Pedal Fest 2016

Pedal Moraine Cycle & Fitness

1421 S. Main St., West Bend

(262) 338-2453

March Badness

Here’s a shot of some trees in my back yard when the temperature was just 18° and there was fresh snow on ground. A Christmas memory? No, I took this picture today at 7:30 a.m. Forget about riding on the Eisenbahn State Trail for the next few days, and add another week before there’s any chance of the mountain bike trails opening. At least the roads should be available again by tomorrow … probably.

You Say You Want A Revolution?

It's been done.

Here’s something I never thought I would see: dissent and disaffection within the highest ranks of bicycle advocacy. It seems the Washington DC-based lobbyist group known as the League of American Bicyclists is now too mainstream for Dave Cieslewicz, Executive Director of the Wisconsin Bike Fed. The advocacy process is too staid, its results too incremental. Cieslewicz voiced his frustration earlier this week and, for what my approval is worth, I applaud him for showing such courage. That’s not to say I concur on every point; I’m just glad to see someone within the advocacy community who is willing to break the tacit agreement not to find fault with another’s work.

I’m going to repeat something I said before: the first priority of the League of American Bicyclists is its own perpetuation. Its business is not better bicycling, but bicycle advocacy itself. As long as money is being spent and bicycle infrastructure is being built, then the League is happy in its work. Whether its efforts actually lead to more bicycling is completely incidental.

I want you to imagine a world in which all of the League’s dreams are realized. Put protected bike lanes on every inch of American roads and bike share stations on every street corner. Welcome bikes aboard every bus, train and ferry to create that multi-modal commute that so many of us are dying to make. Strike down every law that requires helmet use or bike licensing or other “barriers” to entry. What then?

Then comes the farcical, because the practical and the fanciful still will have failed to deliver a significant bump in ridership. Then the problem is that bicycling is still too hard and too slow. It has become safe enough, but who wants to ride in bad weather or up hills? What we need are climate-controlled tubes, a Habitrail for our electric motor-assisted bikes. Why, it would be just like an above-ground subway, but we’ll be getting exercise! And why is riding a bicycle such a white male-dominated activity? What we need are incentives to attract more women. Wait … not just women, but women of color. No, wait … not just women of color, but economically disadvantaged women of color. No, scratch that: physically-challenged military veterans of Inuit descent. For the love of God, how can we get more physically-challenged military veterans of Inuit descent to ride bikes?

Obviously, I’m having a little fun but the point is that the advocacy community will never be satisfied. Why should it be? It’s playing this game with somebody else’s money. None of its initiatives actually have to work, which is why it’s so hard to find reliable statistics that link infrastructure and legislation to changes in ridership. Don’t talk to me about 300% increases when your town started with 1 bike commuter and spent millions to attract 3 more. And how’s that bike share network treating you now that the private company charged with its administration has gone bankrupt and your city is operating it at a loss with tax revenue? The advocacy community will tell you that all public transit operates at a loss, therefore bicycling should have the same right to be a drag on your resources.

You say you want a revolution? Let me tell you about one that we had more than 200 years ago. It was organized and prosecuted by the wealthiest men in the country, who at the end of the Declaration of Independence said, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” That’s what they risked. What does the bike advocacy community risk? Not its fortunes, but yours.

A real revolution in bike advocacy would focus on increasing ridership directly. Instead of infecting the public with fear and then curing it with infrastructure, why not emphasize that bicycling is already very safe, very affordable, and, for many people, a legitimate alternative to other forms of transportation? We know that the roads get safer as more people ride. We can infer that as more people ride, more people will demand infrastructure improvements where they are truly needed. Let patterns of use dictate construction parameters, rather than undertaking construction with nothing more than an assumption of need. Work on legislation that preserves access to public streets and protects cyclists but also expects cyclists to conduct themselves safely and lawfully. Educate motorists instead of demonizing them, but when their intentional or negligent actions harm cyclists, then demand justice from law enforcement agencies, district attorneys and judges and make the public aware of the results so that it, in turn, may judge on election day. In such ways does an advocacy group represent its constituents and not merely its own interests.

