05.18.2009 | 12:50 pm
A Note from Fatty: I just got finished standing out in front of my house for fifteen minutes, where I was trying very hard to do the following:
- Not stare into the TV crew’s camera. I was told to look at the reporter instead.
- Not say “uhm” more than ten times per minute. I’m pretty sure I failed at that.
- Describe what this blog is about. Which gives rise to an interesting question: what is this blog about?
- Explain why we’re raffling off a Kona Cadabra, a bicycle so desirable and rare that it won’t exist for another half year or so.
My understanding is that KSL — the Salt Lake City NBC affiliate — will be running this story today, and there should be an online version of it available tomorrow. Which I will link to, unless it’s horribly embarrassing.
UPDATE: The story and video segment are now live. Click here to take a look.
Fight Cancer, Win a Kona Cadabra
A couple weeks ago, Fat Cyclist readers pitched in to vote for “Cadabra” as the name of Kona’s super-light, long travel all-mountain bike.
And we did it.
So now — true to her word — Heather Gilbert, a cancer doctor and the inventor of the name “Cadabra” is going to donate her prize — a Kona Cadabra — to some lucky random person who either raises money in their own Team Fatty LiveStrong Challenge page, or donates to mine.
Show ‘Em What They Can Win, Johnny
The Kona Cadabra…well, it doesn’t exist yet. There aren’t any prototypes. There’s not even a final drawing. But we do know that it’s going to be a lighter, climbier cousin to the $5799 Kona CoilAir Supreme:
Yeah, I think that’ll absorb the bumps quite adequately.
So, while we know you won’t get your Kona Cadabra until December at the earliest, we also know it that the Cadabra is designed to be the ultimate trail bike. Super light, a wicked climber, with enough rear travel to deal with rough terrain and make long epic rides sweet, fast and super comfortable.
So How Can You Enter?
The really cool thing about how you can win the Kona Cadabra is that you will be helping the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF) fight cancer with your donation. When my wife’s cancer came back, I contacted the LAF and got terrific, personalized help right away. And since then, I’ve directed a number of people who email me with cancer questions and concerns to the LAF, which is always prompt, caring, and — above all– helpful.
So, here’s what you do to fight cancer and — just maybe — win a Kona Cadabra: just click here to go to my LiveStrong Challenge page, and donate any multiple of $5. The more you donate, the more random numbers you get, and the better your chances of winning.
Yes, it’s really that easy.
What If You’re a Member of Team Fatty?
If you’re a member of Team Fatty and are working to raise money for your own LiveStrong Challenge, donate money at your own page! And get other people to donate at your page, too. Every $5.00 you raise on your page between now and May 25 will earn you a chance at winning the Cadabra.
In other words, those of you who have joined Team Fatty but have not yet felt the urgency to start raising money, this should be a terrific incentive for you to get started.
When Does the Contest End?
It ends at Midnight, MDT, May 25. In other words, one week from today. So don’t dilly-dally. Go donate now.
Of course, the winner won’t actually get the bike until it exists.
Got any questions? Ask ‘em in the comments section and I’ll answer the best I can.
Good luck!
PS: As of today, Team Fatty has raised more than $200,000 this year toward fighting cancer with the Lance Armstrong Foundation. We’re making great progress toward that goal of $500,000. Thanks, and congratulations!
Comments (44)
05.15.2009 | 12:20 pm
I’d like you to consider the following photo:
This is Ricky, the core team member voted “Least Likely to Call Elden and Suggest Going on a Ride.”
He does not usually look like this.
Yesterday, Ricky rode Dry Canyon, a terrific singletrack trail of the Bonneville Shoreline. The trail ends with a set of stairs, each step of which is not quite as long as a mountain bike’s wheelbase.
He has ridden this trail — including the stairs — scores of times. Maybe a score of scores.
In Ricky’s own words:
After ~9 miles, with my car in sight, the stairs at the base of Dry got the best of me. I don’t remember the crash but from the looks of things, I landed on my face.
I kind of think Ricky’s going to grow a beard for a while.
Strange Coincidence
At approximately the same time Ricky was tilling the soil, Dug and I were riding in Corner Canyon, riding the Clarks-Jacob’s Ladder-Ghost Falls loop.
We reached the Hog Hollow saddle and began traversing what is usually the least memorable section of the ride: a nondescript jeep road that connects Clark’s to the Hog Hollow climbs.
And then we were swarmed by bees.
