Friday Fun Bags

Well another week has slipped by like grains of sand through the sun bleached toes of time: slighty crusty and a little worse for the wear. Some local folks have kicked off their racing seasons and some Boontastic folks have completed their international takeovers.

As I have said before, the Spring Classics are my favorite time of year for road biking competitions, and this year the classics have been pretty exciting, because, in small part, the camera coverage from vehicles crammed onto old cart paths. The Vlandaren, and the Paris-Rubaix, and the Ardennes, and the Fleche, and all the others have inspired me to do a little cobble reconnaissance of my own here in hilly Pittsburgh.

The process of exploring has piqued my interest in road biking. As I have also mentioned earlier, although I enjoy riding bicycles on roads, I am not a road racing fan, I've never raced road bikes, and I have a heavy skepticism of bicycle rides during which a car needs to precede or follow the actual bicycles.

I do recognize that the majority of skinny tire racers will never train with a vehicle supporting them; but I think it's worthwhile to note that at the very top of the sport, in the painted clear coat of the polished toenails in the sand, training with a car seems to be the norm. Part of why you see so many automobiles when watching a bicycle race is the sponsorship money I suppose. This year Trek is combining with Radioshack and Nissan. BMC and Acura are all tied up and at one point there was VW, and Renault, and Subaru, and all the others. The money from the auto companies is helping to increase exposure of cycling. And it has always been that way.

Here is Pennsylvania, with tempers rising over a recent road law that requires vehicles to grant 4 feet of berth when passing cyclists, there just doesn't seem to be a way that we can all get along. I feel like I wrote about this before. Oh well, hang on.

OK, that feels better. Do you like the idea of not being stuck, in traffic, or anywhere else is life. Check out the following little video that has been making the rounds. Based on this little piece of motion imagery Clint Reynolds is definitely not stuck anywhere, and with a couple creative modes of transportation available to him, he's able to get out into the woods and boost some huge jumps. Cheers.