Cycotherapy News Roundup: Some personal news, taking to the air, Truman and SS in Tokyo
Another wacky roundup of cycling on the interwebs
Hello everyone.
Some personal news. I’ve taken a new part-time position in my professional life. Since late August, I have served as an advisor to a student-run newspaper at Ashland University, in addition to my full-time job as a local reporter. It’s been a bit of a wild ride, but, all-in-all, worth it.
Shepherding young journalists is a joy. The experience has reminded me why I got into this profession: to tell stories. To dig for the truth. To distill hard truths into digestible information. To double, triple and quadruple check the facts. To hold accountable. To challenge status quo.
And so if I miss a few posts here and there, this is part of the reason. Some of my life’s margin that had previously been filled with Cycotherapy is now being filled with proofing a newspaper, attending student-run editorial meetings and preparing for class. Cycotherapy and all of its small-but-mighty cadre of cycopaths is still important to me. I just need a little time to figure out a new flow.
If any of you have advice for the advisor, I’m all ears.
Sincerely,
dillon.
headlines
Automatic shifting — on a bike?
SRAM introduced its new Eagle Powertrain, which features a mid-drive motor deigned with predictive shifting. Apparently it tracks a rider’s cadence to predict the appropriate cog. Sounds weird to me. But … interesting. The new motor also has a feature called “Coast Shift,” which allows the drivetrain to shift when the rider isn’t pedaling. Also weird, and honestly, a feature that makes me wonder why someone would want that.
Ben Stiller and his excitement for Cavendish
Apparently Ben Stiller is a cycling fan. If you all knew this already, sorry for being late to the game. Anyway, he tweeted (X’ed?) that he’s excited about Mark Cavendish’s commitment to Astana through 2024. The commitment means Cav might break Eddy Merckx’s record of TDF stage wins set in 1969. Frankly, I’m not all that interested in whether he breaks the record. It’s a cool thing to look forward to, and maybe Stiller’s excitement means more people start paying attention to cycling — which is cooler.
Bike trips are up
People across the U.S. are using their bicycles more for trips. I wrote about this earlier this week. I took particular interest in the nugget showing more people are using their bikes for trips in three Ohio cities. Is it true? Don’t know. The people behind this analysis used data from smartphones.
… Bike trips are down
When it comes to cycling to work, though, bike trips are down. This article gets a little more nuanced when it cites U.S. Census Bureau figures. “An estimated 731,272 Americans used bicycles as their chief means of transportation to work in 2022, up from 2021 but down almost 75,000 from before the pandemic and 175,000 from the peak year of 2014.”
feature of the week
Tom Vanderbilt, a contributing editor to Outside, transitioned from road cycling to mountain biking recently. His description of this journey, from smooth road surfaces to roots and rocks — and, ultimately, to the ecstasy of flight — is not only accurate, but eloquent.
“The moment you doubt whether you can fly,” J.M. Barrie wrote in Peter Pan, “you cease forever to be able to do it.”
book excerpt of the week
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.
Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there is much to see--simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Railroad, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud …
Truman Capote — opening paragraphs of In Cold Blood
video of the week
Here’s a nice little video of some dudes riding single speeds through the streets of Tokyo.