Buying Into Cycling For The Environment

Bike Radar has an excellent piece on the impact mountain biking has on the environment. The article casts light on the ripple effect our cycling and our purchases have on the environment. The whole article it really worth a read.

When we ask bike distributors what eco-friendly products they stock, the answer is usually: “All our products are green.” It’s wrong, but it’s an easy and understandable trap to fall into. Isn’t cycling green? As a form of transport it is, and as a low impact way to engage with the great outdoors it’s a green activity, if you ride responsibly.

But consider the energy used in manufacturing frames, the carbon footprint of hauling components from their Far East birthplace, and the fact that most of us drive to the trail or bike shop, then we’re entering a grey area. For their product launch last year, one company even shuttled the press up to the test trail by helicopter. So, is mountain biking any greener than, say, playing squash?

Now, as I am poised to buy a new bike, I am confronted with including the environmental calculous into my purchase. I also need to evaluate where I failed in the past.

My current frame lasted 3 years. I was hoping to move it to secondary status after five years, but that didn't happen. At the moment the frame has opportunity to become smelting waste or wall art. I'll have to choose the latter. Luckily for me, the frame was the cheapest major part of the bike.

On the positive side, I believe that you often must pay a little more for quality and so many of my parts are still useable and should be for a long time. In the 16,000mi. or 26,000km I put on the bike, I replaced the aluminum stem, a couple chains, a rim (bent), a lock ring, bar tape a few times, and I just had a bottom bracket in stalled. The Bike Radar article rings of irony if you consider the magazine's most essential purpose, is to entice readers into consuming the (add superlative here) product being sold by the sponsors who buy ad space. One of the things I hardly ever felt over the past 3 years of owning my Salsa was bike lust. I rarely, I can't say never, but I rarely thought about "upgrading". I overspent a little in the beginning for parts that would satisfy me for the life of the parts. That was the beauty of my Chris King parts.

My Chris King hubs were able to be easily cleaned and refurbished without having to throw anything out. Many of my other components are still in great condition. They are not ultra light carbon, but they are light-enough, strong and reliable. My King headset did, in fact, outlast my bike. Longevity and Chris King's environmental practices are why I will continue to put Kings on future bikes despite the high short term costs.

I am also not a huge fan of Carbon Fiber composites. For bike components, this is where the metals...shine... over CF. Alloy can be recycled, steel is repairable and can last decades. Despite its initial price tag and difficult extraction, titanium can last a lifetime with no discernible change in performance. I think the jury is still out on the longevity of current composite frames, but once it breaks what do you do with carbon? You can't put it in the ground and let it biodegrade. You can't melt it down and make something new. You can't hammer it into key chains, salt shakers or church keys. The carbon fiber recycling industry is still in its infancy and there is still a long way to go to keep, not just your busted fork, but also the industrial waste from the production of your carbon fork, out of the incinerator or landfill. Cycling Satin Cessena has some insights into the future of composite recycling at the bottom of her great article on materials and efficiency. Currently, the best bet for a busted composite frame or fork is an expensive repair by folks like Craig Calfee.

Personally, I feel spending a little more for longevity and to support those companies that have made changes to be more environmentally friendly is an excellent first step.

Links:

• Thinking About Cycling expounds on the Cultural Production of Cycling. This article echoes one of my own older posts. here
• Armstrong contemplates the future... now that he is really old.
• Pack of drunk cyclists terrorize Tinsel Town.
• iamnotacyclist does a reality check on how we ride.
• Not learning from history. German cyclist discovers Russia too cold to invade in winter.

Fashionable and Famously Forgettable Fixies For Formosa

The Taipei Times ran a lengthy article about the growing fixie trend in Taiwan. I have seen several around and just chalk it up to the general trend, which is now several years old, finally making it to Taiwan.

For those who are not in the know, a fixie, or fixed gear bicycle, is a bike with only one chainring in the front and the rear cog is welded to the rear hub. This makes for a light, simple bike that works well in flat, urban riding, but is not very practical for a lot of other riding.

