The Bakery: Be the Change
I recently had the opportunity to sit on a panel about the future of women in mountain biking at the MTB Tourism Symposium in Sooke, British Columbia. The answer to many of the questions posed was simply that we need more women to ride. So how to do get more women involved? Some of us are fortunate to live in areas where women’s riding clubs, groups and lessons are readily available, where it feels like you see just as many women out for a ride as men, but to affect change we need to close the gap on the percentage split between male and female riders. To do this we need to encourage grassroots action, each of us needs to participate. While more women are joining the sport, the number of people mountain biking is also growing in general, and so we are only maintaining our percentages.
The Bakery: Discovering YOLO
Carpe diem, the grandfather of 'you only live once.’ It used to be the excuse used by binge drinking teenagers before they needed a shorter hashtag. The clichés around this topic are as endless as the excuses not to live it are. While 'seize the day' has long been used to justify poor, in-the-moment decisions like face tattoos and unprotected sex, this summer, YOLO will be the war cry exclaimed before many an unfortunate decision in the bike park. You may think that it suggests hucking your meat off some never-before-ventured drop because tomorrow may finally be the zombie apocalypse. Not true (about the meaning, the zombie apocalypse is anyone's guess).
A poem, written by Quintus Horatius Flaccus during his lifetime of 65BC - 8BC, celebrates the uncertainty of our future and warns against fortunetellers; apparently they were forbidden by the gods. The last line is loosely translated as: "Seize the day, putting as little trust as possible in the future."
The Bakery: Chasing the Dragon
When it comes to sports I’m not a natural. My first few months of mountain biking were filled with frustration, crashes and temper tantrums. If my bike hadn’t been so heavy I probably would have thrown it at least 10 times. And I definitely tried to sell it once. I never thought much of the learning process. I was either good at something or I didn’t do it; this is the reason I barely passed math in high school. Leave the ‘jocking’ for the jocks, I’ll be over here writing art history papers, thanks. Not until I tried mountain biking did I realize how addicting it can be to conquer the things that challenge you the most.
The Bakery: Leprechauns, Lumberjacks and Bob Ross
I attended a trail day on Sunday. I was somewhat selfishly motivated as I was convinced that if I didn't go to one sooner or later karma would reap its revenge in the form of a stick in my wheel or rock to the face. A few weeks ago I pulled a douche move and went riding on a trail day; my indiscretion has weighed on me ever since. It was time to alleviate this guilty conscience of mine; forgive me father for I have sinned it has been 237 days since my last trail work.
I arrived early to our meeting spot in the morning; I was the second person there. In contrast to my attendance-out-of-guilt, the other guy was keen. He told me about his trail building course and pursuit of an education in forestry while I tried to hide my hangover. Two teenagers were dropped off across the street by their mom; she made eye contact with me from her vehicle and gave me the 'you're now responsible for them' nod. I actually looked behind me to see if there was an adult around. What person in their right mind would leave their kids in my care? Slowly, the rest of the crew rolled in and we eventually packed into vehicles and headed up the mountain. We parked at the top of the trail and hiked down, loaded up with tools and buckets; hi ho hi ho hi ho.
The Bakery: Are You Going To Crush Your Race Season?
I have always taken a certain amount of pride in the fact that I don't go to the gym, I like having a neck and I don't need to jack certain parts of my body up to the ceiling just to run on a treadmill. I have always thought, "why be inside when you can be outside?"
Apparently, there are some very good reasons to take shelter. Aside from all the general health benefits of resistance training such as getting stronger, increasing metabolism and blood sugar control, and improvement of bone density, it can directly affect your riding season.
Studies show that lifting weights builds muscles with stronger and thicker fibers, as well as muscles that are better able to use oxygen, allowing athletes to perform better in endurance sports. Coordination, balance and flexibility are also improved. Additionally, it strengthens your connective tissue, you know, all those ligaments and tendons people keep tearing and snapping. Long story short, training with weight makes you faster and keeps you on your bike longer.
The Bakery: Why Do You Hate My Vagina?
