasn’t sure who these other riders even were. “Are you the riders I’m supposed to be meeting up with?” she was asking. Another five minutes into my ride, descending Central Park Drive, I encountered another of my riders, hammering up the climb towards me in a small group from a rival team. Ten minutes later I came upon a fellow coach, riding solo. He is a relative newcomer to cycling, having picked it up when his daughter joined the team, and was no doubt shoring up his fitness to better keep up with the youngsters. How cool is that … four stealth training missions, all in one evening!

My enthusiasm here doesn’t just come from the obvious fitness benefit. My main goal as a coach isn’t to get top race results from any individual rider, or even from the team as a whole. My main goal is to turn these kids into lifelong cyclists. I love seeing my riders out there stealth training, partaking of the sport without being led along by coaches and teammates.

I’m especially stoked when I encounter a former member of the high school team, who has now graduated and gone off to college, putting in some miles while home for winter or spring break, just for the pleasure of it. When I see that, I know the program has done its job. It is my earnest hope that most of our current riders will bring their bikes with them to college and keep at it, even if they don’t have a team to ride with. Today’s stealth ride becomes tomorrow’s … ride.

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Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2018 Tour de France Stage 1 & GC Preview

NOTE: This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

Traditional coverage of bicycle racing refrains from subjective judgments; legit journalists don’t use terms like “travesty,” “mockery,” and “filthy doping douchebag” like I do. They can’t; I can. And do. In that vein, read on for my coverage of the first stage of this year’s Tour de France, a sporting event that promises the same levels of spectacle, and credibility, as professional wrestling.

Tour de France 2018 Stage 1 – Noirmoutier-En-L’Ïle to Fontenay-Le-Comte

As I join the action, there are just 21 kilometers to go. What the hell happened? Last night steephill.tv said the finish would be at about 7:30 a.m. PDT. This morning it’s saying the finish will be at 6:50. I guess the racers are making better time than expected. This is surely due to the new policy of the UCI around doping, which is to not actually police it whatsoever.

A couple of guys are off the front. They have 30 seconds on the field. It’s Jerome Cousin (Direct Energie) and Yoann Offredo (Wanty-Group Gobert). Believe it or not, I didn’t make up the name of that second guy’s team. It’s really called that.

My coverage is in French. Steephill.tv isn’t even bothering to pretend there are free English language feeds anymore. After a bunch of ads in French, the lead is down to 28 seconds with 16.6 km to go.

Favorites for this stage would obviously include Mark Cavendish (Dimension Data) and Peter Sagan (Bora Hansgrohe). Cavendish is chasing Eddy Merck’s record of Tour stage wins which is something like 134. Sagan is chasing the green jersey, and possibly some podium girls later. (It’s a good thing for him he got his butt-grabbing scandal out of the way years ago so his reputation has had a chance to heal.)

Now, if you haven’t been following all the pre-Tour hype, I can’t blame you. The Tour is traditionally the most boring of the grand tours because Team Sky always brings its best team, and its best doctors, to the race. This year, the only challenge to their dominance was the race organizer, ASO, trying to keep Chris Froome from racing. This is because he finally got caught doping, having tested positive (which in bike racing parlance is now “adverse analytical finding,” as though that’s anything but a positive drug test) after “winning” last year’s Vuelta. So the UCI decided to make things smoother for everybody and just let Froome off the hook, at WADA’s behest. “It’s okay, he had twice the legal limit but his team explained everything,” the UCI told the media. “They submitted 1,500 pages of documentation, which we’re not letting anybody see, but it’s all good.” Was it 1,500 pages of banknotes?

So, I may not watch the climbing stages of this Tour because more than ever I can’t bear to look at Froome. This flat stage should favor other riders, though of course anything can happen. Wow, as if to prove my point, there was just a big crash!

Well, maybe not so big. It doesn’t seem to have slowed down the peloton, other than the famous douchebag Arnaud Démare (Groupama-FDJ), who was not stripped of his 2017 Milan-San Remo victory despite obviously cheating.

The field is back together with 8 km to go. They’re heading toward the finish because, well, where else would they go? Back to their team vans because this sport is almost too lame to even bother with? I couldn’t blame them.

Pierre Latour is off the back, which is insult to injury since his own name is spelled wrong. Any junior high French student can tell you it’s Letour.