Nothing was happening, and then suddenly the air grew dark with them, surrounding us, bumping into us, and attacking.
I was not stung, due to the fact that I made myself very small and sent out powerful thought waves, causing the bees to think I was an overweight, slow-moving, rock. Which is mostly true anway, so the bees bought into it.
Dug was stung repeatedly. I recommend reading his account of the encounter.
So, just a quick word to whoever is using voodoo or whatever to attack the core team: please, cut it out.
Comments (42)
05.15.2009 | 11:17 am
…I will listen to the brand new Green Day album, 21st Century Breakdown, over and over and over. Including while I am on my ride. I suspect my riding may be somewhat…aggressive.
How is it possible that a band can be this good?
Comments (24)
05.14.2009 | 10:26 am
I am often asked by people who know less than I, “How can I look back when riding my bike?”
Well, as an extremely fast, fit, and award-winning cyclist, I personally never have any need to look back when riding my bike. Once I have passed something, there is no possibility that it will ever pose a threat again. And frankly, whatever I have passed disappears into a point on the horizon so quickly that there’s really no value in looking back, anyway.
However, I am sympathetic to your plight.
Why You Would Want to Look Behind You
Before explaining how to look behind you, we need to consider why you might want to look behind you. As an average cyclist, there are three excellent reasons:
- To see the vehicle that is bearing down on you. Actually, I was only joking. This really isn’t a good reason for looking behind you. If a vehicle is bearing down on you, it will either miss you or it won’t. And it doesn’t help to try to quickly memorize the license plate, either. My experience shows that if the vehicle hits you, you won’t remember the moments before the accident anyway.
- To see the vehicle that is honking at you. I’m joking again, of course! If a vehicle is honking at you, that’s because it’s full of teenagers, and they’re playing a hilarious practical joke on you. Ho ho! If you look back, you are validating their wittiness, but not to the full extent they are hoping for. Ideally — for them — you will swerve and fall. Or, if you choose to be non-compiant with their joke, you can instead acknowledge them with a gesture of your choosing (such as a big “thumbs-up” and a smile, as if you were both in a Mentos commercial).
- To assess whether another cyclist is catching up to you. This, naturally, is the real reason you might want to look behind you.
The Problems
Sadly, looking behind you is not as simple as craning your neck around and taking a gander (especially if you’re over 40 and you can no longer turn your head more than thirty degrees in either direction).
For one thing, as you have likely noticed, when you twist your body and turn your head to see what’s behind you, you stop being a cyclist…and become a drunken menace to all and sundry, swerving sharply in the direction you are turning your head as if a U-turn is absolutely imperative right this very second.
More importantly, however, is the fact that by turning your body and head to look behind you, you have tipped your hand. You have just alerted the people behind you that you are worried about them catching up. That you even admit the conceivability of the notion of the theoretical possibility that they might catch up.
And in short, you have shown weakness. “I am about to crack,” is the message you have just telegraphed. “Attack now.”
This will not do.
You need to learn to look back correctly. And I am about to tell you how.
The Basics
When you are first learning how to look back, you should stick to the essentials: finding out how close behind you your opponents riding buddies are, without killing all of you by swerving into traffic or a curb. Worry about being stealthy later.
The trick is simple, and so I’m tempted to make it a little more complicated than it actually is, so as to impress you with my knowledge of the arcane. But I won’t. Because I care about you.
[Note: I am generally reluctant to give actual useful advice, but am making an exception here]
As you turn your head and body to look back, also lift your arm so it’s pointing in the direction you want to look, and you won’t swerve.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
However, you may want to jazz it up by making your hand into the pistol shape and doing the “shooting” action with your thumb while winking to the people behind you, as if you were — instead of checking to see if you will be overtaken soon — are giving them a jaunty and perhaps mildly creepy greeting.
Advanced Techniques
Most expert cyclists will not be fooled by this tactic (Chris Horner is a notable exception; he falls for the “point and shoot” gambit every time). To check behind you with more stealth, you need to become with more arcane techniques.
The most effective and desirable way to check to see if anyone is behind you is to check your shadow. Provided the sun is behind you and low in the sky, you can simply look down. Then use this handy guide to tell whether you are about to be overtaken:
- If you see 1 shadow, of course you will naturally panic, thinking that you are about to be overtaken. Relax! That shadow is yours. You are doing just fine.
- If you see 2 shadows, then you are in fact about to be overtaken. Stand up and sprint as if your life depended on it.