Dear Mr. Motorist,
Our paths crossed yesterday, almost literally, as I was biking home. You were driving a big old truck with an oversized, tarped load in the back. I was riding my road bike. I shoulder-checked for traffic, signaled, and moved out into the lane to ride about twenty feet and avoid a grate through a narrow section before yielding the road back to motorists. You sped up beside me and passed me. In doing so, with your big truck and overhanging load, you squeezed me to the side, forcing me to hit the grate. In all fairness, it was my choice; I chose to hit it over being hit by you.
I wasn’t prepared to hit the grate and when I did I was pitched forward onto my top tube, causing an unfortunate collision between my vagina and my bike. I can only imagine that causing me to box myself was your sole intention; clearly you could not have been so absent-minded or ignorant while driving that you would accidentally cause bodily harm to a cyclist.
The Bakery: Playing Hooky
Riding bikes on a trail day can easily make you a social pariah. I did it on Sunday. As best as I can tell no one has stopped talking to me, no notes wrapped around bricks have been tossed through my window and karma doesn't seem to have enforced immediate retribution, I do however have a deep sense of guilt. It is the kind of guilt that usually only parents or church can inflict, like the time I was suspended from school and my parents opted not to ground me. Instead they simply said they were 'disappointed'. Ouch. They knew that was the worst kind of disciplinary action. I had the same sense of shame the other day when I asked a friend if she wanted to go for a ride on Sunday, she responded with "I'm going to the trail day, aren't you?"
I had actually forgotten all about it.
I still went riding. I felt like a jerk for doing it but I had a good list of solid excuses why I should: I only had an hour to ride, it was the first time I had ridden all week, Strava needed me, the apocalypse was coming, God told me to, I was chasing the last unicorn, I was running away from a Nickleback song, I thought there would be too many people there already, the last time I used a chainsaw we had to go to the hospital, well, you get the point.
The Bakery: Child’s Play
“We were not the valedictorians of the school; we were the guys that would have been chosen ‘last to succeed.’ And for some reason by doing something everyone said was just a waste of time, we ended up influencing kids all around the world.”
Last winter, when the snow hit the trails, I tried to love winter and accept the void of biking by learning how to snowboard. I went through a lot of Fireball Whisky, some tears, and one boyfriend. This year I looked for a different approach to the snowy months and stumbled upon a new ‘sport’.
And more Fireball.
The Bakery: Soul Sucker
As a kid out at a local race how excited were you when your hero showed up to compete? USA Cycling CEO, Steve Johnson, doesn’t appear to think you should have that experience. In fact USA Cycling, while claiming that their mission “is to achieve sustained success in international cycling competition and grow competitive cycling in America”, is essentially grinding out their cigarette butt on the very grassroots events that actually contribute to growing cycling.
Their strong arm tactics of threatening emails, leveraging fines and suspensions, and cock blocking local races from having pros in attendance is more reminiscent of Carlo Gambino shaking down shops for protection money, than it is of an organization meant to be looking out for our sport.
The Bakery: The Three Universal Truths of Trail Building
Spending some time in the forest with a man named Digger, a radio playing classic rock, and some hand tools taught me more about Buddhism that my Eastern Religion class ever did. Whether he knows it or not, Digger has achieved a spiritual understanding that the rest of the world is throwing money at yoga retreats to try and find.
The Bakery: The Other Frostbike
This past weekend, over a hundred racers took part in FrostBike and wound up performing something akin to Bambi on ice. I, myself, spent two days falling down the ski hill, trying to capture some of the action, and not get spotted while peeing in the trees.
The event attracted a solid group of BC Cup regulars and, with the race season still three months away, it was a great excuse to hang out, ride bikes, and punctuate every other sentence with a high-five. This was the kind of rowdy, pre-season event that had the pros out at the bar until close the night before the race. It was a weekend more about bonding than about winning, more about bananas, beers, and hugs than about medals and cash prizes. Although, there were cash prizes to be had.