The fixie trend originated originated among the urban bike messengers in major US cities as the motion and braking are applied through the pedals. The pedals are always in motion as long as the wheel is moving, just as you might find with track bikes. These make ideal trick bikes.

Unfortunately, at least in my own opinion, the trend has been taken over by "hipsters" who find a beautiful steel framed classic bike. Colnago, Pinarello, Nishiki, 3Rensho, Masi... you name it. They will then dremel off the cable and brake hangars, for a smooth frame, and then paint over the original paint in monochrome color schemes to render the bike more of a fashion accessory than a fully functional bike. In Seattle I saw more hipsters walking their fixed gear bicycles than riding them.

The saddest part is that, like most of us, these hipsters grow up to some degree or another and move on to new trends, thus rendering the bike more or less disabled.

There are a few companies out there that focus on fixed gear bikes exclusively. In Taichung IRO bikes on Zhong min South Rd. is a popular spot for fixies. I have seen a couple other shops in southern Taichung near the Art Museum, but I have not had a chance to get the addresses. I hope people who are interested in this type of riding will buy a dedicated fixie than cut up an old Nag.

Happy riding!

The Huffington Post Meets Taiwan Cycling: Michael Turton Writes A Gem

Michael Turton, a man I consider one of the keystones of Taiwan's blogging community, an excellent riding companion, and a good friend, has written a magnificent piece about biking in Taiwan for the Huffington Post.

What is riding Taiwan? Taiwan is going a thousand meters up a massive mountain in a single morning, and buying drinks from scantily-clad betel nut girls in their roadside stalls. Taiwan is piercing curls of smoke on a rolling dawn as the farmers burn off their fields, and speeding past the stink of mud and trash oozing from the muck of a canal next to the ocean. Taiwan is a landslide in the road and a viper lounging alongside it. Taiwan is bantering with the old women selling water and steamed buns on a chill winter morn, and exchanging hellos with farmers spraying fruit trees in the fading light of a summer's eve. Taiwan is gliding into the local fishing port for sashimi, and lapping up the last few klicks to the only noodle stand for a hundred leagues. Taiwan is looking down on the lovely Liyu Reservoir and peering up at the terrifying landslide scarp at Jiufen Ershan. Taiwan is riding next to chasms as deep as geological eras, and hearing the whistle of teapots in houses far above filling the mountains as a crisp dawn cracks across the peaks with forty kilometers of desolate mountain road in front of you. Taiwan is.

For me the article is extra special as the experiences he writes about are also my experiences. Michael and I have biked thousands of kilometers together and each kilometer is full of everything that IS Taiwan and everything that is friendship.

Only a person who is deeply attached to this land can really express it in words like Michael has done.

Taiwan is, like most places, a country of complexities, paradoxes and pluralities. When you live here a while, and even more so, when you experience it by bike, you come to see some of the beauty in the burning, the trash and chaos of the roads. It is not a fascination with the "strange" and "exotic". It is an appreciation of the nuanced complexity of life and lives going on. It is also an appreciation of being a part of it all for as little time as it may be. Biking in Taiwan is living.

Please follow the link and enjoy this piece and Michael's wonderful pictures.

Official Windows 7 Taiwan Bicycle Theme

For all of you Windows users out there, you might be interested in the Taiwan Bike Ride theme for Windows 7. I don't exactly know what it means, but if you are like me and get excited to see Taiwan getting some media attention in ways that have nothing to do with China, then you might like this.

In Taiwan Even Cycling Indoors Is Unsafe

Cycling on Taiwan's streets poses a number of hazards to riders. Weaving scooters, poorly trained or impatient drivers, cell phone driving, blind alley merges and dooring are all regular hazards that come with the territory, forcing many riders off the streets into the safety of the gym, where an instructor can lead them through an hour of spinning in an air conditioned room without the additional expense of equipment. More experienced riders also attend these spinning classes to improve fitness and operate at a higher cadence.

Now, a Taiwanese doctor has come out to warn these stationary riders that their little corner of the cycling universe is also fraught with danger.

