Originally Posted by somnambulant

Am I the only person who saw the post where Mike announced his name change? :P

Originally Posted by jeremywhitehorn

another reason i dislike the suburbs: getting yelled at from a car in oakville. "get a car!" they said. what? it looked like they were driving mom's minivan...

Originally Posted by pyze-guy

Evidently.

An expresso machine in the bike store. Dangerous. 2 out of my 3 vices in one place. Not good for my wifes paycheck.

Originally Posted by TRaffic Jammer

Sport Minivan I'll have you know.

Originally Posted by TRACKMAN

TAKE A DEEP BREATH.... I tend to go into overkill


Most experienced cyclists have heard of the benefits of riding a fixed gear bike as part of one's training regimen, to improve your spin, your sprint, your wind. My own take on fixed gear bikes (and my own reasons for riding them) are very different: they have to do with psychology and premodern, even primitive impulses, not with leg speed and winter training theories. So just why do I ride a fixed gear? Like anything else in life, the answer is complicated, but here goes.

When you ride a fixed gear, you are truly united to your bike. When the wheels are turning, so are your legs, equally pushing down on and being drawn forward by the crankarms and pedals in a symbiotic whirl. You'd think that this would make the feedback between frame and rider on a fixed very direct--you would be much more aware of the ride quality.

This started me thinking of historical analogies, particularly the following one: riding a fixed gear is like living in a premodern, more heroic age. In contrast, riding a bike with derailleurs and a freewheel is instead like living in a much more modern and self-aware period of Western human history--say from the sixteenth century to the present one. The unity of man and machine in riding a fixed has both the strengths and the weaknesses of the heroic; and while riding a derailleur-freewheel bike is easier, it is not heroic.

For this to make any sense, a brief and crude overview of some literary history is necessary. If we believe some historians and literary critics, much earlier literature is outward-oriented and heroic: in Homer's Odyssey, for example, we hear more of Odysseus's actions than we hear of his thoughts (though we often hear of his craftiness in the various epithets applied to him). Later literature, such as the sonnet cycles of the English renaissance by Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, et. al. , are all about the internal conflict: the poem's speaker is separated off from himself, looking at himself: we readers watch and hear about not so much external action as the internal reflection. The interest in psychology is far greater; the interest in bare-fist action much smaller. Thus the heroic age makes for epics, outward and action-oriented: the Odyssey, Beowulf, El Cid. The later age (what historians now call early modernity, from the fifteenth or sixteenth century on) makes for much more lyric (personal, short, private, reflective, self-reflexive) and personal literature, a literature of psychology and not action.

Now to return to bikes:

Riding a fixed gear is premodern, heroic, and maybe even epic. The bike disappears beneath you; you are one with it; and because you are so united, you cannot even adequately describe the frame's ride (and there are no real component performance characteristics to enumerate. You and the bike are one; only being two, being separable, allows for such descriptions of the "feel" or performance. (Author's aside: I don't want to push this to absurd lengths, for surely you can feel the difference to some degree between a cheap and a good quality frame even without a freewheel. The difference I'm trying to describe here is really a matter of degree, not of kind.) With a freewheel and derailleur equipped bike, you are that much more separated from the bike: you are instead a bike and rider, not a cohesive unit of the two. While rides undertaken on such a bike can be heroic and epic, the very act of riding such a bike is not. In riding such a bike, you have experienced the fall into self-reflexivity; the ability to experience not just the primary riding, but also the separable qualities of your chosen mount and its components. Man and machine are two; and man (or woman) controls the multi-gear technology, controls the bike, and hence is aware of it and as separable from him- or herself in a way not available to the fixed gear rider.

It is this heroic character that appeals to me in riding my fixed; and I believe something like this appeals to at least some of those who regularly use a fixed gear bike. Such a machine gives us a chance to have a much greater degree of unity-with-the-bike, engaging us in a kind of primal struggle with terrain, time, distance, and self without the distractions of gear choices, derailleurs, shifters, and good or bad chain lines. Gone are the distractions of "well, maybe I should drop it into the small ring; I'm feeling tired today." You've got a gear, one gear, the gear. Use it. Don't think, do. Don't talk, ride. Don't calculate, execute. On a fixed, the option of being a saddlebound and dithering Hamlet just is not available to you: if you stop pedaling, just a brief pause to think of a corner, the pedals jerk you back into the present, the now, the ride itself.

Given human weakness, we can only achieve this quasi-heroic discipline with the utter simplicity of the fixed gear; the multi gear bike plays into our self-reflexive doubts, our "oh, my legs are kind of sore today from yesterday's ride" excuses, our all-too-modern ability to use technology to distance ourselves from primary, visceral, blood-sweat-and-tears experience. The fixed gear takes away options; and paradoxically, by taking the options away, it allows us to maximize ourselves and our own potential.

Originally Posted by jeremywhitehorn

do we want to know what the third one is? i'm hoping it has something to do with cooking tools...

Originally Posted by bldzr

hey toronto-ites!!!

so I'm going to be headed into your fair city this weekend for the F*cked Up record release fest. Anybody going? Anybody wanna put me up for a night or two? i'll be bikeless (stupid Amtrak) but fine to get around to wherever. The shows are all in the University Area (Spadina & College, Spadina & Dundas), so if anybody lives around there....

thanks in advance!
BLDZR
NYC

Originally Posted by Offhoff

Whose playing? I can't put you up but I can definately show you around a bit. I'm always down for live music and live in that hood, hit me up with a PM we'll talk.

Originally Posted by Shiznaz

Cross posted from Road Cycling. Our neighbourhooditudinally-challenged friend is quite the anthropological writer! Thought you might apreciate this. Nadir knows all the world's cool and crazy characters.

Originally Posted by lymbzero

Fixed gear riding is like Token Ring, timed packets, and TCP ack/nak.
Freewheeling is like Ethernet streaming UDP.

Appologies to those who aren't nerdy enough to get it....

:D

Originally Posted by lymbzero

Fixed gear riding is like Token Ring, timed packets, and TCP ack/nak.
Freewheeling is like Ethernet streaming UDP.

Appologies to those who aren't nerdy enough to get it....

:D

Originally Posted by Shiznaz

hey keith, shamil:
http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=239568

Originally Posted by sbhikes

I don't feel safe at all. I'm terrified every second of the way. Those mean bike lanes are going to get me killed. People are going to run me over because I'm not darting into their path and demanding a response. I'm so terribly irrelevant. There's no hope for me.

Originally Posted by sbhikes

Would you feel safe if you approached the end of a residential street only to come upon about 10 men in their late teens/early 20s, each one wearing one piece of Raiders paraphrenalia, each one wearing Raiders colors, and one of them stands directly in your path? Where would you position yourself then?

Originally Posted by shapelike

So ... am I allowed to attend a safety meeting if I don't smoke?

Originally Posted by cavernmech

This weeks topic....non-twist off bottles and the danger to delicate palm skin.

Originally Posted by darkmother

There will be much to discuss. I like to use my trackends to open NTO bottles. Some wingnut I met also showed me that opening bottles is the real function of the iron ring. I knew it wasn't just for show....

Originally Posted by Offhoff

Whose playing? I can't put you up but I can definately show you around a bit. I'm always down for live music and live in that hood, hit me up with a PM we'll talk.