The Bakery: Must Love Bikes
Until recently, unless you were an entrepreneur or a retired athlete, finding a sustainable career in the mountain bike industry was like finding a unicorn; a unicorn that paid minimum wage, but let you crack a beer at noon at your desk.
Slowly opportunities have materialized and with them there is a growing need to hire experienced personnel from other industries. We are starting to see more and more outsiders with the necessary skills, but lack of passion for our culture. So, how important is it that our help-wanted ads include “must love bikes”?
The Bakery: Wear a F*cking Helmet, You F*cktard!
I am not one to tell other people how to live their lives. I am usually the supportive friend, the one you go to when you know your life decision is terrible but you want someone to agree with you. Recently, however, I have had to restrain myself from opening my living room window, leaning out in my pajamas with mascara under my eyes and shaking my fist like an old person while yelling at the douchebag riding by without a helmet on. He rides by every morning and I have actually thought about lying in wait and jumping out from behind a parked car to push him off his bike just to prove my point.
What’s my point?
Riding without a helmet is a total douche move.
The Bakery: Why I Own a Guitar
I have a guitar that's been collecting dust in the corner for the better part of six years. I keep it for the same reason crazy bingo ladies keep troll dolls. I'm superstitious. I believe that selling this unloved, unused guitar will result in an injury and I would need a new hobby to fill the temporary void left by mountain biking. This new hobby, obviously, would be learning the power cords to Rock You Like a Hurricane.
Why are we so afraid of getting injured? There are the obvious reasons, like pain, inconvenience, expensive medical bills, and bad hospital food. But what else is going on in our heads about it? There is almost a competitive nature to our reports on how quickly we've gotten back to riding post injuries. I've watched people shave down their casts so they can fit their hand on a set of drops and hit jumps in Whistler after much too recent concussions. One friend is the proud owner of a cadaver ligament as his eagerness to ride post surgery resulted in unsatisfactory healing. I like to ask him if his leg feels haunted.
When I broke my collarbone, yes it is ironic that the one injury that has kept me off my bike for any length of time also kept me from mastering any Hendrix, the doctor told me that I would be off my bike for six weeks. Somehow this information triggered an outpouring of boastful reports of 4-week or less recovery times. Apparently there was a race for me to get back on two wheels and I wasn't entirely sure that my underachieving collarbone was up to the challenge. In the same vein I often see status updates on facebook to the effect of "The doctor told me I can't ride yet, but I'm going anyway." What are we so afraid of missing by being off our bikes?
The Bakery: Don’t Call it A Comeback
Tara Llanes is the Queen of Comebacks. When you hear her name most people will think of the 4-Cross crash that left her with a complete spinal cord injury, but there is a lot more to what Tara has overcome and what she has done to stay connected to an industry that she calls family.
Tara fell in love with bikes when she was eleven, the year she started racing BMX. Eight years later she made the switch to mountain biking and shortly thereafter won gold at the X-Games. In her first year of racing professionally Tara crashed and broke her collarbone at Nationals in Washington. In an interview in 2000 Tara expressed that she thought no one would want to sponsor her after that, little did she know that the support of her bike family would see her though a lot more than a broken collarbone, or three.
The Bakery: The Dangers of Riding in TIght Pants
I like men who ride in tight jeans. I enjoy watching them struggle to pull their jeans up over their kneepads, I think because it looks roughly as awkward and exposed as I feel when I’m peeing in the woods.
I am not really one to worry much about what other people ride in, aside from a slight jealousy when I see 16-year-old boys looking better in tight pants than I do, but a simple Google search reveals scads of people with strong opinions about this particular fashion choice in our riding community.
There is nothing that ages you more than criticizing the fashion choices of a new generation, and yet there are pages and pages of references to “girl jeans”, emo kids, and the superiority of riding in tights. Among these opinionated folk there also seems to be some debate about the appropriate age for tight pants. Forum experts weigh-in with everything from no appropriate age, to you have to be pre-pubescent, or pre-thirty. This is something I probably should be taking into account.
