Anthem Cycling Blog

The much anticipated Holiday Event of the Holiday Season which hasn’t even started is just around the corner!

That’s right folks, thanks to the special people over there at Bike Gallery and Global Events Group, we have a “GO” for Bike Night! If I weren’t holding firm to my belief that using “epic” as an adjective must be reserved for near death (epic = almost died) experiences only, I’d say “it’s gonna be epic”. Then again, I won’t be there and this is Portland so who knows what’ll happen. I’d encourage you all to have a slightly less than epic time, but turn this thing into a seriously crazy fun experiment that will make it a MUST DO Portland Bike Tradition.

Detail, details I know, I’m getting to it…

Alright, here’s the scoop.

Location: Portland International Raceway if you haven’t been there, you need to watch more cyclocross. If you have been there and don’t remember how you got there, you might be watching too much cyclocross. But if either are the case, click on the fancy link above and type in your address.

Transportation:

1. You are encouraged to ride your bicycle to the event. HOWEVER, you don’t have to. Some people are coming from quite a distance for this little shin-dig so I say, drive there, park in the parking lot, unload your chariot and enjoy the festivities.

2. Take MAX. Throw your bikes on MAX and take it to Delta Park. You can coast to the entrance from there.

3. RIDE RIDE RIDE!!! If you’re fortunate enough to live close enough, burly enough to ride from far away or have any other previously unstated reasons, you should ride your bike over. To make things easier, the lovely people at PIR have decided to open the gate on the SE side of the property along the leve for easier access. Don’t know where that is? Well, frankly I don’t either but I’ve asked an expert to write in on the comment section with specific directions. I hear it’s much easier if you riding over to come in that way.

Cost: Like the flyer says, $5 per person and under 13 is free. You can’t afford not to come.

Decoration: Should you decorate your bike, yourself, your child, your trailer, your freak flag? Yup. You better. I mean, it’s not mandatory or anything but at least put a Rudolph’s nose on little Jane or something. Will there be a contest for best decorated whatever you have? Nope, but I hope next year there will be.

Vendors: Verboten! yeah, seriously folks, you can’t buy or sell anything in PIR. Part of some big time agreement and if that’s the worst of our issues, we’re doing pretty well. HOWEVER, (looking ahead as I often do) there is the opportunity to next year have samplers and free stuff like Hot Chocolate and Coffee (Chris King are you listening), maybe some soup and such? Could be good, think it over.

Media: This is my weak effort at asking people to take pictures and video and send them to me. Alas, I cannot attend. I will be somewhere in Illinois or Iowa transporting my 70 pound Chocolate Lab home from his vacation in NY. I’ve missed him and unfortunately it’s the only time I can rescue him. So PLEASE, send whatever you’ve got and I’ll post it here. Send STORIES! I want to hear what you all did before after during, legal, illegal, questionable or down right not quite sure, I want the whole vicarious experience and next year, I’m in!

Alright, I’m leaving out a bunch of stuff but I’ll follow it up with more posts. Please comment any questions or things I might have forgotten.

HEY, Post a rendezvous if you’re riding over. It would be great to see some huge groups show up at the same time!

Peace to you all, ride safe as always and enjoy one another!

ba

What exactly is Anthem Cycling?

This is a question I often have to ask myself. The simple answer is to state what it is at the current point in time. It’s a solution. It’s a way for companies to have their own custom Bike Share program to encourage their employees to explore alternative forms of transportation, go out on group rides, get some exercise or even just run some lunch time errands. Here’s a little overview I’ve thrown together that you may find informative.

If you’d like to find out how Bike Share can work at your company, drop me a line at: brian@anthemcycling.com

I make socks for a living. This is what I tell people, and it is the truth. Beyond that, I am the manager of an extremely large business unit with diverse distribution, consumers and customers that is reliant on technology as much as it is on value.

I am a cyclist. I ride 37 miles one way to work as often as I can. I used to own many bicycles and now I ride my cyclocross bike everywhere, which is to say more with less. I ride to get there, and to see what is between here and there and I ride to break my own legs, and find places where I can hear no cars and see no people.

I am a husband. My love for my wife amplifies my love for the world we live in. I want it to be better for her and it drives me to make small changes along the way. Little tweaks, gentle nudges to the world because I know it’s listening. Adding a bit of positive energy to what sometimes appears to be a very mad world.