We all want to change the world, and often the best first step is to change ourselves. The League of American Bicyclists is the conventional face of advocacy. It’s not likely to change. But a more militant stance from the Wisconsin Bike Fed isn’t the solution; solving real problems for real people is. Whether those solutions impress the rest of the advocacy community shouldn’t matter.

Wiouwash-out

This morning I traveled to Oshkosh for the Fox Valley Bike Sale. It was a well-run, well-attended event at the Sunnyview Expo Center, site of one of my favorite cyclocross races in 2015. I was in the market for tires—very specific tires—but I left the sale empty-handed. Carpool partner Jeff Wren did OK though, finding several items he needed.

It was a warm and sunny afternoon, so we left the bike sale and headed 3 miles down the street to the Wiouwash State Trail. Neither Jeff nor I had ever ridden it, but we had our cyclocross bikes with us and our plan was to travel north to the trail’s end at Hortonville. That would have been 36 miles round-trip. Unfortunately, we soon realized that the trail was still soft and wet in many places, and very tough going. My solo ride on the Eisenbahn earlier this week gave me hope that the unpaved rec trails in the area were all firm enough to ride, but the Wiouwash was a mess. Frustrated, we abandoned the north-south Wiouwash as soon as we reached the east-west Friendship Trail. But the latter also was soft, so in turn we abandoned it in favor of local roads. With not too much further trouble we felt our way back to the trailhead from which we had started. Our 27 miles were slow and, at times, sloppy. Still, it was better than a day on the turbo trainer!

The Wiouwash deserves another look. I will wait until I know it’s dry and I will begin in the heart of Oshkosh to see the trail in its entirety. Today’s ride missed the section along Lake Butte des Morts, which must be its most scenic feature.

Edge, But Not Cutting Edge

I just know that this is going to be a great week. Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico will give me something to watch over breakfast, temperatures in the 50s and maybe even the 60s will motivate me to rack up some miles on my bike in the afternoons, and Daylight Saving Time will return in the middle of the night on March 13, adding a usable hour to the end of the day. Was it just two nights ago that I drove to work on snow-covered roads? Spring gets turned on tomorrow as if someone were throwing a switch, and hopefully we will see no more of winter.

I’m ready. In fact, I’m armed with better technology as the 2016 cycling season begins in earnest. On Friday, before the snow came, I did my first ride with my new GPS device. My old Garmin Edge 200 died near the end of a ride last weekend. I tried all sorts of things to get it to respond/reset, but nothing worked. Whatever went wrong, I think the battery was OK. But the device is 3 years old and has seen a lot of use, so I’m not horribly disappointed if it has reached the end of the road. The 200 is a very basic unit anyway and lately I have been thinking about adding some new dimensions to my training. I’m very interested in Zwift, for example, and it demands things like power and cadence as input. The 200 can’t produce such numbers.

I found a good deal on a new-old-stock Garmin Edge 500. If you’re familiar with the Garmin line, then you know the 500 is far from the latest or greatest device. But it is a big step up from what I had. I would need add-on devices to measure power, cadence, etc., but at least I have those options now. Winter 2015-2016, assuming I can speak of it in the past tense, was a pretty easy one. Next winter might be worse, and if I’m confined indoors for too long I may turn to Zwift for relief. In the meantime I will be happy just to have a couple of additional features and (I hope) more accurate elevation data. The 200 always under-reported my climbing totals and I expect the 500 to do a better job.

I used a stopwatch and MapMyRide to figure out my time, distance and speed for a couple of rides that I did between the death of the 200 and the arrival of the 500. I feel confident in the accuracy of those numbers but I wouldn’t want to resort to that method every day!

A Mileage Record For February

Last month was my all-time best February: 205 miles. If you live in a state with warmer weather—i.e., all of them except Michigan, Minnesota and North Dakota—then 205 miles probably doesn’t sound like a lot. But in Wisconsin it is. And I didn’t even take advantage of Leap Day, as I didn’t feel like battling 20+ mph winds.