With 6 km to go, Quick-step Floors and Astana are massing on the front, setting up Phillippe Gilbert and … well, I guess Astana has a sprinter. How would I know? I barely watch this sport anymore!

Hmm, here’s a weird caption on the footage: “Christopher Froome Team Sky Chute.” Is this like a live doping tracker, and he’s shooting up at this very moment? Or does it mean he crashed? (Yes, “chute” means “fall.”)

I don’t see any of that footage, which would of course be glorious. Is it wrong to wish that on anybody? Of course not. I don’t want him dead or anything, but an injury would be splendid. It wouldn’t take much to sideline him. He dropped out of the 2014 Tour de France because one of his fingers got scuffed or something, while later in that Tour Alberto Contador kept racing despite having a broken fricking leg. Anyway, yeah, a Froome injury would balance things out a bit and possibly deprive a known doper from stealing another race.

Okay, here’s some Froome footage. It does look like he either crashed or just really doesn’t do a good job of keeping his jersey clean.

With 2 km to go, the peloton is still all together. The footage keeps switching to the riders who are off the back. I can’t really figure that out.

It’s 1 km to go! Quick-step drills it on the front with some guy in a national champ jersey, perhaps , in second.

And Marcel Kittel (Katusha Alpecin) is going for the line! But then again, who isn’t?! He fades, and now it’s between reigning world champion Sagan and some Quick-step guy. Wow, the Quick-step guy is just flat-out blowing Sagan away in the sprint!

It’s Fernando Gaviria (Quick-Step Floors) and he’s got the win! 

Man, he’s kind of funny looking. He’s doing the I-just-woke-up-and-am-yawning victory salute, which is a new one.

Marcel Kittel has to settle for third place.

Wow, this peloton is in tatters. Lots of little groups rolling in one by one, perhaps sorted according to how lubed they are. The clean riders will be through in a few minutes.

Here are a couple of EF Education First – Drapac p/b Cannondale riders. That team, in addition to obviously having the least snappy name in the sport, has the ugliest uniforms. It’s like what the Energizer Bunny would look like if we dropped acid. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but neither do the costumes (I dare not call them “kits”).

So the big news today is that Froome finished in a little group like 50 seconds behind the winner. What matters, of course, is how he finished relative to the other GC favorites. I can tell you he was near Richie Porte (Team BMC).

Wow, the ads here are just endless. I’m waiting for the podium ceremony because I want to see how professional these podium girls are. Bike racers should not wear beards. Beards trap too much sweat and saliva. If these ladies can kiss Gaviria’s beard without wincing, I will be very impressed. Unfortunately we’re back to the coverage now and it’s just some dippy Frenchman giving a needless post-race analysis in his silly, impenetrable language.

Oh no, how did I miss grabbing a snapshot of this? Gaviria just got his podium celebration, and the podium girls didn’t kiss him! They just sort of gave him a little wave! Either that or I missed it. Okay, here’s his yellow jersey presentation:

I think she handled that pretty well. She’s a real pro.

OMG, is that Merckx standing there?

Let’s assume it is. That’s pretty cool, though it would be even cooler if he boycotted the race on principle like Bernard Hinault is. (No, I don’t know that he is, but I don’t see him here so I’ll assume that’s what is going on.) Now Gaviria gets his green jersey.

It’s hard to tell from this photo, but she’s not actually kissing him. She’s whispering in his ear, “You really need to shave. It’s more hygienic and also more aerodynamic.”

So here’s another photo of Froome, this time (obviously) at the finish.

Judging by his elbow, he certainly did crash. My god those are ugly jerseys. Is that some kind of sea creature depicted there? I saw this jersey earlier and couldn’t figure out what team it was. Bizarre.

Now Gaviria is having a little cuddle with his new stuffed lion. You know what? I think I like this guy.

This is Gaviria’s first Tour, and surely this evening some teammate, or perhaps several fellow riders, will say, “Uh, dude, you’re not supposed to hang on to the stuffed lion. It’s bad for your rep. You need to find some kid to give it to, pronto. People are saying—not me, mind you, I’m cool with it—but people are saying you’re kind of a mietje [wuss].”

