If It Fits

Size matters.

So does positioning. 

La-Vande Is Here

 Last week, I did four rides on four different bikes--all of them mine.

If you've been following this blog, you've seen three of them:  Dee-Lilah, my Mercian Vincitore Special; Tosca, my Mercian fixed gear and Negrosa, my vintage Mercian Olympic.  But I didn't mention what I rode to Point Lookout that Friday.

La-Vande, a Mercian King of Mercia, rose from the wreck of Arielle, the Mercian Audax I crashed last June.  One of the few good things that came from that mishap--save for the support you, dear readers, showed--was a settlement to cover another bike.

I intended La-Vande to be the "winter" and "rainy day" version of Dee-Lilah, my Mercian Vincitore Special.  So, I specified the same geometry but a slightly heavier tubing--Reynolds 725.  And I'd asked for a different color scheme because I'm not trying to build a "Stepford" fleet.  

Well, the frame was built with the same Reynolds 853 tubing as Dee-Lilah.  And it was painted in the same colors, though La-Vande's lilac paint is slightly lighter.  Grant at Mercian said it was probably a result of a "different batch" of paint.  He apologized, but I wasn't upset, really.  What La-Vande is, essentially, Dee-Lilah with less fancy (though still lovely) lug work--and some slightly less expensive components, most of which came from my parts bin.  

Anyway, I pleased with the bike.  It's a "younger sister" to Dee-Lilah.  I figure that since she has a geometry and build I like, it doesn't hurt to have another bike like her.  

Here is a list of La-Vande's specs.

Frame:  Mercian King of Mercia, Reynolds 853 tubing.

Headset:  Tange sealed bearing.

Wheels:  Phil Wood hubs.

              Mavic Open Pro 36 hole rims.

              DT Competition spokes.

Tires:     Continental Gator Skin folding 700 X28 

Brakes:   Shimano BR-R451 

              Tektro RL 340 levers 

              Mathauser Kool-Stop salmon pads

Crankset:  Stronglight Impact, 170 mm, 48-34 chainrings

Bottom Bracket:  Shimano UN-72, 68x107mm

Derailleurs: Shimano Ultegra 6500 rear 

                  Shimano Dura Ace 7400

                  Dura Ace downtube levers

Cassette:    Shimano 105 9 speed, 12-25 

Chain:         SRAM PC-971 

Pedals:        MKS Urban Platform with "basket" toe clips and Velo Orange toe straps

Handlebars:   Nitto 177 "Noodle" 42 cm, wrapped  with Newbaum's Eggplant-colored cloth  tape

Stem:             Nitto NP 110 mm

Seatpost:        Nitto 65

Saddle:           Brooks Professional

Accessories:    Nitto M18 front rack, Zefal HPX pump, King "Iris" water bottle cages

In another post, I'll tell you about the bags on this bike--which I've also been using on some of my other bikes.

Safe Passing In The Garden State

During the past few years, a number of jurisdictions have passed laws with the ostensible purpose of promoting cycling safety.  Some, like the “Idaho Stop” and its variants, make all kinds of sense. Others don’t. Still others are well-intentioned and could work.

In that latter category is a law New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed yesterday.  It, and others like it, are commonly called “safe passing” laws. 

The Garden State version is more detailed than most.  It not only stipulates that, when passing, drivers move over one lane if a lane is available.  If it’s not, drivers must give a four-foot berth.  If that’s not possible, drivers must slow down to 25 MPH.

Moreover, those mandates apply when motorists are passing, not only cyclists, but also pedestrians, scooters and wheelchairs.

Patrick Conklin, President of Jersey City nonprofit advocacy group Bike JC, says that a “great benefit” of the law is that it “not only tells drivers how and when they should pass” but also “when they shouldn’t.”  Another result is that it “carves out a space for cycling as transportation,” even on “roads with high car traffic, which are often the most direct routes.”

Conlon is pointing to one of the barriers, for many people, to cycling for transportation:  a safe and direct way to pedal to work.

That is not only a problem for urban millennials:  In rural areas (Yes, New Jersey has them:  I know;

I’ve cycled them!), the direct route is sometimes the only route.  Also, many rural and even suburban roads don’t have sidewalks, let alone bike lanes. People are therefore forced to ride their bikes—or walk—or navigate their motorized wheelchairs—on the road.

I think the new New Jersey law is a good step towards promoting human-powered transportation.  My hope, naive as it may be, is that drivers’ consciousness keeps pace and doesn’t lead to hostility, as the construction of bike lanes has here in New York, the Garden State’s neighbor.

