SB Nation User Blog: JFS_PGH

Just the PR cycling needs / warning to you pros

JFS_PGH — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:54:55 -0000

Just the PR cycling needs / warning to you pros

BBC is highlighting a new study about incredibly low rates of normal sperm in cyclists. Of course, they didn't look at RR pros, they looked at triathletes...Spanish Triathletes.

got italy / lombardy area bike info?

JFS_PGH — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:21:07 -0000

Details still sketchy, but spouse has a conference in Trento the week after the Giro de Lombardia, which is on Oct. 17. We're intending to do some bike touring the week before the GdL, so we'll be in shape to hit a couple of spots on the GdL route somehow...and then conference time.

We'll be flying into Venice or Verona (frequent flyer miles finally pay off!), then getting to Lombardy / Trento by some combination of bike & train. But what combination should that be? Train to a strategic location, then rent bike? Bike ASAP, then navigate trains with bike? Complicating matters, we're hoping to either rent a tandem in Italy (presumably not as falling-off-a-log easy as renting a couple of standard road or touring bikes) or ship a tandem (scary and potentially expensive). Anyone know the rules on tandems in Italian trains? (They were surprisingly unwelcome inotherwise bike-friendly Dutch trains.) Good vs. bad stretches of road? (Rolling terrain is ideal for tandems.) Best/worst camping options? Ideal bike rental spot / source?

Also, basic question...how do you say "tandem" in Italian, in a way that makes it clear you're talking about a bicycles, not, say, a romantic proposal?

Finally, while steephill and Cyclingfever both confirm the date for the GdL, I can't seem to find an actual official site for the race. Anyone know more?

Prisoner's Tour de France--WTF?

JFS_PGH — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:27:50 -0000

Prisoner's Tour de France--WTF?

It doesn't seem to be dated April 1, so I suppose it's real. But, WTF? And who's paying for the bikes? And how bad do I have to be to get put into prison in France within the next couple of weeks (or get hired as a guard)?

sicklist: Mollema has mono

JFS_PGH — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 16:41:08 -0000

Watch those water bottles, folks... and those fan smooches.

Mollema reports he has the Ziekte van Pfeiffer. Which appears to be that strength-sapping, spleen-weakening disease, Mono/EBV. Which is bad news for any sustained effort in the next few weeks (that's assuming antivirals are not on the drug ban list, otherwise, maybe longer).

Poor dude. Poor all of us with him on VDS, too. But at least he's got years in front of him.

keeping an eye on "daylight use only" rules

JFS_PGH — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:20:04 -0000

Bikes: racing machines, vacation toys, transportation. They don't need much. A bit of upkeep, a rideable surface, and...the right to ride on that surface. Too bad that item #3 can be turned into a bar to biking, even on....say...one of the nation's longest bike trails. Yes, the Allegheny Passage (DC to Maryland) is again facing greater restrictions: another section is threatening to become "daylight use only." Because we wouldn't want people commuting safely in away from traffic in winter, or pushing a little past dusk to make the campsite or hotel in summer. Just think of all the human powered bike gangs this will dissuade from raining terror down upon the good people of Allegany county, who might otherwise be shaken by the unmistakable clicking of a freewheeling chain at the ungodly hour of 9 PM.

Who comes up with this nonsense? And where do I give them a piece of my mind?

The quest for the ultimate travel bike: BTC's

JFS_PGH — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 13:50:07 -0000

Anyone have a bike using torque couplings? Or know someone who does? Some impressive names on the list of builders who use them. The folders are sweet, but my legs say it would be sweeter yet to be able to retrofit one of the tandems for ease of travel. (Yes, liking the tandem IS the ultimate wheel-suck on my part, no apologies for that.) Especially as Amtrak and airlines have different rules for tandems and non-tandem bikes. I don't know if they make them for ovalized tubes like the Burley, but the older tandem should work. It sounds like Bilenky replaces oval tubes with round to do the retrofit on Burleys and Santanas. (Not sure how I like that, though if you can trust anyone to make good structural choices, you'd think it would be Bilenky.)

Impe impe impe impe...impe!