Are fashion trends really all that dangerous to our health? We still see girls in stilettos regardless of all the public safety announcements about the damage they can do to our feet, legs, and backs. I decided to spend some time researching the dangers of riding in tight pants. The Internet will have you believe that there are some real disadvantages to making yourself into a mountain biking sausage, and some of them are kind of gross.
The Bakery: Don't Be a Dick, Talk to the Bun Guy
Four years ago I finally got my driver's license. It was a novelty at first. It was nice that friends no longer smiled sympathetically and questioned my ability to lead a fulfilling and independent life without a license. The days of showing leg on the highway for a ride to Whistler or being the one that couldn't contribute to sacrifice shuttles were over. I even started driving to work. Then, as the high of feeling like a real adult wore off, I realized that my morning commute had become more of an observation than an experience; it felt like I was watching a movie. There was a subtle disconnect from my world. Pedestrians, people turning left, and even cyclists all annoyed me. Apparently I was a driver now; I couldn't interact with anyone beyond turn signals and brake lights.
While riding to work I had connected with the people around me. Riding had removed the barrier for communication. Sometimes the communication was, "Hey you asshole! You had a stop sign!" but more often than not, it was saying "good morning" to people collecting bottles in my alley, nodding hello to other commuters, or thanking pedestrians for giving me the right of way. I especially missed the occasional flirtatious interaction, chatting at stoplights or trying to look cool while I painful slipped a pedal into my shin. On a snowy commute one day a woman driving by rolled down her window and commended me for riding, I fell over about a block later, but that interaction made me smile all day.
The Bakery: I’ve Found Religion
I’m not what you would consider a religious person. In fact the last time I was in church the priest interrupted the marriage ceremony to tell me not to stand on God’s furniture to take photos. I think God would want you to have nice wedding photos, don’t you? There’s also the small matter of religion rejecting me before I could reject it. My parents tried to have me baptized because it seemed like the right thing to do, unfortunately the minister in our small town refused because I was a bastard; my parents weren’t married. The little old ladies were up in arms over it and protested, but the minister held his ground. Good for him for believing in something. For me it took a little longer to find somewhere I wanted to be every Sunday.
The Bakery: My Mom is the Bob Barker of Mexico
My mom is the Bob Barker of Mexico. If your dogs aren’t spayed or neutered, she will get on her bike and hunt you down. Truth.
Ten years ago my mom started rescuing dogs in her village in Mexico. Five years ago she got a bike and a friend, and now rescues dogs in the surrounding towns. LaRae and Donna may seem like your average Mexico living, cruiser bike-riding, margarita-loving, cookie-making moms, but they’re not.
At the age of 56 my mom discovered biking when Fibromyalgia stopped her from participating in other activities. I helped her pick out a sweet pink cruiser bike, suitable for her retired life in Mexico. Within a few months she started asking for a better seat, then a mirror, then a computer to track her mileage. Mileage? Really? She was riding upwards of 20 kilometers a day, sending me photos from the middle of cow herds, mud puddles and new spots that she had once thought were much too far to ride to. One of her favorite stops when she comes home now is my local bike shop. Her most recent acquisition was a basket, but not one of those trendy wicker ones, nope. Mom needed a basket with support, one that can hold a lot of dog food, or a dog when needed.
The Bakery: The Trail You Have Loved and Lost
As mountain bikers we have all had a 'Big Ed' in our lives, that trail that was a secret or not-so-secret-but-not-so-legal gem. You loved it and then you lost it. This is a eulogy for all of the trails that have been taken from us too soon.
Big Ed touched all of our lives in my neck of the woods. From the first rumors we heard of his inception, we had big plans for his future and our future rides. The countless hours that the builders contributed to creating Big Ed were out of dedication to their vision. Their work built a beautiful resource that we all came to love.
Through all our seasons he was there for us. At times he required a helping hand; some new rockwork here or a ladder there, but he never forgot our actions in those times. Big Ed always repaid our kindness with the loyalty characteristic of a good friend. He was there for us on the best days and more importantly on the bad days; days when we just really needed to get out and ride our bikes.