While I never truly enjoy my wife being out of town, I did take advantage of my newly found bachelorhood this weekend by putting an end to 5 rideless days.

Saturday morning was nothing spectacular, I got the usual 7:30 wake up call from whichever construction project happens to be going on across the street. You can never quite tell which house, road, lot or randomly parked contractor’s truck the noise is coming from , but you can bet it’s coming, and early. After some brief domestic puttering and way too much coffee, I loaded the car with toys and headed out to the Santa Ana’s to find myself some fire road.

I met a lovely couple at the trailhead who approached the Stumptown as if it were a UFO with a kind of “You kin ride dat ting on dirt?” attitude. Much to their chagrin, I broke the news that I was not affiliated with a “Team” and that I genuinely was just out riding for fun, and yes, on a cross bike.

I headed up to Great Divide road which was a stunning 10 mile climb on beautiful dirt roads like this one

Since my map sucked, as anything you tear out of a local trail guide usually dpes, I crested the ridge and blew passed my turn on a ripping and gripping descent. After about 3 miles I was getting pretty close to a town, and well, that didn’t seem right. I came across a kid lying on the side of the road, waiting for his dad and looking like he’d just given birth to a fully grown something or other. I asked him if I was still on Great Divide “I don’t know”. I’ll save you the torture of the following 8 questions, suffice it to say, the answer was always the same. Finally, I was able to score a major victory by him telling me that Yes, in fact, that is Corona down there. To which my reply was “Shit,  I’m on the wrong side of the range”.

As with most of my journeys, this wrong turn took me down hill, meaning my backtracking would be all uphill and by the time I reached the Great White Testicle in the sky

I was pretty well cracked. It was at this point that I was caught up by the couple I’d seen at the trailhead. The woman continuing with her bravado  about how she usually rides that section (currently pushing her bike up the steepest section) and that my ideas of calling it a day and going surfing for a while was good because “cross training is good”. At this point I was having major flashbacks to trailside conversations in Boulder where you couldn’t stop to take a leak without being asked what you were training for.

So I pointed it down and man, what a ripper. My handling is real mediocre, but I felt pretty damn solid as I cranked the 10 miles back to the car. I stopped briefly to take in a little of this

One last little climb that made me feel like this

Seriously, if it’s possible to take a picture with an iPhone, hurl and ride a bike at the same time, you’re about to witness it.

All in all it was ride full of preemptive nostalgia as I prepare to retire my Stumptown from cross racing and do-everything-ness in favor of my new Ira Ryan cross racing and do-everything-ness-ish bike. Stumpie will be the full time commuter set up and I might even design a special new rack for it, just so it doesn’t feel neglected.

My day ended by being turned away (or rather turning away voluntarily) from a $35 per night campground and making some hippie art

and then catching a few sunset waves at San Onofre

But now it’s time to act like a grown up/working stiff and get ready for another fun filled day of capitalism, product marketing, and day dreams of the next time I get to do this all over again.

The kind folks at PIR have agreed to set aside one night for Bikes Only at their Winter Wonderland holiday lights festival. If you haven’t been before, the Portland International Raceway (PIR) in North Portland hosts over two miles of holiday lights that in the past have been accessible only by car, or on their one night specifically for walkers. I was recently contacted by them to help organize a bike night and we were able to get it set up! December 7th at PIR, Bikes Only at Winter Wonderland.

Check out the comments section on Jonathan’s blog, bikeportland.org.

Folks, this is gonna be huge! We want this to become one of THE bicycle events on the Portland calendar that we look forward to every year. We want costumes, decorated bikes, families with trailers and bakfiets, the works.

I’ll have posters/flyers developed and available soon, but I need your help getting the word out. I NEED you to show up! Looking forward to it, and more to follow.

b

I’d been getting super claustrophobic here in the LB. There are zero dirt trails in this entire city for riding. It’s complete crap. So I finally ventured out to explore some of the mountain biking last weekend. I decided on the San Juan trail, having heard it was the best ride in Orange County. I’d give it a 6 out of 10, and that’s generous. There was some of thisa whole lot of switch backs (Yay for switchbacks)…

Some ridiculous views…but just like my LA commute, it’s not always about the ride, but the traffic. I found plenty of that…All in all, it was a beautiful ride that I’ll probably re-visit. But I’m putting away the squishy tail as we’re officially one week from cross season (hooray for cross!). As a solid reminder that I’m completely out of shape and will no doubtedly be a top finisher in the puke-fest on Saturday (the puking, not the riding), I thought I’d put some new rubber on my commuter and return it to dust track. Found some good up, some sketchy down and some very wobbly legs…

With that, I’m off to tune out my jack-ass neighbors who’re screaming and yelling at every first down, incompletion, fumble like it’s the Super Bowl and they’re playing in it. It’s enough to make me want to buy a TV and blast Marry Poppins out the window all night. That’d shut there yapping dog and sports garage up.