And now, because my actual coverage was so brief and I’d meant to do this anyway (albeit as a separate blog post), here is my analysis of the upcoming general classification battle.

GC pre-race analysis – the top favorites

Christopher Froome, Team Sky - Froome, the best doper of the modern sport, looks unbeatable coming off his decidedly “not normal” performance in the Giro which was more graphically unrealistic than anything Lance Armstrong ever did. His most powerful secret weapon this year is his ability to test positive without being suspended. No other rider in history has managed this feat so blatantly. Still, Froome is still arguably, putatively human and might actually be tired after winning the Giro, so this could be his year to finally lose. He’s still the odds-on favorite and when the press tries to find reasons to doubt him, they have been settling for mentioning threats to his physical security because the French cycling fans are so angry. Froome has tried to placate them, saying, “I love France. The Tour is the most beautiful race in the world.” He should have left it there, but he added, “Nevertheless, being what I am, there is no other Troy for me to burn.” (Note: I added this last part because I think it was implied even if he’s incapable of being so eloquent.)

Rigoberto Uran, EF Education First - Drapac p/b Cannondale - Uran was 2nd in last year’s Tour by a very slim margin. He is a great time trialist. He has been 2nd twice in the Giro. For some reason everybody underestimates him. Maybe it’s because he’s not Froome.

Romain Bardet, Ag2R La Mondiale – Having finished 2nd and 3rd in past Tours, Bardet was 3rd in this year’s Criterium du Dauphiné, which is promising. But then, the French just don’t seem able to win the Tour anymore. Speaking to the press, Bardet was philosophical about his limited prospects in the GC battle. “Cycling is basically Froome’s bitch,” he said. “I hope he eventually gets bored with it and moves on to something else, like insider trading maybe.” (He may or may not have actually said this. I might have mistranslated him, or perhaps he didn’t actually even open his mouth.)

Richie Porte, Team BMC – Porte is a great doper, who really learned a lot at Sky. He won this year’s Tour de Suisse so it looks like his pharmaceutical program is going pretty well. Still, he seems to have problems holding it all together. His best Tour finish was 5th in 2016, and he dropped out last year. He dropped out of the Giro in 2015. In the 2014 Tour, he took over as leader after Froome crashed and bruised one of his nipples. Porte seemed to buckle under the pressure (of being the team leader, not of having a teammate with a bruised nipple). As team leader he finished a very disappointing 23rd place. Still, he is a strong rider, often eerily, not-normally strong, so he’s got a solid shot here.

Tom Dumoulin, Sunweb – Dumoulin is of course last year’s Giro d’Italia winner, and did great at this year’s Giro as well. He looked poised to win again, but in the end couldn’t handle Froome’s doping prowess. Assuming both riders are tired from the Giro, only Froome will be able to ride well; Dumoulin, who appears to be clean, is probably going to get crushed. Only his youth could save him: he was born in, I shit you not, November 1990. DAMN do I feel old.

Vincenzo Nibali, Bahrain-Merida - Nibali has a good team, has won all three grand tours, won this year’s Milan-San Remo, and maybe didn’t totally kill himself at the Giro (placing 5th).  He’s highly motivated to beat Froome after their very public spat in the 2015 Tour, when Froome whined post-race like a little bitch after Nibali won the stage. (Click here for details.)

Nairo Quintana, Movistar - Quintana has been on the Tour podium three times, and won a stage of this year’s Tour de Suisse. He has won both of the other Grand Tours. He also comes from a poor farming family so he has lots of character. Unfortunately, character is no match for doping products, and Quintana lost more than 15 minutes to Froome in last year’s Tour. I am really rooting for Quintana because he has had the decency to speak out (albeit mildly) against Froome. Asked about Tour fans booing the emaciated cheater, Quintana said, “Sometimes you reap what you sow.” (Since I am often unable to resist putting words in riders’ mouths, I must emphasize that he really said this.

Adam Yates, Mitchelston-Scott – Yates  is quite good, though he might cook in the black jersey he’s required to wear. He took 4th and best young rider at the 2016 Tour. Last year he kind of faded. This year he was 2nd in the Criterium du Dauphiné, which suggests good form. When baited about Froome being booed at the team presentation, he remained diplomatic. “The fans booed and it’s the media’s job to cover that. Hopefully Froome is tired after the Giro. I hope the Giro took its toll, and who knows, maybe during this Tour he’ll get a bad blood bag or something.” No, he didn’t really say anything about a bad blood bag. At least not out loud.