- If you see 2 shadows and one of them is 14 feet tall and six feet wide, then you are about to be overtaken by the chupacabra. Stand up and sprint as if your life depended on it. Because it does.
[Note: My legal counsel advises that it is also possible that if you see a 14-feet tall, six-feet-wide shadow, it may be a car in the late afternoon. In which case I still advise sprinting as if your life depended on it, because the chupacabra may be inside the car.]
The second-best way to check behind you is to glance as you go around a switchback. This gives you an excellent opportunity to see how far behind you your mortal enemies friends are. I am personally very partial to this technique, and so will only ride — road or mountain — where there are plentiful switchbacks.
Sadly, the switchback technique and the shadow technique are not very effective when used in combination, primarily because switchbacks have the unfortunate effect of reversing your direction every so often. This makes it devilishly difficult to keep the sun at your back.
For this reason, the third technique — the spit-glance – has been developed. To do the spit-glance, turn your head far to the left (or, in Australia, to the right) and spit down. As you do this, wrench your eyeballs as far back as you can, stealing a glance behind you. You have no more than a tenth of a second to take in your rear view before being detected, so don’t dawdle.
As a bonus, if you use this technique often enough, people will become quite wary of riding behind you and will think long and hard before passing (Hi, Dug!).
Things to Avoid
Really, I only have one thing to avoid, but the heading “Thing to Avoid” seemed awkward. So: the thing to avoid as you develop your surreptitious looking-back skills is: purchasing a mirror.
Yes, I know. Those mirrors work. They work great in fact. But don’t use them.
“Are you talking about helmet- or handlebar-mounted mirrors?” is the question I expect you are about to ask.
The answer is, “Yes.”
“But why not?” is your question.
“Please refer to the photograph,” is my answer (Hi, Kent!).
[Note: The "Things to Avoid" section (see above) does not apply to recumbent riders. In fact, I believe that recumbents are required by law -- or at least by whatever mad impulse it is that drives a person to recumbents -- to have both a helmet mirror and a handlebar mirror. ]
Yes, the art of looking back on a bicycle is a complex, multifaceted technique, requiring no small amount of determination. Once you have invested the necessary years of practice, however, I guarantee you will always know who is about to pass you.
I wish you luck.
Comments (48)
05.13.2009 | 11:05 am
I don’t have anything clever to say about bicycles today.
Wait. That was far too specific. I should have said, “I don’t have anything clever to say today.” No need to narrow it down to bikes.
But I have my reasons. And I’m going to subject you to that set of reasons right now.
I apologize in advance.
Chirp
It is a scientific fact that no battery on any smoke alarm ever runs out of juice except between the hours of 3:00 and 4:30 AM. Say, for example, it’s a battery’s time to go, and it’s only 11:00 PM. All of the other batteries in the world will get together and concentrate very hard, lending good vibes and energy and willpower to that on-last-legs smoke alarm battery, giving it the strength it needs to hold on ’til 3:00 AM.
And so, at 3:00 AM — on the nose — this morning, I was wakened by a chirp.
Then, at 3:00:30 AM, I was awakened by another chirp.
At 3:01 AM, I was awakened by another chirp. This time, I was sufficiently awakened that I recognized the chirp for what it was. “Well, it’s 3:00 AM,” I thought. “This seems like the perfect time for me to go on a scavenger hunt for a 9-volt battery, followed by a game of chirping-smoke-alarm Marco Polo.”
I trudged petulantly to the fridge. And I’m dead serious about the petulance of my trudging. If you had seen me trudge, you would have been astonished at how effectively I can communicate petulance with mere footsteps.
The reason I went to the fridge, of course, was to see if there were any 9-volt batteries in it.
There were. Ten of them, still in their original packaging.
[Quick Aside: I'm pretty sure it's fairly common practice for people to keep new batteries in the fridge. Am I correct in that? Also, is there any basis to the conventional wisdom that batteries keep longer if refrigerated? Has there been a Mythbusters episode on that? It almost doesn't matter to me, because I have kept new batteries refrigerated ever since I've owned a fridge and like the fact that I always know where the batteries are, regardless of whether this is actually helpful (or maybe it's actually even harmful?) to the useful life of the battery.]
I spent four minutes grappling with cellophane, then started listening to the chirp in earnest.
Where could it be?