In my early years as a cyclist, only freakishly warm weather could tempt me outside in February. Now I try to ride whenever the temperature is at least 32° and the roads are dry. That’s not asking for much, but it’s hit-or-miss. Sometimes the warmest days of February are made unusable by high winds and rapidly melting snow that leaves the roads a wet, gritty mess. All of the miles I have ever ridden in February wouldn’t add up to an average total for one month in summer. Nonetheless, they are important miles because they are outside. They restore my spirits at a time of year when I otherwise would be confined indoors. Here’s the year-by-year breakdown:

2016 – 205
2015 – 50
2014 – 31
2013 – 82
2012 – 137
2011 – 55
2010 – 0
2009 – 25
2008 – 0
2007 – 0
2006 – 0
2005 – 51
2004 – 0

December now has the distinction of my lowest monthly PR: 175 miles, set in 2012. In most seasons I have hit my mileage goal for the year before December arrives, and I’m usually done with my racing calendar. Weather conditions decline, the days are short, and it’s hard to get motivated. By contrast, February—though it’s usually miserable—is a time to work on new goals.

February 29-er

Let’s make February 29 more interesting by reserving for it all of the shenanigans that we typically associate with April 1. “February Fool’s Day” would have the advantage of being four times less frequent than “April Fool’s Day,” which comes too often to catch us off guard. Leave April 1 alone from now on and get to work on February 29 as the new holiday of harmless hijinx.

I’ll get you started.

Did you know that the cycling term “29er” originally had nothing to do with the size of the tire? The 29er was invented—if we can call a refinement of an existing product an invention—by Alan Epstein, an engineering professor at Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York and an uncle of Linda McCartney. (Yes, that Linda McCartney, wife of Paul McCartney of the Beatles from 1969 until her death in 1998.)

As an undergraduate in the early 1940s, Epstein was a member of RIT’s track cycling team. During World War II, RIT’s athletic programs were shut down. Many never came back. Those that did return were given a new nickname: since 1946, the sports teams at RIT have been known as the Tigers. But during Epstein’s letterman days, RIT was the home of the 29ers. The original nickname was a reference to the founding of the college in 1829, in the same way the Philadelphia 76ers and the San Francisco 49ers commemorate the American Revolution and the California Gold Rush, respectively.

In 1968 RIT built a new campus in the suburbs. The school disbanded its track cycling team and the old velodrome was torn down. (The land then sat vacant until 1994 when a new stadium was constructed for Rochester’s minor league baseball team. Today a plaque near the Plymouth Avenue entrance reminds visitors of the velodrome that once occupied the site.) Epstein, by then a full professor, took possession of the school’s track bikes and loaned them out to students for trips around the campus.

As mountain biking was starting to emerge from weirdly cobbled-together machines in northern California, Epstein was fitting knobby tires on some of his old track bikes back in Rochester. Who would want a fixed-gear mountain bike with no brakes, you ask? No one, of course, but Epstein didn’t think of himself as a mountain bike pioneer. His application of knobby tires to a 700c wheel was motivated purely by Rochester’s snowy winters. And the concept proved successful for campus commuting. The visual effect, though, was comedic. Everywhere he went, Epstein was asked, “What is that?” His answer: “That’s an old 29er.” The name stuck, but more than that, it traveled to every part of the country when Epstein’s students went home at the end of their studies. When the style of mountain bike that we now know as the 29er came along, the name was waiting for it. But it’s only a remarkable coincidence. To Epstein there was no correlation between the name and the wheel/tire diameter. His bikes were rolling on very low profile, very low pressure tubular tires that were designed to maximize the contact patch on snow and ice. They were “28ers” at most.

And here’s where you would say, “February Fool’s,” and admit the story is a fabrication … albeit one with enough factual elements to hook your audience. You can read the real history of 29ers at Wikipedia, but I like my story better.

Laatste Ronde

Sven Nys with family and friends at the end of today's race ... the end of a remarkable career.

Today I watched the final race of cyclocross legend Sven Nys. What can you say about someone with these credentials?

 2 UCI World Championships, elite
 2 UCI World Championships, U23
 6 UCI World Cup series titles
50 UCI World Cup race victories
13 Superprestige series titles
 9 Trofee series titles
 9 Belgian national championships

Nys also won 5 national championships in mountain biking and, when he was a kid, 8 national championships in BMX.

