The Unwritten Rules of Cycling

Ah, quarantine! With all this discussion about “social distancing,” I’ve learned I need to take some time and reorganize all the clutter in my apartment and make it look like a habitable living space again. In doing so, though, I’ve had to find something to do with all five of my bikes. My partner, who’s stuck in quarantine with me, remarked to me, “have you ever thought that you don’t need five whole bikes?” to which I responded, “absolutely not.” I thought, since I’ve taken the time to dust them off and reorganize them in their pile in my bedroom, that it would be nice to share my collection and hopefully explain my attachment to each. I don’t have them in any particular order, but rather the order in which I see them in my room while making this list.

 

1. 2019 Cannondale Scalpel SE

This bike, being the most recent addition to the family, is something I’ve been saving up for a while to get. According to my manager at The Bicycle Shop who helped me with the purchase, it’s “the bike for Rothrock.” It’s a cross-country mountain bike, meaning it’s designed to cover long distances and climb well, but it’s also beefed out with an extra 20mm of suspension front-and-rear to handle more technical terrain. I try to ride this bike at least 50 miles a week, especially since this will be what I take out for the Wilderness 101 and the Shenandoah 100 later this summer.

 

2. 2019 Cannondale CAAD12

This is my other high-mileage beast that I’ve had since Summer 2018. Another Cannondale, this bike has an interesting allure in that it’s not made out of carbon fiber like most modern race bikes, opting instead for a more traditional aluminum tubing. Cannondale has long been regarded as a champion of lightweight aluminum, putting their CAAD (Cannondale Advanced Aluminum Design) models out with the exact same geometry as their ultra-light SuperSix EVO carbon bikes, some of which being the lightest production bikes ever made. The big problem with carbon, though, is that it’s painfully fragile, and a single crash could render the bike a pile of splintered shards of composite that can’t be repaired (at least not cheaply). I like having this stress-free bike to race in the sometimes clumsy pelotons of the collegiate circuit.

3. The Hipstermobile

If there’s any bike I own that screams “I miss 2014 because that’s when people cared that I had a beard,” it would be this one. This puppy is tricked out in all sorts of hip, vintage tech, and it’s the bike on which I generally commute every day. For a drivetrain, it’s running a 1964 Sturmey-Archer 3-speed hub, a shifting mechanism that’s been around since 1938. I built the bike specifically with that component in mind, and the rest of the parts came to me through a search for the most hipster-esque look I could manage. I managed to get some super silly Nitto cruiser handlebars and a porteur rack capable of carrying only the snootiest bags of french-press-ground coffee and cases of craft IPAs (someday). Not pictured are the gorgeous Hanjo fenders I used to complete the build and also protect my butt and shins from the rain.

4. The Danger Bike (1995 Cannondale F400)

“Adam, why do you have that scar on your right hand?” That’s a great question. To explain that, just imagine the bike to the left hauling it down one of the steepest trails in Rothrock because of a dare. It didn’t go so well. Really, though, I love this thing dearly. I found the frame sitting on a curb around the end of the summer, and I built the rest of the bike up with parts from scrap and generous coworkers. The result is a somewhat bastardized recreation of an entry-level 90’s all-terrain bike. It has two completely different brakes, there are two too few gears on the front, and I had to give the rear inserts for the wheel a bit of a stretch (danger!), but it’s been a trusty commuter ever since its inception otherwise. My one grievance with it at the moment is that I put a Shimano Silent Clutch rear hub on it, so there’s no freewheel noise to alert pedestrians that I’m coming.

 

5. The Other Danger Bike (Marinoni Steel Frame with Recalled Spinergy Wheels)

Now, this bike really screams danger! While, in the opinion of many within the community, this is a really badass looking bike, it has one big issue: the wheels were recalled only shortly after I was born. The eight flat spokes on each wheel are razor sharp, and anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in a crash with one of these bikes can get hurt pretty badly. There are multiple cases of pro riders in the 90’s injuring extremities because of the spokes, and certain development lots were prone to exploding spontaneously under the weight of the rider. Thankfully, though, I got a set from a coworker that has been ridden for thousands of miles without issue, which leads me to believe with some confidence that I’ll be fine if I ride them. I still don’t do it often, though, and I definitely don’t ride it in groups. It’s more of a novelty to me than a good ride, especially since early carbon fiber wheels were painfully stiff.

For Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, the next few weeks promised a smorgasbord of epic, gritty road races through the cobbles of Western Europe. Every year, crowds span the roads between Paris and Roubaix and Ghent and Wevelgem (and many other hard-to-pronounce Dutch towns) to watch pro roadies in their early season as they brave stiff headwinds, horrendous road conditions and short, steep climbs. This excitement has been shunted, however, by the abrupt cancellation/postponement of the entire Spring Classic calendar effective immediately because of the spread of novel coronavirus.

For most, this seemed inevitable. After the rapid spread of the virus through Italy, many knew the fate of the Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy) was going to be canned for the first time since the second World War because of its massive spread across the entire region, but many also didn’t account for how races would be faring farther up North. To ensure international safety, the entire pro peloton has been sent home until this pandemic can subside. Of course, these racers all have significantly more respiratory capacity than most healthy adults, so they would effectively face no harm; however, these races are attended and viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, and it’s pretty hard to match the no-audience tactics of stadium-bound sports when races will sometimes pass right through fans’ neighborhoods. In other words, someone is bound to risk the health and safety of their town in order to get a good look at the beautiful glisten of Peter Sagan’s beard.

Because I’m optimistic, I would be willing to think most events after mid-summer are going to be okay, but nobody can be certain. The Tour de France starts right at the beginning of July, and a serious impact could be made on the sport as a whole if such a massive event ends up being canceled. At this point, it’s only a matter of waiting to see how Europe continues to respond to the epidemic. Italy and Spain have both banned leisure cycling altogether on the roads in an effort to keep people inside as much as possible, and most of Western Europe is sure to follow suit if issues progress into a more drastic phase. Ultimately, though, cyclists are in mourning because, regardless, the pros are already off the roads for the foreseeable future, and it’s going to take a good deal of time for any races to return to the WorldTour calendar.

 

Coming to the mountain biking world from a firm half-decade on the road, I knew I wasn’t prepared to hop straight into a new lifestyle of ‘hucking gnar to the max’ without taking baby steps. I have a lot of training in long, disciplined endurance events, and the idea of shuttling a van to the top of a hill and fueling myself with Red Bull was entirely foreign to what I know and love about the culture of riding bikes. I have a lot of love for the feeling of covering ground on my own, and I just wanted to add some dirt into my life to spice things up beyond the bland tarmac that successfully bored me off the road. I’ve found myself sticking to cross-country mountain biking for now, which is a more race-oriented style of riding that focuses mostly on speed, flow, and putting out lots of power on a lightweight bike. The biggest problem with this, however, is that I live in Central Pennsylvania, and my closest trails are the radical, unkempt rock gardens of Rothrock State Forest. It’s a fantastic place to ride, but XC bikes aren’t exactly designed to chomp through terrain like this without hemorrhaging speed. Therefore, it’s important for me to make up momentum as much as I can between nasty bits in order to avoid walking like a quitter.

 

Coming up on a rock garden or massive drop, it’s hard to think that the carbon fiber bike beneath me (with tubing that’s 2 millimeters thick) could ever end up on the other side unscathed. There are just too many jagged edges and too much evolutionary danger detection within my nerves to feel comfortable plowing through, but I’ve learned that momentum is ultimately my friend. I’ve learned that a lot of mountain bikers find success in stopping their overthinking, and this can override that pesky sense of self-preservation. They charge into tech like this at an absurd speed, and they’re ironically the ones who make it across these features the most intact. Sure, there’s still technique beyond just putting the hammer on the pedals, but confidence is key. I feel like there’s some level of deactivation in the fear centers of the brain present here, which isn’t very helpful for most other facets of life, but perfectly appropriate when we haven’t quite evolved to understand bike physics at the foundation level. Bikes have a strong tendency to just keep freakin’ going forward, and it always impresses me to see someone stay upright when they ride through everything Rothrock employs to keep featherweights like me scared out of our minds.