Mikel Landa, Movistar - Landa will have to compete with teammate Quintana. Fortunately, he has plenty of practice beating up his own team members as he did with Sky (which I thought was charming; click here for details).

Ilnur Zakarin, Katusha Alpecin – Zakarin is pretty much a badass. He was third in the Vuelta once, and 5th in the Giro. Also, he uses caffeinated shampoo. Which is legal.

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From the Archives - UC Santa Barbara Bike Paths

Introduction

My older daughter, a high school junior, wants a car when she goes off to college. This is comical for two reasons: 1) she doesn’t even know where she’ll be going yet and thus whether a car would be appropriate, and 2) it’s not like you can just ask your parents for a car ... can you? Myself, I hate cars, so why would I give one to anybody?

When I was in college, I naturally rode my bike everywhere. (I didn’t get my first car until I’d been married for three years and my wife needed one.) At Berkeley, commuting by bike was (and is) serious business, with real traffic and real laws that are really enforced. But at UC Santa Barbara, where I spent my first two years of college, biking was just this big joke that everybody was in on. Just now I randomly stumbled across this article about biking at UCSB, which basically said, “Hey, kids, did you know you’re supposed to obey traffic laws?” The fact of this article attests to the lawlessness of the bike paths at UCSB. So does the following post, from my archives.

[You will note in the photo above, and others in this post, that nobody biking to class at UCSB wears a helmet. At least that was true when I was there. Wearing a helmet simply never occurred to us.]

The UCSB Bike Paths - March 6, 1989

Laugh all you want at the shocking tales you hear about the UCSB bike paths. Heck, I do too. But for those who lack eight years of bicycle racing experience, the daily traumas are no laughing matter, and the accident rate gets top billing in our campus newspapers. The other day, I rode along the bike path reading in the UCSB Generic that there were 212 bike accidents in the past year alone that required immediate medical attention. The article, which was incidentally one of the most poorly written I’ve ever read, began to offer a solution: “Lex Murray, bicycling instructor at UCSB, feels that common sense would...” There the article runs off the bottom of the page, and never picks up again. Dang.

I’ve found that one of the biggest hazards is the pedestrian contingent. If they wanted to be safe, they would never dare to use the crosswalks, but since they simply must cross over the bike path, they take their chances. The out-of-towners get it the worst, since in their complete ignorance of the bike situation they wander right into traffic and get hit. During my Freshman Orientation at UCSB, one of my group members was the victim of a high‑speed crash which wasn’t just entertaining, but also artistic, with the rider flying through the air like an acrobat.

Some pedestrians get so flustered at the crosswalks, they actually just close their eyes and walk across, praying to God that they don’t get hit. Perhaps more common are the people that look at an oncoming cyclist, check to see that he is paying attention, and arrogantly walk straight across his path, forcing the cyclist to slow down. (This is really stupid, since few bikes at UCSB have working brakes.) These boneheads are my favorite: whenever I detect that I’m being scanned like this, I accelerate and head straight for the guy, staring into his eyes like a lunatic. I have yet to lose my right‑of‑way (although when I finally do, it’ll be ugly).

I think the most dangerous bicycle commuting factor at UCSB is lack of confidence. Allow me to illustrate just what kind of confidence I’m talking about. While exchanging war stories with friends from the cycling team, I described a crash I had a few years ago. Towards the end of a fast criterium in Denver, there was a big pileup. I thought I could squeak by it, but a guy ahead of me cut over into my path and my brake lever went right into one of his haunches. Flipping over my handlebars, I watched, with a strange sense of peace, almost a calmness, as the ground flew towards my face. I took the impact on my chin, splitting it open. At this point in my rendition of the story, one of my teammates asked me why I didn’t let go of the handlebars to catch myself on my hands. Realizing this guy was obviously a novice, a pal explained, “He still thought he could ride it out!”

Simply, the attitude a rider must take on the UCSB bike path, is this: “Nothing can crash me; I am invincible.” If you firmly believe this, then nobody will mess with you because they will know. To keep the rubber side down, riding defensively isn’t enough—you must ride offensively. And when things get sketchy, you cannot panic. You must absolutely refuse to go down—once you submit to fate, you’re a goner.