No Rain, Wind Or Tides

 I’m not cycling to Connecticut today.  Instead, I’m on another familiar ride: to Point Lookout.

Another thing is familiar: the weather.  While it’s a couple of degrees warmer than it was yesterday, today feels more like early June than early August.  I don’t mind that, or even the veil of blue-gray clouds that conceal the sun but pose no threat of rain. Those clouds even rein in the wind and tides, or so it seems.

I will not complain:  It’s been a while since riding has felt as good as it has during the past few days!

Three Times, Better

 I have done what just might be the strangest sequence of cycling I’ve done in a while.  What makes it so odd is its familiarity:  I have done the same ride three times in five days: today, Monday and Saturday.

Why did I do that?  Well, I took Negrosa, my vintage Mercian Olympic, to Greenwich, Connecticut on Saturday.  That has become a frequent weekend day ride for me.  I took that same ride on Monday because I wanted to start the week right.  And today I hopped on Dee-Lilah, my Mercian Vincitore Special.  The weather—overcast, with no threat of rain and temperatures that maxed out at 24C (75F)—was ideal and I just wanted to ride and ride. Somehow I ended up taking that 140 kilometer round trip again.

Perhaps an unconscious, or at least unacknowledged, wish guided to today’s ride.  Whether it had to do with Dee-Lilah, the weather or me, today I felt better riding today than at any time since last June, when a crash led to a weekend stay in Westchester Medical Center.

If I can say “this is the best I’ve felt” at my age, I guess things are pretty good.

What NJS Could Have Prevented

 Tosca, my Mercian fixed-gear bike, has some NJS-approved parts on it.  I have never made any effort, however, to make it or any other bike I’ve owned NJS-compliant.

Parts and bikes with the designation are approved for use in keirin, a form of track racing in Japan.  As I understand, NJS standards were created so that no racer is at an unfair advantage or disadvantage because of his equipment.  That is why NJS- approved equipment perpetuates standards from the 1970’s and ‘80’s: Frames are steel and wheels have 36 spokes.

Because bets are placed on riders, officials also want to ensure that a race isn’t decided by broken equipment. Thus, NJS standards emphasize strength and reliability.

A consequence of NJS standards is that they don’t make for putting together the lightest possible bikes.  That is why, for example, Olympic track racers don’t ride NJS equipment.

Those racers include Australian Alex Porter. He and his fellow Team Pursuit teammates were seen as possible gold medal winners in Tokyo.  That is, until he came crashing down on the track and sliding across the boards. That ended Australia’s qualifying run after a minute. The team was able to make a second attempt, in which they finished fifth.  Now they have a difficult task ahead of them if they are to contend for even a bronze medal.

What sent Porter, and his team’s hopes, crashing down?  A broken handlebar. 

He was riding an Argon 18 bike. Argon VP Martin Faubert said, “While Argon 18 has designed a handlebar for the bike, and provided that bar to the team, it was not our bar in use during the incident.”

Somehow I think NJS standards also preclude statements like that from executives of Sugino, MKS and other companies that make equipment for Kerin.

He Delivers In Indonesia

 Lockdowns and other restrictions induced by COVID-19 have left people dependent on deliveries for everything from pharmaceutical s to pizza.

Here in New York, as in much of the developed world, Amazon trucks and electric bicycles with delivery boxes have become ubiquitous.  A shrinking but still significant number of restaurant and store delivery workers, however, still use bicycles that have only the riders’ legs as their power source.

It seems that the less-developed and poorer parts of the world depend to an even greater degree on regular pedal bicycle.  Those are also areas that, because they have fewer resources, have been even more devastated by the pandemic. They also tend to have tighter restrictions on people’s movements and on businesses because their hospitals are even more overburdened than those in wealthier areas.

Just about everything I’ve mentioned in my previous paragraph could be used to describe the situation in Semarang.  This city of three million (roughly the same as Chicago) is one of the worst-hit areas of Indonesia , which has become Asia’s epicenter of the epidemic.

Such places also tend to rely to a greater degree on volunteers. They include 35-year-old Arrahman Surya Atmaja, who delivers food, prescriptions and other items to isolated residents as part of the volunteer delivery service he started in April.

Arrahman Surya Abakan, left, with another volunteer .Phoro by Budi Purvanto, for Reuters.

He says his most common deliveries include medicines or vitamins he picks up via WhatsApp or Instagram.  He and other volunteers have had to lift their bikes over barricades blocking off “red zones” with high rates of infection.  “Maybe because we are helping the community, it will somehow boost our immunity,” he joked.