Lovin’ the LB.

Anthem’s on the move, er rather, moved about 7 months ago and is just now getting back to the blog. But yes, I left what some people consider a mountain paradise of Boulder, CO and car-free living; for the rat race madness of Southern California. Yep, I traded up big-time! The only way I can say this is because what CO lacked was my fiance, and what Long Beach had, was her. So now I’ve got it all.

My commute has gone from looking like this…to something more along the lines of this…

Yep, that’s me over there on the right, livin my life on “the 405″. It’s taken 6 months, but I feel like I’m officially part Californian now that I call my interstates by “the”. I’ve never been a fan of “the 5″ or “the 90″, but this simple omission was enough to cause more confusion than I cared to deal with in my daily asking of direction. So now I’m a “the”.

But on the bright side of all this, it’s a great thing for Anthem Cycling and BikeShare. Previously, I was contented to sit up on my high horse in Portland thinking that LA was married to their cars by choice and if they wanted to have a bike culture, they could. Same thing in Boulder, but that doesn’t really count because, well, it’s Boulder. It’s over there near Colorado.

But now, being a full fledged LA commuter I can honestly say, I was wrong. I know, stop the press, it’s only happened once or twice, today, but I really was wrong. LA’s a city built around a car and sadly, closing in on 2010, it hasn’t changed all that much. There are some good things going on in public transit, but they’re slow. For now, I’ve decided to do my best to commute at least once a week by bike from Long Beach. It’s 37 miles one way without a shower at work, so it’s a bit of an effort. But I get to see some things, some really amazing things. Some good, some not so good, some down right disturbing. I’ll do my best to get those logged on here with some regularity and hopefully it’ll provide some cheap entertainment.

In BikeShare news, adidas is still rockin’ their Green fleet and hopefully going to grow in the coming year. GoLite is still learning how to uni, bless their Boulder Hearts and I’ve got some new help enlisted, so before long we should see some real updates on here, not just my most recent city.

More soon,

Enjoy your ride.

ba

I am excited to announce today that adidas in Portland, OR has signed on with Anthem for maintenance of their BikeShare fleet. Entering in their third year of a very successful program, we will be providing full quarterly maintenance on the fleet of 10 KHS Green bikes that their employees are using for commuting, recreation and exercise.

Here’s a photo from one of the department group rides last summer. adidas has found that grabbing a bunch of bikes and riding out to grab lunch or have an off-site meeting is an excellent way of bring a team together, having some fun and even getting some work done that avoids conference rooms…Here’s the fleet, built and locked up safe and sound in their parking structure…

While Idaho makes many wonderful contributions to the NW and to me has always represented somewhat of a gateway to different worlds (driving through on the way to Oregon, Utah or Montana depending on the trip) it’s progressive mind-set toward stop signs is what really sets it apart.

No, seriously, stop signs. A while back (’07 I think) Idaho adopted a very simple law for cyclists and stop signs, treat them like Yield signs. Cyclists are more aware of their surroundings and lets face it, everytime you pull up to a four way with other cars around you, you’re faced with that dilemna, follow the law, or do the safest thing. Generally, depending on where you live, you’ll get people waving you on when they actually would have the technical right of way. You get the person on your right deferring to you, the one across from you wants to wait but the one on your left is antsy as hell. And if you’re a frame stand stopper, oh just forget it, people have NO IDEA what to do with that. You might as well be riding naked with a machine gun on your handle bars because all the sudden people are like “holy crap, what’s he gonna do!”

Anyway, where I’m going with this, is the BTA in Portland has decided to adopt “The Idaho Stop Law”. You can read all about it at bikePortland.org

I came across some photos from my time in China this summer. While most people are riding out of necessity rather than recreation, you’ve gotta give them some serious cred for how burly some of the loads they carry are.

We also took a little recreation time cruising around Hangzhou on the China equivalent of BikeShare.