Your typical UCSB student tends to be pretty self-assured, even cocky, about his bike safety. Perhaps part of it is that he believes his body is as indestructible as his 40+ pound beach cruiser. It’s just a big game to him—which is good. I’ve had some close calls but my fellow students seldom panic. The other guy might simply ignore that we’ve locked handlebars, or he’ll find amusement in our mutual fight for control. Occasionally, he’ll say something witty like, “Whoa, dude!”

I have identified two things that make the UCSB bike paths particularly tricky. One is that there are these roundabouts that nobody knows how to negotiate. Students here bike between classes pretty much on autopilot, which normally works fine, but then you reach a roundabout and are yanked out of your mental haze because it suddenly seems like bikes are coming at you from every direction.

The other problem is congestion. You don’t see too much of this between classes, or even right before a class starts, because nobody here worries much about getting to class on time. But as soon as a class period ends, everyone is out of that lecture hall like a shot, students pouring out of buildings and mounting their bikes. The next five or ten minutes are total gridlock, but without the reduction in speed or observance of safe distance motorists give one another. After all, we’re all on bikes so nobody can get hurt, right?

Just the other day I found myself in the midst of a bike path nightmare. Somehow, about ten of us got suddenly crammed into the space that only one or two bikes could safely occupy. To make matters worse, I was travelling about ten miles per hour faster than anybody else (and we were all cruising). Tapping into my mountain biking skills, I squeezed my bike handlebars, which are about 28 inches wide, through an opening about 18 inches wide by putting one half of the handlebar through at a time. Had anyone panicked, we all would have been history. Instead, there was a collective burst of laughter.

But not everyone is so sanguine. Some students recognize the danger; panic; and succumb. I will sometimes see two riders on a collision course panic five feet from impact, close their eyes, and scream, and my immediate reaction is, “What a cop‑out! They didn’t even try!” Once things get out of hand, these riders just submit. That probably causes most of their crashes.

Why, just today I was coming out of the Phelps Hall parking lot, and two girls coming in the other direction thought they were going to hit me and panicked. They shrieked and almost crashed into each other. Meanwhile, I calmly held my line and they missed me by a good ten inches. Not half a second later, as I turned onto the bike path, another biker cut the corner to the inside and we really were destined for collision. A natural instinct here would be to throw up your hands to protect your face, which would be carnage. But I resisted the impulse based on my special training. I hit the brakes hard. Mafac cantilevers in the front, coupled with a Shimano U‑brake in the rear, really carried the day and I averted disaster by stopping on a dime. The other rider, totally freaked out, flew off in a skew direction. (If I had been cutting the turn to the inside like that, I would have expected near disaster and not lost my cool like that.) As I pulled away, shaking my head, another guy gave me a knowing look, as if to say—what? I don’t know for sure. But something profound.

Now, all this being said, it’s possible to be too confident. And that’s exactly what led to what my friends and I now call “the Gump Incident.” My friend John was the perp/victim. He was riding along no-handed, reading the school paper, not a care in the world, minding his own business, not bothering anybody, when all of a sudden, out of the blue, for no apparent reason, with no provocation whatsoever (this is all a standard preamble when describing a bike accident), this fricking parked car appears out of nowhere! I mean, one second he’s just riding along, and the next second he’s plowing right into the back of this car! And it’s like, what was that car even doing there, other than sitting next to the curb being parked? The audacity!

Now, there are a couple of things to keep in mind about the Gump Incident. First, it didn’t technically happen on the bike path; it was on Pardall Road, an Isla Vista street that the bike path empties onto, so perhaps a slight increase in caution would have been wise. Second, it could have happened to any of us, because sometimes you get engrossed in an article and don’t really realize that you’ve left the bike path and are in the street. So when my friends and I refer to the Gump Incident, it’s affectionately, not pejoratively.