Many professional athletes hang on too long and then retire with broken bodies, tarnishing their legacies with greatly diminished performance. Not so with Nys: at 39 he is still one of the best in his profession. It’s sad to see him go but it’s good to see him go in this fashion. He will remain close to the sport and no doubt will continue to inspire new generations of racers.

Here in Washington County we’re making a different kind of transition. We have reached the point of the year at which our afternoon temperature usually is above the freezing mark. On Friday we reached 50° for the first time in 2016 but high winds made the prospect of a bike ride too unpleasant, if not dangerous. At times the winds were holding steady above 30 mph and we had gusts as high as 49 mph. Saturday was a better day for cycling. The air temperature was just a little cooler at 46° but we had plenty of sunshine and much lower wind speeds. The effect was a day that felt warmer than its predecessor, and I was very pleased with my 30-mile road ride. Today was only 34° and overcast but there was no wind. I rode in relative comfort thanks to heavier gloves, heavier socks, and toe covers for my shoes, but I kept my effort to just 20 miles. Monday and Tuesday should look very much like today, and that’s good enough. A shift in wind direction could bring a few inches of snow by the middle of the week. We had a little taste of spring this weekend but winter isn’t done yet.

Cross-State Rivals

The big city bias is simply a function of demographics.

This week the Wisconsin Cycling Association is giving us a sneak peek at the 2016 cyclocross season. The WCA is conducting a poll to gauge racer interest in a handful of issues. Responding on Facebook, some people have called for a more widespread distribution of races throughout the state. Our series is mostly a Milwaukee and Madison affair, and that makes sense to me because those are our largest cities. Wisconsin has about 5.9 million residents, almost 3 million of whom live in these 12 contiguous counties:

Milwaukee County     956,000
Dane County          510,000
Waukesha County     394,000
Racine County       195,000
Kenosha County      168,000
Rock County         161,000
Washington County    133,000
Walworth County     103,000
Dodge County         89,000
Ozaukee County       87,000
Jefferson County      85,000
Columbia County      57,000

That’s 51 percent of the state’s population. A little harder to quantify—but not to be discounted—is the large pool of racers from northern Illinois, many of whom appear in the results of WCA races.

The 2015 season featured events in Manitowoc, Sheboygan and Oshkosh, proving races can succeed on the fringe of the Milwaukee-Madison corridor. But how would an event in Wausau fare? Or La Crosse or Eau Claire? By themselves, those areas just don’t have enough population to sustain a big race. I can assure you that they wouldn’t draw from Illinois, and I’m pretty sure that they wouldn’t draw from Milwaukee either. Historically the WCA has had very little success with road events outside of the Milwaukee-Madison corridor, and the cyclocross crowd is essentially the same group of people. Eau Claire might be close enough to the Twin Cities to pull in a Minnesota contingent, but it’s the wrong place for a WCA race.

Still, an alternate series could work in the northeast. Almost 1 million people surround Lake Winnebago:

Brown County        255,000
Outagamie County     180,000
Winnebago County    170,000
Sheboygan County     115,000
Fond du Lac County   102,000
Manitowoc County      81,000
Calumet County       50,000

Imagine a 4- or 5-race series that includes the existing events in Manitowoc, Sheboygan and Oshkosh, plus a new one in Green Bay, Appleton or Fond du Lac. Again, it’s hard to expect much support from the Milwaukee-Madison guys, but there might be enough regional interest.

What happens in other states? I looked at last year’s USA Cycling results (except for Oregon, which has its own governing body) to see where sanctioned races were held, reasoning that they wouldn’t exist where they weren’t wanted. In almost every state the cyclocross scene is centered in the largest urban area. California is something of an exception because it has so many urban areas that I can’t say one is more important than another.