Growing up in State College, I used to think bike theft was a myth outside of behemoth cities and foreign countries. I’m going to avoid sounding like a curmudgeon when I say that ‘things have changed,’ but I’m finding myself to be more and more incorrect in the past year or so as I get closer and closer to victims of bike theft on campus. In America, a bike is stolen every 30 seconds, and I finally had the closest possible encounter with the crime this past weekend after I carefully hid my bike behind the Millennium Science Complex to see my partner, Sage, at work. I didn’t have a lock on me because I was returning from a ride, so I did my best to make the muddy mess look as inconspicuous as possible. Truth be told, though, it’s hard to make a $5000 cross-country racer look like any other random hunk o’ junk on campus. I was inside for only 15 minutes, and I came back out to the damning realization that my bike’s parking spot was now vacant. I felt like I had lost a child, and my blood was boiling.

After a good few minutes enveloped in an existential crisis, Sage encouraged me to give scavenger hunting a try for the evening, and they gave me their bike to scour every nook and cranny on campus. I searched for an hour and a half, riding from the HUB to each residence hall and doubling back empty-handed. We had checked all four major dorms on campus, and I was starting to feel deep in my gut that I had lost my brand-new bike for good. I was starting to feel nauseous, and I nearly passed out as stress hormones pumped through my brain like water through a plugged garden hose. Thankfully, though, the ‘denial’ stage of grief is much more persistent in me than that, and I decided to scan the North side of campus again. I looked everything over again, rode by the Nittany Lion Inn, and decided there that I should just go home.

As I was heading back on Fischer Road, I was telling myself that it would take a miracle to find my Cannondale again. I wasn’t really looking for it anymore, and I felt defeated like I never had before. Suddenly, though, as I was riding past the parking deck on Fischer, I noticed a single light flickering in a bike parking area inside the building, and I could just barely make out the tan-walled tires of my Scalpel leaning against the wall. It’s as if it were calling out to me, seeing me ride past and using some divine force to grab my attention. I ran inside, and, wildly enough, the imbecile who took it left it in a wide open space, unlocked, and took off for somewhere else. Perhaps they were looking for a better hiding spot, but that speculation isn’t important to me beyond this point. I beat ridiculous odds and brought my bike back from what would have surely been the quickest $50 eBay sale of all time, and I still can’t wrap my head around how lucky I am to be writing this as the MacGuffin of this story sits next to my bed unscathed. I talked to campus police right after my incident to get an insider’s look at what might have happened through security footage, and they told me they had been following the thief on security cameras for around half an hour while I searched. He was obviously a student who lives on campus, not being able to take the bike into his dorm and opting instead to keep the bike moving throughout the evening.

 

If there’s anything I’ve taken away from this night, it’s the realization that bike theft is a serious, real crime on campus. I’ve tested fate too much with my theory that people don’t steal bikes in State College, and it nearly cost me gravely. If I’m going to salvage anything from this, I hope that my idiocy can help provide a real-world example of what otherwise sounds like a crime ripped from a kid’s cartoon. Thankfully, we’re still not in a big city where experts recommend using two D-locks to secure each wheel, but a lock through the frame on campus would be plenty to deter any potential thieves from picking your bike first. It’s not about making your bike untouchable, but rather making it unattractive. I didn’t have any way of bringing a lock with me in this particular story, but I probably would have opted to stay out of a situation like this again in the future by just going straight home. It was a stressful evening, and I feel like I’ve really been dealt the best hand possible for this situation. I wouldn’t anticipate having this luck a second time.

Sometimes, especially when the winter starts to get pretty rough, I find a lot of people giving me an odd look when I clamber into a room on campus or at a cafe with a helmet in my arms. This typically happens when there’s a fresh layer of snow outside, because people deduce pretty quickly that I just rode there in that. It’s a strange feeling, because I can’t ever tell whether people are looking at me in awe of my commitment to getting around everywhere via bicycle, or if they think I’m an imbecile. My family prefers the latter, but I try not to let that faze me too badly, because I know they’re just concerned about how I get my kicks sometimes. Doing the Traffic Tango with cars that are 20 times my weight every morning is a much more potent wake-up ritual than a cup (or several) of coffee, but it’s becoming a way of life for me, and I’m finding that it gives me a lot of ideas about how I should be living my life as a whole.