While most of his runs are to residences, he unwittingly went to an ICU ward.  “I got scared, but my feelings went away when I remembered I only want to help.” He added that he and other cyclists try to make contactless deliveries.

Why I Still Can Say I'm In Midlife

 Could it be that bicycling has an even longer history than we realized?

From Teeshirtpalace

Bikes And Murals For The Community

Although murals have painted for about 30,000 years (if you count such works as the Lascaux cave paintings), they really weren't a major art form in the United States until the early 20th Century, when the Progressive Era engendered protest against big business and imperialist wars.  They really became a part of American life during the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as part of his New Deal,  commissioned artists including Diego Rivera who, along with some fellow Mexicans, were sponsored by their president, Albero Obergon as part of a nationalist cultural program during the previous decade.  

It was as if Depression-era America and murals found each other:  the medium was ideal for expressing the hardships of the time as well as elevating workers and other everday people.  (How hard do I work if I'm writing sentences like that?)  In other words, murals are a "people's" art form, which is exactly what the nation and society needed as it was confronting the failures of an economy and culture in which a focus on individualism had run riot.

I admit that I am not an art historian, so what I've presented is a comic-book version, at best, of the history and importance of murals.  But I think it will help to make sense of what I'm about to say next:  Bicycle Recycleries and murals go together like, well, cycling and people.

If murals are the most democratic visual art form, then bicycle recycleries (like my local Recycle-a-Bicycle) are the people's bike spaces.  Not only is it possible to find reasonably-priced reconditioned and rebuilt bikes in them, but most offer bike repair classes and volunteer programs.  Some also offer internships as well as other community services and programs.

For years, Recycle Bicycle operated out of a warehouse on Atlas Street in Harrisburg which, in spite of being Pennsylvania's capital, is one of the state's poorest communities. (It tried to declare bankruptcy ten years ago but a judge blocked it from doing so.)  Its people suffer from the same lack of opportunities and health problems that afflict people in other poverty-stricken areas.  So the need for affordable transportation and recreation is as great as it is in other impoverished urban enclaves.

The mural on that building became part of the organization's identity. So, when the building was sold and Recycle Bicycle was forced to move two years ago, some feared the work of public art would be gone forever.

That is, until longtime volunteer and board member Jennifer Donnelly climbed a ladder into the loft of the warehouse.  There, among tools, she found something familiar:  the stencils used to create a whimsical scene of children and swirling purples and blues.  

Other volunteers pulled panels from the mural and Ralphie Seguinot, the self-taught artist who painted it, recreated it, with some modifications, on the new location.

From The Burg

Donnelly explained that Recycle Bicycle raised half of the funds for the project from community donations.  That is fitting because, she says, having the mural--which became closely identified with Recycle Bicycle--on the new building is important to the organization and its mission of creating a community space.  

That's what bicycle recycleries are, and what murals help to define:  community space.

Hey, Sammy. Where Are You Going With That Cash In Your Hand?

 Is he the Bernie Madoff of cycling?

Samuel J. Mancini is accused of bilking 40 investors out of 11 million dollars. While that’s “chump change “ compared to what Bernie defrauded from his clients, I’m sure Mancini’s victims are no less impacted—and feel no less betrayed.

He’d raised the money, he told his investors, for Outdoor Capital Partners (of which he was the managing director) to acquire bicycle-maker DeRosa, bicycle helmet-maker Limar and De Marching, known for bicycle clothing and accessories.  He would re-launch those brands, he told his customers, as part of a direct-to-consumer business that would be a direct competitor to Canyon, at least in the US.

The deal for De Marchi fell through.  So, he set his sights on Gruppo SRL, the parent company of Cinelli and Columbus.

At least, that’s what he told his investors.  In the meantime, according to a civil complaint filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and a criminal case in the US Attorney’s office for New Jersey, Mancini and OCP embezzled $400,000 of investors’ money and made $800,000 of “Ponzi-like” payments to investors.

As a result, Mancini’s and OCP’s accounts were frozen and Mancini was arrested.  He was released on bail and is awaiting trial.  The charges of securities fraud, money laundering and wire fraud could bar him being an officer of any public company or selling securities, require him to pay back funds with penalties and interest, and land him in prison for up to 30 years.

Perhaps one reason why investors trusted him was that he told them he was investing millions of his own dollars.  That turned out to be as false as his claim of being an alumnus of the United States Military Academy at West Point.  

This guy sounds like a real charmer.  I hear Bernie was one.