According to a report in Taiwan Focus, stationary bikes can be a hazard to your health. According to the article:

Although cycling is deemed a fairly safe form of exercise, Pan Hsiao-ping, chief of the Su Tien Urology and Ophthalmology Clinic's rehabilitation center, said excessive stationary bike workouts can damage the knees, neck and wrists.

"Most patients are unaware of the potential harm of cycling indoors, " said Pan, explaining that some people adopt inappropriately intense exercise regimens in their efforts to lose weight and improve their fitness levels.

Stationary bike users, especially those in group spin classes, get so excited by the accompanying music and the instructor's exhortations that they forget the limits of their own bodies and fail to notice that they possibly have poor posture, she said.

She said that riders in a more upright position, for example, can put too much weight on their wrists, while cyclists with too-low handlebars that are not adjusted to their height can hurt both their neck and wrists.

There you have it. Cycling of any form can be harmful... if it is not done right.

I think the real lesson here is that being properly fit for a bicycle is essential to avoiding injuries. Many cyclists are not injured by cars or road furniture, but by their own bikes.

What the article really highlights is how a laissez faire attitude toward bike fitting can become a health disaster. The risk of fit injuries becomes greater as the distance increases and the repetitive motion starts to put strain on the joints and tendons. This can be true for both bicycles and stationary bikes.

A proper fit should balance the weight bearing load between the sit-bones, wrists, and mainly the core muscles of the body to limit stress.

In Taiwan I see many novice riders outfitted on mountain bikes for road use with the assumption that they will be more comfortable due to a more upright position. I have even had the owners of a bike shop insist that road bikes were uncomfortable due to the more extreme position. With their extreme compact geometries, they can throw more riders over the bar of a mountain bike and sell more stock... fit or not. Many riders are also not taught about proper fit and set their seats too low resulting in knee pain.

The doctor makes an excellent point in how an improperly fitting bike with an upright position can put stress on the wrists and necks.

With stationary bikes, as the proverbial town bike, everyone can have a ride and many people in spin classes simply hop on and don't worry about fit. Many instructors do not emphasize this point either, resulting in lasting injuries to the participants.

A properly sized and fit bicycle, whether stationary or mobile, should eliminate pain, discomfort and injury to its rider. Even a fit problem that doesn't manifest itself in one hour, may become a problem in two, three or four hours... or even over the course of a week or a month. Listen to your body and don't get beat up by the bike. If you haven't been properly fit, get fit by a professional. In Taichung, Rocky and T-Mosaic charges NT500 for a good fitting. The service is of course free with a purchase. My wife, a novice, was fit for her road bike with traditional road geometry and could ride in total comfort from Day 1.

It is not so much the bike, but the fit.

Also:

Hello Dali... goodbye Schweinfurt! SRAM exports German jobs to Dali in Taichung.

Breaking Away: American Cycling, Taiwan Culture and the Mimetic Faculty

Peter Yates (July 24, 1929 – January 9, 2011)

Peter Yates, the director of the 1979 classic, Breaking Away, one of the earliest and best bicycle/coming of age movies, died Sunday at the age of 82.

The plot revolves around a young cycling enthusiast in a small Indiana college town, who is infatuated by all things Italian and all things cycling. He does his best to imitate what he imagines to be everything, "Italian". He tries to speak Italian, eat Italian and even scam on the college hottie like an Italian.

Italian he is not. He is simply another local kid, or "Cutter" who is NOT going to college with the prospect of a life stuck in a small town staring him in the face.

Dave, the protagonist, and many elements of the story, were lifted from the life and times of Dave Blase and his exploits in the 1962 victory of the Phi Kappa Psi team in the Little 500 at Indiana University.

This movie can serve as a starting point for several conversations about cycling, globalization and greater ideas on the power of the image.

To connect this all back to the subject of this blog, I think, and I may be reaching a bit so bear with me, that it not only represents a paradigm shift in the sport of cycling that has had both a direct and indirect on Taiwanese culture, but it also helps illustrate the shifting and impermanent cultural borders that are often portrayed and imagined as fixed and unchanging.

What?!

