Hi Folks. Busy year and lots of biking.  We got a letter from a customer and wanted to share their trip as we love the single speed!

Just wanted to say that I loved the shorts! They arrived the morning I left for Kalispell. I stopped by PO box on my way out of town, and there they were. We rode 60 miles the first day, and 50 (different route) on day 2. Roads were mostly gravel.  Old bikes ruled the day.  Mark’s was from 1932!! I rode a single speed and payed for that.  But will probably ride it again next year.  Why?  I don’t know why.  A glutton for punishment…

Our lunch break was in a meadow and the food was fantastic.  Tiramisu, brie, olives, beer and wine, etc.  Cigarettes were also provided, to help get us in the right mindset.

Thanks for shipping the shorts.  They were PERFECT.

I’ll send a few photos.

Earl Craig
Livingston, MT

You’ve watched on YouTube in horror (and fascination) as their spandexed legions pedaled in unison at the gym. You’ve seen the vapid smiles on their faces, and the headsets of the men and women who lead their exercise classes. They are the spinners, the folks who gather in gymnasiums across America in order to “cycle” on stationary bikes to the latest techno remixes of Tom Jones classics.

This, at least, is certainly the stereotype when it comes to “spin culture.” These are the men and women who sit atop their stationary machines as they bike themselves faster and further into nowhere. While there may be a kernel of truth to this notion, it is also very important to separate the culture (such as it is) from its generative exercise. Despite all its kitschy baggage, spinning can be a viable part of any serious biker’s health regimen.

For those of us who don’t all live in San Diego, spinning can be an incredibly useful tool when it comes to training your muscle system in the cold off-season. Your body remains fit for when it’s time to hit a genuine bike-path again, and your holiday weight-gain suddenly feels manageable.

Furthermore, the flywheel on a spinning bike challenges certain muscles more so than a regular bicycle pedal. The extra weight of a flywheel (usually weighing around 35 pounds) lends inertia to rotational speed, which in turn strengthens your hamstring muscles, since the hamstrings have to contract at the apex of the pedal to reduce the momentum. Furthermore, the added weight on flywheels adds force to your pedaling, so that in order to accommodate your increased pedaling rhythm, your cardiovascular system works faster and harder.

Of course, a bike has its own advantages. The relative weightlessness of a normal bicycle flywheel encourages your hips and quads to work harder (to get the same rpm’s going) than they would on a spin bike. But the verdict remains, spinning has its usefulness. Good for your hams, good for your heart. And indoor exercise has its charms in a Wisconsin blizzard.

Over the last two decades there’s been a real paradigm shift in Americans’ attitudes toward biking as a means of practical transport to and from work. For members of the biking community, the statistics would seem pretty heartening. Since 2000, there’s been an almost 50% increase in the number of Americans who commute to work by bike. And here in New York City, bicycle commuting soared 26% in 2009 alone. Whether motivated by the Recession or some other reason, people across America are getting out of their SUVs and heading for the bike lanes.

So we seem to be a far cry from the bad old days of 1990, when the Federal Highway Administration called biking (along with walking) one of “the forgotten modes” of getting around town. But the question remains … is now really time to break out our sports-bottle champagne and, as fellow members of the bicycling community, toast each other on a crisis averted, on a job well-commuted?

No question things are better than they were in 1990. But let’s not let these statistics lull us into illusions. Sure, the numbers of people who bike to work have shot up. But when you add it all up, it only amounts about half a percent, or 1/200^th, of the population commuting to and from work—less than two million people. And when you compare that figure with the huge number of Americans in any city who commute by an automotive vehicle, it’s pretty clear whose world we’re still living in.

The vast majority of American commuters still opt for four wheels. Cars and trucks continue to be regarded as a more practical means for the journey between suburb and city office. No doubt the resurgence of the cycle as a popular means of urban transport has begun, but the vast majority of people still see the bike as just too slow on the draw, as far as rush hour is concerned.