JFS_PGH — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:26:10 -0000

Pieter and I were chatting about today's results, and he wondered out loud whether the current Van Impe was the son of one of his old favorites, Lucien Van Impe. A little googling turns up the full extent of the Van Impe dynasty (with a huge tip of the helmet to the good work done at the Cyclingwebsite.)

Lucien, the uncle, you probably have heard of. "The small guy from Mere." His wins stretch from a first in the 1968 Tour de l'Avenir and include such oddities as 2nd in the Manx international (who knew?) as well as tons of stage wins in most of the major tours, and a not-insignificant haul of climbers' jerseys (polka-dotted and otherwise) tapering off to a last gasp in 1987, and an additional career off the bike.

Lucien's brother is Frank Van Impe. A specialist in minor races, but clearly first-rate in passing along skills and attitude to his son, the current Van Impe.

Three other Van Impes are given as cousins of Frank and Lucien, but they seem to be cousins, removed (based on the dates).

Achiel (racing in 1949/50), Remi and Constant were 3 racing brothers (with very cool names, no?) Constant won the 1931 Ronde Van Vlanderen, and it looks like he was also the Belgian champion in 1934. Remi came in 3rd in the 1927 Scheldeprijs Vlaanderen. Needless to say, this makes it much cooler that the current Van Impe has done well in some of the same strange (to me) small(er) races won by other Impes in their day, like Lede and [ahem] Buggenhout. (Which sounds like something you tell the other guy to do, when he's sucking your wheel.) A Scheldeprijs for him, too, someday? How nice that would be.

How to say bicycle

JFS_PGH — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 13:08:01 -0000

Found a nice site from the international association of esperanto-speaking cyclists. It allows you to pop up 70-some bike part terms, side by side, in quite a wide choice of languages. I don't know how perfect it is, but it's got to be at least a good start.

"multilingual bicycle's vocabulary"

here's the english/dutch lineup, to get started. You can change either language to the one of your choice, including Finnish (Suomi), Swiss German, Chinese, Russian (велосипед) and Ukrainian (Українська).

Here is a Dutch cycling resource page in full English translation, with partial translation in French, German and Spanish. It has a glossary where you can put in words. Mostly sensible ones (fiets gets you an exhaustive list of bike parking place information, as well as parts) but not "drempel" (speed bump) or doodsmak [grin]. But you can suggest inclusion of other words! I suggest we try to use this site to make it also serve as a bike racing terminology resource. It will take very little extra storage space for them, it will bump up their hits (a good thing) and it will save us from having to create this from whole cloth.

So who wants to translate some of the following (stolen/adapted from the Amgen terminology list)?

If you can do the translation to your language, I volunteer to use the "suggest" function to put in several languages at once.

If you want to give translations in additional languages, we can "donate" them as well under "comments," and see if they take the hint to add, say, Suomi/Finnish or Portuguese [grin].

Abandon

Attack

Breakaway

Bridge (v, tactical)

Bridge (n, architectural)

Broom Wagon

Cobble(s)

Crash

Curb

Drafting

Drop/Dropped

Escape / Echappe

Echelon

Fans

Team / Equipe

Gap

Grade (or Steepness)

Gear (low gear, high gear)

Gruppetto

Paceline

Peloton

Puncture

Rider / courreur

Road Rash

Sprint

Stage / Etape

Team Leader

Time Cut

Time Trial

Train (of cyclists)

Train tracks

Wind

For new fans: does PdC hate Lance Armstrong?

JFS_PGH — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:00:59 -0000

This is a historical explanation of the term "HWMNBN," a term used elsewhere to refer to the worst dark wizard of all time, and commonly used here to refer to Mr. Lance Armstrong.

It strikes me that people stumbling in a year or more after the coining of "HWMNBN" must assume that we're a bunch of folks who all equate Lance with Voldemort. Not so. A brief history of the coining of the term:

There were periodic "if Lance were still here, he'd kick [fill in the blank's] butt" threads. They tended to be short on actual analysis, but, eh, it's a free world. More irritatingly, however, people were periodically and perennially debating ages old Lance doping scandals after the man was retired. There was (duh) never anything new to be said, because there was (duh) NO new evidence and NO new samples and precious few new leaks or rumors. The only thing that varied was the level of hostility, ranging from intermediate to painful. Even the wording had practically become standardized, though the people bothering to type in the words seemed to change from time to time. It got very tiresome. It clogged up fanpost space. It hijacked substantive threads. It deepened frowns and worry lines, triggered global warming, problem drinking, geopolitical upheaval (OK, I exaggerate), and led exactly nowhere.