Now I know just what you’re thinking. “That Dana, he’s a cocky one, and he’ll get his, just you wait.” Yeah, yeah, of course you’re right; deep down inside, I know there’s a Huffy or Schwinn out there with my name on it. And when I do go down, it’s gonna be incredible to behold. First there’ll be an ear-splitting squeal as I lock up my rear wheel and my Tioga City‑Slicker lays down a rubber road. Then you’ll hear something like “LOOK OUT, GEORGE!” (even though there’s no specific reason to suspect the other biker will think I’m named George). Then the screams of onlookers will almost drown out the krunking of mangled metal as Deore XT meets Schwinn-Approved in something like a bizarre ad hoc metallurgical experiment. You may hear my jeans or shorts rip as they’re dragged across a spiky bit of bike, but if bare flesh meets metal the carnage might be silent, like a carpenter’s rasp zipping up curls of soft pine. You may hear me yell, “You BASTARD!” just before riders and bikes alike are consumed in a six‑foot fireball that will send shards of molten metal and rubber flying for hundreds of yards. Jaws will drop, beautiful girls will sob, and an early dusk will come over Santa Barbara as the mushroom cloud slowly climbs and grows and smears out the sky.

Until then, I’ll continue to ride like a man possessed. After all, this is a way of life here at UCSB.

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From the Archives - Pushing the Envelope

Introduction

Here’s a little something I wrote back in college. Looking back, I find it laughable that I’d thought the movie “Gleaming the Cube” would give society a lasting new cliché (i.e., its title). I never saw the movie, but people must have been talking about it and tossing around the phrase “gleaming the cube.” Boy does this movie look stupid. “Brian’s skateboard became his weapon,” the trailer declares, “in a deadly game of international smuggling, murder, and revenge.... When getting even means risking it all: gleaming the cube.”

Pushing the Envelope - January 26, 1989

Modern cinema has popularized several great terms: “pushing the envelope,” “walking a tightrope,” and most recently, “gleaming the cube.” The latter has a specific skateboarding reference, but they all relate to one basic theme: living on the edge. Going to the very limit of safety. In short, pushing your luck.

I enjoy living my life according to this bold notion. No, I don’t climb mountains, or swim across channels, or jump in almost-frozen lakes bare naked. And I certainly don’t often push the envelope in a bicycle race. While many a criterium was won by the rider with the biggest balls, I’m not about to risk a handlebar in the ribs. However, I do enjoy taking risks that involve less physically debilitating consequences.

Here’s an example. Recently, I felt really lousy while on a training ride. So lousy, in fact, that the boredom of meager speeds was threatening to drive me stark raving mad. This was along US 101, a highway not offering any particularly interesting terrain. I thought about cutting my ride short, but that just didn’t make any sense. I mean, being out of shape was the problem here, and nobody ever got into better shape by slacking off. So, I pedaled on, and out of desperate listlessness, I decided to collect every single unbroken Botts Dot I saw. I’d bring them home, I decided, and figure out something useful to do with them.

[Note: my brother Geoff also collected Botts Dots, or, more specifically, Raised Pavement Markers, which are those cool road bumps that have built-in reflectors. We didn’t have these growing up in Colorado, because the snowplows would rip them up, but while in California we collected enough to line our basement floor with them back home. We glued them down, one long strip down the middle, and boy did it look cool. I cannot now remember whether, on this Santa Barbara bike ride, I was gathering plain old Botts Dots or Raised Pavement Markers. –Ed.]

The project became more of a hassle than I had ever imagined, because I managed to find an amazing number of Botts Dots. What’s more, I was wearing an old-school wool jersey that didn’t ensconce the Dots very snugly. When the total number of Dots per pocket reached five or six, my jersey sagged badly enough that it threatened to drag on my rear wheel. Plus, I was trapped in the saddle because my jersey would snag on it if I tried to stand up.

Soon I found a cardboard box in a ditch, and carried the Botts Dots in that. It was slightly wet, very old, and the bottom threatened to give out at any time under the crushing weight. I knew that I would have to be crazy to trust the box, which is precisely why I chose to do so. Granted, the risk factor wasn’t as high as that of hang gliding, but if the box gave out I’d probably run over its contents and face-plant. In the end, I managed to avoid mishap.

Carrying groceries on bicycle handlebars is a favorite way, in my family, to gleam the cube. Geoff and I, when we lived in San Luis Obispo, used to compete: who could carry home the largest amount of groceries in one trip? (I believe I still hold the record: $80 worth.) Recently, while on a massive fridge-stocking mission in Goleta, about four miles from home across a freeway overpass, I discovered a shocking new challenge to bike-grocery-schlepping: the plastic bags, which have always been the sketchiest part of this activity, have become even thinner and flimsier.

