Everyone has their own reason for starting cycling. Whether it’s to improve fitness, build muscle or lose weight, many people start with a certain goal in mind. However, although the physical benefits are widely documented, what is often forgotten is how much it can benefit our mental health too.
Didn’t we just have a monthly bike thread?
Questions:
Can the National Parks system build cross-nation bike trails?
Is there any organization pushing for this that I could join and support?
National cross-country trails would not only benefit our citizens but would be an attraction that would bring in visitors from around the world. It would promote the development of mom and pop business that would be needed to support the bikers.
I’ll call when the ice has melted from our driveway....which has been present since our surprise Dec. 29 snowfall.
A few months ago, while bicycling, I saw a hungry fox sniffing a trashcan and then eating some crap on the grass. So the next morning I brought two leftover meatballs. But then all there were was a bunch of hungry geese. So I ate the meatballs. Now today I saw a lot less geese at the same place, after I ate their meatballs...
Here is a sad but interesting story. About a doctor who could easily afford a high price car but instead rode a bicycle , no doubt for his enjoyment but also his good health.... RIP.
ER doctor hit, stabbed while riding bike died at O.C. hospital where he saved livesMammone had been riding his bicycle north on Pacific Coast Highway when he was hit from behind by a car, according to authorities.The driver, 39-year-old Long Beach resident Vanroy Evan Smith, got out of his white Lexus and stabbed Mammone repeatedly with a knife, officials said.
When I was growing up I had a Schwinn that lasted 10 years. It was still in full operating condition when I passed it on.
Since retiring I’ve been through 3 walmart bikes that need constant attention, tires won’t even hold air...
...how do they get way with that?
It was created by a rich guy named Luciano Nicolis, who collected a lot of stuff, some of it a bit odd. Classic cars, motorcycles, typewriters, cameras, musical instruments, ... and bicycles. I guess he got tired of paying to have all the stuff warehoused so he built a museum around it to make it pay for itself.
From the advertisement that I saw I thought it was mostly cars, but when I got to the floor that had all the bicycles in it, there was a side-by-side line of bikes in the middle of the room that had the complete evolution of the road bike on display. At one end was a Draisine and at the other end was a carbonfiber Bianchi with 10-sp Campy Record Ergo. And in between was every major technical innovation in the history of the bicycle, all arranged in the order of invention.
It literally was the evolutionary tree of the road bike.
A Draisine, likely a replica, but still ....
After the Draisine they added a steering head. After the steering head they added pedal power. Then brakes. Then derailleurs, three speeds up to 10 (this was some years ago, before 11, 12 or 13-sp). If it happened, it's here.
Front-wheel drive and rear-wheel drive. Direct drive (high-wheeler/penny-farthings), bellcrank drive, chain drive, belt drive, and shaft drive.
Solid tires, pneumatic tires, airless tires; wooden rims and metal rims.
They had one bike wearing Tullio Campagnolo's original quick releases. And if you know Campy history, you know that's how he got into bicycle components.
And the derailleurs! There must have been a dozen crazy designs and operation methods before the 1951 Campy articulating parallelogram shifter.
A 4-sp derailleur with the control lever mounted on the drive side seat tube. The rider would have to bend down and reach around his leg to twist the lever and shift gears.
A 1947 Bianchi with a 4-sp Campy rear derailleur. One lever steers the shifter cage, which moves the chainline. There's no jockey wheel to maintain chain tension so it has a second lever to allow sliding the axle fore or aft in the dropout.
HdG wouldn't allow derailleurs in the TdF until 1937 (said he didn't want it to become about the bike) so shifter technology didn't really take off until after that.
This next one was my favorite thing on display. They have a bicycle that doesn't have gears but its back wheel has a sprocket on both sides (Hodaka, anybody?). The small gear is for flat roads and the big one is for the mountains. The reason that seemingly primitive innovation was so noteworthy was that the whole time I had been interested in bicycles, I had been reading that this set-up was why cycling shorts traditionally are black.
In order to turn the wheel around and use the sprocket on the other side, you first had to un-ship the chain with your hand. And grease from the chain would get on your hand. So unless you wanted grease on your handlebar tape, you had to wipe it on something. And the shorts were the obvious choice.
So if shorts weren't already black they'd soon get that way. So just make them black to start with.
Notice there's also a sprocket on the non-drive side of the back wheel. Looks about 15-16t on the drive side and maybe 20-22 on the non.
I'd been searching for one of these for so long I was beginning to think it was a myth. Yet here it is, on a 1925 Bianchi.
If you're interested but can't make it to Italy right away, check out their website: https://www.museonicolis.com/en/category/bicycles/
The rider was Valentin Ferron and it was the second stage of the Etoile de Bessèges. They neutralized the stage, not because of Ferron's close call but because of the massive pile-up on the bridge.
There's no estimate of how high the drop was but the commentator said "not short," so I don't know if that means his life was in danger.
There's video of the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMXfJfBP7Fo
I have a Marin East Peak Aluminum Mountain bike....It’s old but in great shape.
1. The longest “tandem” bicycle seated 35 people, it was more than 20 meters long
2. You can fit about 15 bicycles in the same space that one car occupies
3. It is 20 times cheaper to maintain a bicycle than a car
4. If the number of cyclists was tripled, the rate of motorist-bicyclist accidents would be cut in half
5. The world manufactures about 100 million bikes each year
6. Bicycle delivery services have become a significant industry over the last 30 years
7. The word “bicycle” was not coined until the 1860s
8. The Tour de France was established in 1903
9. China boasts more than a half billion bicycles
10. In America, people use their bikes for one out of every hundred trips
11. The fastest bicyclist is American rider, John Howard
12. There are twice as many bicycles in the world than cars
It takes time for a ghost bicycle to be placed. I know of one that was placed almost a year to the day after the tragic accident. I thought they missed it but then it was finally placed.