Monday, August 25, 2008

Road Cycling, the lack of olympic coverage, and you.

The problem?

1. I grew up riding and reading about BMX bikes.
2. I work at CommunityCycles, and regularly work with city employees.
3. I know several people who regularly go on the Cruiser Ride.
4. I have a tallbike, and have ridden it a>down Boulder Canyon, twice and b>on the Boulder 360. Twice.
5. I commute by bike to work from Lafayette 4 or 5 times a week.
6. While I don't regularly ride a mountain bike, I'm on several email lists of/about/by mountain bike enthusiasts, and keep up with their doings and happenings.

These aren't so much problems as they are strange qualifications for something I'm not quite sure of, but with these, I feel like I've got an ear to the ground with regards to most of the bicycle related things happening in and around Boulder. Except one. This one is the problem:

I know next to nothing about recreational road cycling.

And, I do ride a road bike now. I mostly use it to commute to work, go to the grocery store, and just my general transportation. I have ridden on a 2 day century, and several longer daytime rides with my roadie friends. This is about the extent of my recreational road riding. Most of the time, nowadays, when I'm on a bike, it's because I'm going somewhere, above and beyond "on a bike ride".

The person whose flats I'll happily fix on a Monday morning on our commute to work has a professional road and track cyclist as a parent. She's explained more to me in the year I've known here about professional and recreational road cycling than I've learned in all my 32 years.

I wanted to post something about Taylor Phinney, a kid from Boulder who makes it to the Olympics on a bicycle. What more could BoulderBikes be looking for in blogfodder than that? The Slipstream team made waves with their biweekly dope tests, and they're based in Boulder and rode in the Tour. Better writers than I have written more about these two subjects than I could in weeks of hacking at the keyboard, so I'll leave these media lovelies to the mainstream media. At least until I have something useful to add.

I'd love to include more happenings and things of interest to road cyclists in and around Boulder, but I have no idea where to start. I'm not up on rides, races, events, or issues surrounding riding a road bike in Boulder County.

This is where you come in. If you consider yourself a road rider-- that's the only qualification I'm looking for is that you consider yourself to be one-- and there's something you think belongs here on BoulderBikes, please let me know. Feel free to comment here, or email me at veganboyjosh@gmail.com.

Thanks.

2 comments:

thedalyn said...

I would particularly like to know about a local time trial series. Anyone?

evan said...

Anybody got any reports from the Boulder Velodrome/indoor bike park? Sure wish I were there on this rainy afternoon. Would be nice to see some photos from Tour De FAT in Fort Collins and in Denver. Challenge the Ride made over $1000 for the Center for People with Disabilities last friday.