1. I can’t teleport places instantly; nobody can.

For a lot of people, driving somewhere acts as a transition between events, especially when it’s a daily commute. We have a tendency to use this time as empty space, and we sometimes forget that it takes time to get places. It makes people impatient when something disrupts this space, which can help to explain why 80% of all drivers have expressed significant anger behind the wheel. As a cyclist, I see every commute as a unique experience, and I’m willing to let things cost me a few seconds. While this sounds small, I’ve found it allows me to start my day with much less anxiety about running late for things, and I’m able to hold myself more responsible if I don’t make it somewhere on time.

2. I’ve been lucky in the past, but I won’t live forever.

Hundreds of cyclists die each year on their way to/from work. I’ve had my fair share of close calls with cars passing too close or ice patches getting the better of me, and it’s given me a very small, manageable amount of existential dread. While this would be a deal-breaker for most reasonable people, I see this as a way to make life a little bit more poignant for me. I know some half-witted student could end up trading my life for a Snapchat notification as 9 people are killed by distracted drivers every day, and it makes me rearrange my priorities when I consider what I should really be worried about in day-to-day life. I don’t very easily get stressed out about small things like assignments for school or social pressures, because I have a general gratefulness for being alive that allows me to see those everyday stresses as a reminder that I’m still here.

3. When you do something for long enough, it becomes your way of life.

Every time I get a ride to class from a friend, I feel genuinely strange. Being carted across campus in the blissful incubation of a heated car feels like a luxury to me, not because I don’t have a car, but because it feels like a special treat. With this, though, I feel like my whole day’s schedule is upended when I have to get a ride back to my apartment, or walk (gasp!). When people tell me it’s not normal to be riding my bike everywhere, I feel the need to remind them that it’s only abnormal for them, because I’ve gotten to a point at which I can’t imagine myself getting around town any other way. I know people who will take this to extremes by biking everywhere (including inter-state journeys), but I’ve decided the daily commute is enough to stimulate me and keep me active year-round. I don’t do it to spite anyone, and I certainly don’t do it to make anyone else late for work; rather, I simply have an enjoyment for starting my day with a little adventure as often as I can, and I think it could transform how other people start their days, too.

Ah, Spring! It’s a time of growth, a time of warmth, and a time of breaking out from the cocoons into which we’ve locked ourselves for the past half year. Many students take this time to get things tidied up for the summer, while some take advantage of their newfound ability to get inebriated without dying of hypothermia on the crawl home. In a way, especially as a townie, the latter is a sight familiar enough that it brings me excitement by association: more drunk kids in the streets means winter is nearly over!

Now, it’s only January, so it might sound like wishful thinking to be obsessing over the sight of green this early, but the Cycling Club needs time to get ready for the racing season as it starts up right after Spring Break. The Eastern Collegiate Cycling Conference (ECCC) starts up with races in March and April, giving everyone the perfect warm-up for a big summer of more intense events. As a whole, collegiate racing exists primarily to be fun, which is a wonderful break from the dangerous burnout potential provided by most serious weekend warriors. Races are usually not taken too seriously, and prizes aren’t usually awarded for performance in a single race, but it’s always a nice break to be racing against a full peloton of similarly financially disadvantaged college kids instead of a brigade of dentists. This provides a nice level playing field for people to spar with each other, and it really catches the attention of Team USA.

Another unique element provided by collegiate cycling is a more well-rounded team dynamic. Predictably, students are separated into teams based on their schools, and, unlike most professional circuits, it’s important for each school to have pretty good results across the board with each of its racers, in contrast to a professional team that might have half a dozen men working for the victory of one chosen leader. It promotes teamwork and cooperation in a sport that requires an absurd amount of it, and it’s helping a community grow that otherwise isn’t very popular among younger Americans (thanks, Lance).  It’s an opportunity for people to goof off on bikes, watch their friends make each other hurt, and appreciate a sport that deserves a reboot in our culture. Penn State’s team is extremely excited to make its way into this coming season, and we even have hopes of taking home the ECCC Cup at the end of the year, which is an experience we’ve missed having for a while.