Breaking Away materialized just at the end of the 1970's when cycling was dominated by the powerful European teams of Italy, France and Belgium. The reign of terror Eddy Merckx had enjoyed for a decade was coming to a close and the surly Frenchman, Bernard Hinnault, was just beginning his own dynasty.

The United States treated cycling as a European farce and very amateur. And... the US sucked at cycling. With football, baseball and basketball... what else was there?

At the same time, Taiwan had used American aid (and pressure), state-run monopolies, joint ventures between state and private companies, and a vast network of small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to promote rapid industrialization to help manufacture goods that were mainly aimed at the American market.

By the time Breaking Away came out the United States had already announced its official withdrawal form Taiwan and an end to the 1954 Mutual Defense Treaty which enabled the US to station its military personnel on the island who spread American consumer culture off base.

The point I am edging toward here is that people will mistakenly attribute Taiwan's culture to China, yet for the past 100 years Taiwan's metropoles, its cultural centers... the locations Taiwanese have looked toward to emulate, compare and contrast themselves and their lives... those places, aside from the domestic, have been in either Japan or the United States. "How are we doing compared to America?"

When Breaking Away came out it was just at the tipping point for American Cycling. Team 7-11 was established in 1981to go head to head against the European greats. Team 7-11 featured several great American amateur cyclists including, Davis Phinney, who makes a cameo in Breaking Away as one of the evil Italians.

Team 7-11 gave Americans their first victories in the big European races and as it later morphed into the Motorolla teams of the mid-80's and then birthed the US Postal Service and Discovery teams of the 1990's. With greater success came better sponsorship and more success. American cycling increased its profile in the US athletic market. The increased profile also let to an increase in riders and Americans interested in cycling. These cyclists needed bicycles. Breaking Away had led the vanguard of American cycling and the consumer was quick to follow.

During this same period Taiwanese bicycle producers were coming into their own and offering better and cheaper manufacturing facilities than the Japanese factories. This is when Taiwan started to become the world's producer of bicycles. Taiwan was turning out frames and parts as OEMs for Nishiki, 3Rensho, Shimano and other companies.

Not only did Taiwanese encounter the bicycle as an economic mainstay in the period after Breaking Away was released, but as the popular image of the bicycle matriculated throughout American culture, especially with the rise of Lance Armstrong, that image was exported around the world in the form of advertising and popular media. These images were readily snapped up by Taiwanese. From this point Taiwan had a double cultural investment in cycling-- both economic and popular.

These dual influences have really helped give rise to a strengthening and more nuanced cycling culture that has transformed and been reflected back as something definitely Taiwanese. This only could have happened with the USA as one of Taiwan's cultural centers.

Beyond this, in the movie, Dave, emulates the Italians he idolizes.

This reminds me a little of, what I call, "The Iron and Silk effect". We have all seen this in Taiwan, and maybe been guilty of it at some time or another, of Orientalizing and engaging in a type of mimesis of what we think we are seeing or wishing to be. Periodically, I run into, more often than not, white men who want to be Asian. They wear the jacket with the Sun Yat-sen collar (Sun Jacket), pajama bottoms, maybe get really into martial arts and buddhist imagery... maybe a samurai sword on the mantle. They attempt to integrate themselves into the society and capture some of the imagined "magic" through the mimetic faculty. In doing so, they appropriate essentialized imagery and reflect it back into the people they are trying to mimic, which does not make them more alike as there is a consciousness on both sides of the contact of what is being appropriated and why. It remains an underoos fantasy.

The mimetic faculty and the use of the image has been used for millennia as a form of capturing the power held by the object. By drawing the Ibex on the wall of the cave there is a hope or belief in somehow capturing some of the essence or power the object holds to use for oneself.

Just as Dave in Breaking Away tried to capture the power of Italian cycling, thousands of cyclists tried to capture and appropriate the images in Breaking Away as they entered the sport of cycling, driving the image of the sport to far off places.

The image of drafting a truck probably sold more bicycles that that ad in the back of Sports Illustrated.

(Video) Specialized Downhill Urban Mountain Bike Competition

WOW!