AL - Birmingham
AK - no events
AZ - Phoenix
AR - Little Rock
CA - various
CO - Denver / Boulder
CT - Hartford / New Haven
DE - Wilmington
FL - Orlando … kind of
GA - Atlanta
HI - no events
ID - Boise
IL - Chicago
IN - Indianapolis
IA - Des Moines / Iowa City
KS - Kansas City / Lawrence
KY - Louisville
LA - New Orleans / Monroe
ME - Portland
MD - Baltimore
MA - Boston … kind of
MI - Detroit
MN - Minneapolis
MS - Jackson
MO - Kansas City
MT - Bozeman
NE - Lincoln / Omaha
NV - Reno
NH - Concord / Manchester
NJ - Philadelphia PA
NM - Albuquerque / Santa Fe
NY - Buffalo / Rochester
NC - Raleigh
ND - no events
OH - Columbus / Cincinnati
OK - Oklahoma City / Tulsa
OR - Portland / Bend / Eugene
PA - Pittsburgh / Philadelphia
RI - Providence
SC - Greenville
SD - Sioux Falls
TN - Nashville
TX - Austin / Houston
UT - Salt Lake City / Ogden
VT - no geographic center
VA - Richmond / Washington DC
WA - Spokane
WV - Morgantown
WY - no events

Maybe your goal is to have just one race in central Wisconsin, not to be the state’s cyclocross hub. The point is that you need concentrated population to make cyclocross sustainable. Look at our neighbors in Illinois. Chicago Cyclocross Cup races are enormous: a single category may contain 100 racers. But in Rantoul, an easy 2-hour drive to the south, Patriot CX serves only about 100 racers across all categories. If you’re a race organizer, then there’s a threshold below which you’re not serving enough racers to ensure legitimate competition across categories, followed swiftly by the threshold below which you’re not serving enough racers to cover your costs.

Mountain bikers will drive for hours to reach unique trails that they can ride all day on Saturday and then race on Sunday. Cyclocross is different. Almost any park will do, and your course probably doesn’t offer anything that another course—a closer course—cannot. Even in the Milwaukee-Madison corridor, there are many racers who are Milwaukee-only or Madison-only. Many of those who do travel would be more inclined to race in northern Illinois than to drive to far-away central or western Wisconsin.

There seems to be a misconception about the function of sanctioning organizations like the WCA, a notion that they are traveling shows that need only to stop in your town and set up a race. In truth, the sanctioning organizations merely keep score and enforce rules. Each race comes from a dedicated local organization. Until you have that, you have nothing. And even when you have that, your invitation may not appeal to a distant audience.

The Split Personality Of The Riverfront Parkway

West Bend’s original bike route: the Riverfront Parkway.

In my earliest days as a cyclist, before there was an Eisenbahn State Trail, the Riverfront Parkway featured prominently. I still use it today, though never its entire length. I like each end of the parkway but the middle does nothing for me as it runs through downtown West Bend, parallel to the Eisenbahn and far less efficient.

When you ride the 4.7 miles of the asphalt-paved Eisenbahn from Rusco Drive to Northwestern Avenue, the experience is consistent and predictable. I mean that in a good way. By contrast, the Riverfront Parkway is sometimes this and sometimes that. On the east side of Riverside Park, it’s a narrow gravel path. Then it’s paved. Then it’s a sidewalk as it runs along Auxiliary Court and Veterans Avenue. The section from Washington Street north to the bridge at Rivershores is nice enough, but how do you get to it? And then you’re on the sidewalk again until you reach Park Avenue. Tracing the west side of Barton Pond, the remaining section of the parkway is great until it unceremoniously ends at Roosevelt Drive.

If you ride the parkway from end to end, you may be left with the impression that you journeyed from nowhere to nowhere. This proposed bike route system would use only the northernmost half mile of the parkway to create a car-free connection between Regner Park and Barton that skirts around the hill on Main Street. The rest of the parkway just isn’t ready for prime time. Aside from its other shortcomings, the parkway suffers from inconsistent maintenance. Entire sections are blocked by snow in the winter and by flooding in the spring, reappearing only when Mother Nature permits.

Still, there is some reason to hope that eventually the parkway will morph into the west end of the long-promised Milwaukee River Trail. It wouldn’t take much to connect the parkway to the trails in Quaas Creek Park, and from Quaas Creek Park the city wants to extend a rough trail east to the airport. Following the contours of the river, a trail from Quaas Creek Park to Newburg would be just 8.5 miles, and much of the land is owned by the city, the county, the Town of Trenton, and the Ozaukee Washington Land Trust. A fully realized Milwaukee River Trail is years away at best, but it’s an intriguing possibility. For now, the parkway is just what it always has been: a trail whose individual parts are strangely more valuable than their sum.