First Attempt
From the relative softness of the chirp and from the fact that I don’t like to go into the basement at night because it’s really cold down there, I decided the chirp was coming from upstairs. I trudged (petulantly, still) to the top of the stairs, then waited for the chirp.
And so the fire alarm decided it should start taking four times as long between chirps, to make the game of Dead Smoke Alarm Battery Marco-Polo more challenging.
Eventually, the chirp came, from the left. I went and stood under the smoke alarm at the end of the hall, gazing up at it, expectantly, thinking to myself, “I cannot think of a single thing I would rather be doing right now.”
The chirp came again. Right from up there. I had guessed right the first time.
Unbelievable.
I dragged a chair from what I lovingly call “The Roller Room.” I have named the room thusly because that’s where my rollers are. It’s also where Susan’s jewelry and craft equipment is kept, and the rest of the family calls it “the craft room,” but I’ll be damned if I’m going to tell anyone that “I’m headed up to the craft room for a couple hours.”
Anyways.
In a moment I had pulled out the old battery and put in the new one. I then dragged the chair back into The Roller Room, and started walking back down the stairs.
And then I heard the chirp again.
Second Attempt
I pivoted, halfway down the stairs, and walked back up, upgrading my emotive level of trudginess to “put upon.” I then stood under the hallway alarm ’til I heard the chirp again.
No, that chirp was definitely not coming from the hallway smoke alarm.
I trudged — perfecting my put-upon trudge technique — downstairs, opened the fridge, got another 9-volt battery (taking a moment to be glad that I had started with more than one 9-volt in the fridge), and went back upstairs.
This time, using my powers of deduction — it couldn’t be the hall alarm and it shouldn’t be the twins’ alarm because I remember changing it fairly recently — I deduced it ought to be The Roller Room alarm.
Plus, I liked the fact that I would only have to drag the chair about eighteen inches to be in the right spot for changing the battery.
I made the swap, did not bother moving the chair back into its correct place, and started heading back downstairs.
And then I heard the chirp again.
Third Attempt
I pivoted and went back upstairs. By now I was pretty well awake and had upgraded my trudge to a peevish march. I stood in the doorway between the hallway and Roller Room alarms, trying to tell which could possibly be the offender.
The chirp told me it was neither.
And that’s when I had a flash of brilliance: we also have a guest room.
You may think it strange that I had until this point completely neglected the possibility that the chirping could be coming from the guest room, but the door to that room is always closed. Nobody goes in except when guests are here, and then only guests go in. Sure, it’s part of the house, but we don’t think about it much.
The guest room door is also very nearly at the end of the hall.
I opened the door just in time to hear a — much louder now, thanks — chirp.
Downstairs I went, to fetch the third battery of the night.
Opening the fridge door, I considered how fortunate it was that we had a whole big-box-store-sized box of 9-volts on hand, since I evidently was in the process of doing stair intervals and changing every smoke alarm battery in the house. At 3:00 AM. Or rather, 3:15, now.
I replaced the battery, this time certain I had changed the right one. I shut the door and started doing my “grateful to be going back to bed at last” walk down the stairs.
And then I heard the chirp again.
Fourth Attempt
I pivoted and went back upstairs. I really was absolutely positive that the smoke alarm in the guest room was the one making the noise, but stood under it until it chirped again to make certain.
Yes, no question about it.
I considered: could the chirp mean not that the battery was dead, but that the alarm was defective? Maybe. Could it mean that there’s a very small fire nearby, one that merited occasional chirping instead of full-on blaring? Maybe. Could it mean that I put the battery in wrong?
Yes. It could definitely mean that.
I got the chair back out of The Roller Room, opened the battery door and looked. No way to tell if it was in wrong from there. I took out the battery and checked.
Yes, that was it. I had put the battery in wrong.
I put the battery back in — this time really thinking it through — and started heading back downstairs.
This time I was almost certain I would hear the chirp again.
But I did not. I had — finally — triumphed.
Afterward
I laid back down, grateful to finally be back in bed.
And then, for the next hour and a half, I contemplated the fact that once one has climbed the stairs half a dozen times (or so) and done no small amount of sleuthing, battery changing, more sleuthing, more battery changing, and then troubleshooting and battery changing, one might arrive at two very important truths. Specifically:
- If one were to use my hallway’s smoke alarm as the center of a six-foot circle, one would find four smoke alarms in that circle (the hallway, the guest room, the Roller Room, and the twins’ room).
- I was now thoroughly awake.
Comments (62)
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