Frank Lenz was born in 1866 in Pittsburgh to a staid family of German immigrants, right at the dawn of the bicycle era. He would have grown up in an age when bicycles weren’t viewed simply as the garden-variety means of transportation they are today, but had an exoticism to them, as (for example) skateboard culture for kids growing up in the 1980s.

Lenz could have led the simple, prescriptive life of a bookkeeper (his chosen trade) in the Midwest, but for his bicycling habit, which took him further and further afield from home. In 1889, he pedaled his way to New York City and back again. The following year saw him and a friend making their way from Pittsburgh to St. Louis. And the year afterward, he and another friend travelled via penny-farthing high-wheelers to New Orleans.

Not only would Lenz mount these ambitious trips on a yearly basis, but as a better-than-amateur photographer, would record his adventures on film for posterity. Gradually, as he grew in confidence and ability, Lenz began to see the distinct possibility of travelling across the world via bicycle, and recording his travails. As Lenz himself wrote, “I had become so familiar with my bike, that to ride it, laden like a packhorse, had become second nature. Still, I yearned, like Alexander, for new fields to conquer.”

In mid-1892, at the age of 25, Lenz set off cross-country, westwards from New York City, to bike the entire world. Such was the acclaim he’d accumulated by then that he had an impossible time actually biking out of Manhattan, such were the crowds who cheered him along his way. Except for a few close brushes (a train almost hit him in Minnesota, and he tumbled 30 feet down a cliff in Montana, with only a few nicks and scratches), Lenz reached San Francisco in October of 1892 to wild acclaim and fanfare. As he wrote in a dispatch back to Outing magazine, a premier adventure travel magazine of its day, “My wheel, loaded with baggage, canteen, revolver, the Indian bow and arrows, and an old buffalo horn from the plains, was a curiosity to the mass of business men, clerks and workmen” who greeted him there.

From there, Lenz took off on a steamer bound for Hawaii, and then Japan. Japan was, for Lenz, a perfect place for cycling, with modern, well-maintained roads, “something akin to an Earthly Eden and an ideal land for travel.”

It was in China that Lenz found his first real difficulties. The Chinese road system of the 1890s was completely unsuitable for bicycling, being a morass of dirt and mud roads that stretched on for hundreds of miles. Lenz spent a large amount of time having his bike carried for him by “hired opium addicts” over otherwise impassable mountain ranges. Furthermore, Chinese peasants would flee at the approach of his bike, or fling stones and clubs at him.

Barely making it alive through China (several times he had to draw his revolver to disperse an angry mob), he came into British-controlled Burma, where he promptly came down with a severe case of malaria that delayed his journey for many weeks.

From Burma he cycled across India on the Grand Trunk Road, the ancient trade route that snaked through the heart of the subcontinent, and on into Persia (present-day Iran), where the last-known photograph of him was taken in the city of Tabriz.

From there, Lenz was bound for the wilds of the Ottoman Empire, and on into Europe, though he never made it that far. As an article from the archive of The New York Times, written September 29th, 1895, puts it: “Pittsburgh, Penn – Frank Lenz, bicycle rider, was beyond doubt murdered by the Kurds in Tchelkain, Armenia, in May 1894… Lenz stopped in this village one night, and was never again seen alive.”

The article goes further on to speculate about the reasons the villagers killed Lenz. Either the Kurds mistook the wheels of Lenz’s bike to be made of silver, and killed him in order to rob him, or (more strangely), having never before seen a man riding a bike, and not knowing whether Lenz was a man or a demon, they decided to shoot at him to end the debate. Either way, Lenz’s dispatches home stopped coming. And while Lenz’s body was never recovered, many witnesses swore up and down that indeed he was dead.

Today, bike travel remains a popular means of crossing the world. And indeed, the world has become a much less difficult place for bicyclists to cross, what with safer roads and populations that (presumably) no longer mistake cyclists for demons. That being said, Lenz’s story remains a compelling testament to the perils of exotic travel, whether it be on bike or otherwise.