Five years ago I was in Santiago Chile pretending to race my bicycle. I wrote about my first experience then, which involved a much steeper learning…
Everything and the The Bathroom Sink
Category: Bikes
As I prepared to move myself to Santiago Chile, I frequently told people that I planned to “inject myself” into the cycling scene and eventually “dominate.” Well after almost two months, six trips to various bike shops, and countless kilometers, I finally injected the scene. However, I think in the end, the scene did not like me sticking it with sharp objects and turned around and bitch slapped me to the other side of the road. Here’s how it went down.
I absolutely adore aggressive city cycling. I am not talking about the usual getting from point A to point B, although that is the main objective for me. I am talking about a heart pounding, flat out effort across town running every red light you can find
, even red lights that you do not have to go through. A balls to the wall sprint with your head band on to keep the sweat out of the eyes. Malicious pedals dragging on small dogs as you go the opposite direction on the side walks to avoid a particularly heavy chunk of road traffic. Simply, whatever it takes to beat your cousin going from South West London to central North in Camden. I have mentioned in the past my love of the Argentine system for making sure that this would not even be a contest. Well London is a little different and let me explain.
The time had come once again to pack up my bicycle and head off into the campo (fields) of the state of Buenos Aires to seek victory and fame in my beloved sport of cycling. The race was early on Sunday so I needed to take a 3 hour bus on Saturday to find a hotel, assemble the bike, prepare, and beat every Argentine I could possibly find in front of me, on the track of course. Heres how it went down.
There is a phenomenon here in Buenos Aires that I have alluded to in a previous post but I feel that it deserves a little more attention now that I have become a surfing junkie on the streets of BsAs. A lot of people here in BsAs think that I am a little crazy for riding a $2000 bicycle around the streets of a town with roads the width of our highways back home, all one way, intersected with small veins of cobblestone streets, and filled with thousands of taxis and hissing buses that will send a shiver down the spine of the bravest individual when they breath down your back waiting to pick up their constituents and spit you out along the way. Although I save on transportation costs (buses and the subte cost $0.30 and taxis are no more than $5 for a half hour ride), transportation time, and I get some exercise, here is the main reason I love riding around here.
While traveling around Europe, our group coined the term ‘dupe’ which is basically to be tricked. Dupes happen all the time especially in a foreign country where you do not speak the language. Thus far I have been rather lucky and I have only been duped twice. Here they are…
I show up in Buenos Aires and I am antsy for some racing action on mi bicicleta. I go online and look for whatever I can find and come across a very helpful website at http://www.infobiker.com.ar. I look on the calendario for wahtever I can find and see that there is a race in a province of Buenos Aires in a city called Olavarria. Perfect! So I am staying in the province of Capital Federal in the state of Buenos Aires. Olavarria is in it’s own province in the state of Buenos Aires. This basically means that the place I had to go was 350 kilometers from where I am living. No matter, I was committed.
Going into the last turn of the race with 100 yards to go sitting in the top 20 spots, two guys crash to the floor…
The Mulholland Challenge has proven to be one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. It is a 108 mile cycling race through the Santa Monica mountains of Southern California involving 11,500 feet of climbing with grades often over 6% and reaching 18%. Also on this particular day, the weather peaked at 105 degrees to make things that much more exciting. Here is a great quote from the people that put on this masochistic event…