So Chris banned the subject. And by implication, posts about Lance that were likely to trigger that type of response. As he has pointed out previously, the ban was actually only "HWBCC1999-2005MNBD" i.e. "He whose blood cell count 1999-2005 must not be debated." And it was actually explicitly conditional on Lance being an ex-racer. Not so draconian, right?

But Chris had never before instituted a blanket ban on any subject. It didn't take long for people to notice the Omerta quality of the ban, and the Voldemort-esque absoluteness of it. Verbally-playful people that we are, the HWMNBN label, and a dozen variants, sprung into being. And in a case of mass typographical Tourette's, once we'd started blurting the thing out, it felt so good, we couldn't stop. For the record, PdC does not--organizationally or by vote or consensus of the membership--hate Lance. Some hate him, some love him, some can take him or leave him. But we do, organizationally, hate repetitive threads, unless they take off from "phone's ringing" or a picture of HWMABP or otherwise make us smile or laugh or think deep thoughts.

Many of us continue to type "HWMNBN" a a in-joke. It is also a reminder to be polite to your fellow PdC members. It also prevents PdC from showing up in the top 5 google results for every person who types in "Lance Armstrong" 'cause they want to get a yellow bit of rubber for their arm. (That's good for us, for them, and for the cause of internet civility.)

If you're looking for a place to fight Lance Armstrong's battles for him, you're going to find a lot more windmills than giants here. Pick an old race thread from the archives, and follow it. Check out some of the Gavia Gossip. Or a team analysis, a race preview, a young rider bio. If you read this before the deadline, PLEASE enter the VDS competition even if you're picking names more or less at random--it's free, and its fun. Put Lance Armstrong on your VDS team, then also pick 24 other riders, and cheer them all on, in whatever races they're racing in. It's FINE if you love Lance. Come love, and learn, his sport.

worthy (?) causes

JFS_PGH — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:53:42 -0000

Money is tight all around, right? Major foundations are going under, humanitarian groups are going begging, as already-promised funds disappear from under them, like bad magic. What's that got to do with cycling? Well, if you're making some year-end donations all the same, consider tossing a few bucks at one of the following.

1. Podium cafe VDS competition swag fund. Chris turns out to be way too polite to remind us monthly, despite his half-hearted promise to do so. Unprompted by Chris here's a remember that you can paypal a sum, modest or otherwise, to podiumcafe@yahoo.com

2. Cyclingfever has had a couple of different competition-specific paypal links up. Don't know if they stay functional from year to year (update, anyone?) but the old Tour of CA link can be found (translated version!) here. (Needs a link on the ever-helpful "startist" page.)

3. Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, blah blah blah. But it's a nice, quick starting place, and it gave us a lot of naughty editing fun in the recent past. The cycling project is certainly laudable. Wikipedia is still a bit short of their fundraising goal, and donations are tax-deductible in the US (and in some other countries, via donations to local chapters).

4. I'm sure your local bike support network could use a few bucks--ours was flying high and flush with new members while the weather was good and gas prices are up, (and in the case of Bike-PGH, when it looked like a transit strike was looming.) But that was then, this is now.

5. Plenty of national groups too (though I have to wonder if rails to trails will, at some point, need to change their name to "rails and trails," if we start to "unbank" any of those rail corridors). I'll leave it to yinz/youse/you/all y'all to post your faves.

6. And, oh--support your local bike shop. And bike mags / rags.

People who do not get free gifts? For many of us, Spring time of year where CTV re-sucks money from our paypal account (where they like to set things up for a recurring annual "auto-renew" debit). In the past, people have found it helpful to go into paypal and cancel that "auto-renew" feature, allowing them to instead re-up with CTV only if CTV convinces them that this time, it will deliver the goods. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of rant.