I noticed this mere seconds after leaving the store. When I was only halfway across the parking lot, two bags burst simultaneously, sending tuna cans, apples, tomatoes, and onions rolling across the asphalt while I attempted in vain to stabilize the load. After bystanders (touchingly) ran to my aid from every corner of the lot, I took out the two spare bags I had brought along.

I assessed the situation: if those first bags didn’t even last fifty yards, how could I expect these backups to last for four miles? I decided if I had any brain at all, I’d go back into the store and get plenty of extra bags. But then that perverse envelope-pushing impulse crept into my mind, and I knew there was no way to stop it. A grin spread across my foolish face, and I mounted up and set off for Isla Vista with no extra bags.

Throughout the trip, I dodged every pebble in the road, every squashed bug, and every oil spot. When I reached the UCSB bike path, I knew I was in trouble. The path is wrinkled in some places, probably because of some really bad bike accidents. These wrinkles have the effect of a jackhammer on a fully loaded mountain bike with like 90 PSI in its tires. Almost instantly, two bags gave way simultaneously (they tend to go in twos, probably because of Murphy’s Law). The familiar produce dispersal ensued, and this time nobody rushed to my assistance. (I should mention that it was dark by now; naturally, I didn’t have a light.)

After collecting the goods, I put some of them into other already-full bags, and held one ripped bag together with my right hand. The left hand wasn’t free for steering either, because it was clutching the tiny top of a ten-pound bag of potatoes. So I could barely steer, and braking and shifting gears were out of the question. I guided my overburdened machine with my palms on the ends of the handlebars, each finger straining to the limit under with the tremendous weight it bore.

I kept reminding myself of what was at stake: I’d just paid dearly for that food; a lot of it was in jars; the produce would be crushed messily; and the dry spaghetti would be broken. Besides, one more bag failure would leave me with no means of carrying the surviving groceries. Somehow, I managed to keep it together until I was speeding through the bombed-out La Loma parking lot. Then, everything started failing at once. I flew towards my apartment, a ball of boy, bike, and groceries. It seemed my load was staying together only through sheer force of will. No sooner did I get the front door open, but everything rolled onto the floor of my apartment, miraculously unharmed. Not only had I pushed the envelope, but I had held it together after breaking it.

Yesterday, I engaged in this self‑inflicted phenomenon once again. My roommate had been whining hysterically about the four bags of empty jars which had accumulated in the kitchen as part of my recycling project. We also had a bag of crushed aluminum cans, and one of mixed paper. Alas, this whining roommate was the only one with a car, and also the only one unwilling to help recycle. The old bug bit and I had to prove to myself that I could get it all down to the recycling center in Goleta by bike. This being a tedious activity, I decided I had to do it in one trip. On my ride over there, I would be literally encased in glass.

I imagined the outcome of failure: “A 19‑year‑old UCSB student was killed today in a bizarre accident as yet unexplained by law enforcement officials. He was found buried in a mound of broken glass, with the bumper of an AMC Gremlin clenched in his teeth.” Or, “A UCSB student was arrested today by law enforcement officials for vandalizing Hollister Road. The youth was found breaking bottles there, and unsuccessfully tried to pass off his bizarre actions as mere accident.”

Okay, I’m exaggerating. The worst‑case scenario probably wouldn’t involve death or dismemberment, or even arrest, but it would surely involve a great deal of broken glass. But what alternative did I have? I filled my duffle bag and my big backpack completely with jars and bottles, and carried the cans and papers in bags hanging from the handlebars of my Miyata beast of burden.

To keep the duffel bag from swinging down into my rotating legs, I had to sit bolt upright and secure the bag with my right arm, leaving just the left hand to steer and brake. I comforted myself with the knowledge that in a panic situation I could dive for the right side of the handlebar. After about ten seconds of biking, the pain set in. My shoulders, arms, back, and even my toes began to ache. Soon, I was audibly groaning, moaning, and even whining. It seemed as though I’d never make it to Goleta. But as always, I somehow pulled it off ... which means I need to set my goal even higher next time.

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