When Amy Drombroski gave up ski racing for a new found love of bike racing in 2006, she didn’t mess around. She won the U23 Cyclocross National Championship her first full year of racing. In 2009, she took the U23 National title in cross country mountain bikes and then, just a week later, took the title on the road as well. Now, Amy’s spending her cyclocross season in Europe, chasing world cup titles and learning to race in their deep, fast, aggressive fields. We talked about the ups and downs of Amy’s short but full cycling career to-date, how she earned the nickname “Cross Diva,” the growth of women’s cyclocross, and more.

How did you first get started in competitive cycling?

I grew up alpine ski racing in Vermont. Once I graduated from high school at Burke Mountain Academy, I followed my older brother to Colorado to pursue my ski racing in Steamboat Springs. A second knee injury took me out for the majority of the winter so I joined my brother in Boulder who lent me his bike to use for rehab. I quickly realized I didn’t miss the ski racing, but I did miss the competition. So I tagged along with my brother to a criterium and was quickly hooked, despite my pedal falling off!

Take me through the short version of your path from those early days of amateur racing to your professional cycling career.

My first race was in May of 2006. I had so much fun racing that summer that come winter I wasn’t ready to stop and I certainly wasn’t keen on getting back on skis. My brother had this sick love of cyclocross so of course I followed him there. And though I struggled like mad and hated it, I was somehow hooked. That year I won the U23 National Championships. I hadn’t won many races or competitions so it was a new feeling, like a drug. I couldn’t get enough of cycling and I started mountain biking too, but since I tried road racing first, I pursued it the most. I raced on a local Colorado team for 2007 and the next year got a spot on Webcor. I was thrown in the deep end my first year with Webcor, racing World Cups and stage races in Europe and in Australia. It was an incredible learning experience and a massive arse kicking. I feel very lucky to have been part of the team.The next year road races kept getting canceled from the calendar so I added in more mountain biking and culminated that season with a U23 National Championship win on the mountain bike and a week later a National Champ win on the road bike. With the mountain bike title, I decided to pursue mountain bike racing the next year with Luna. But throughout all the switching I realized cyclocross is where my heart belongs. Luna was another great experience but the focus was US racing and my stubborn-ness prevailed—I wanted to race in Europe. I left Luna and was lucky to find Crankbrothers as a perfect sponsor.

Together we built the Race Club which was meant to be an off-road women’s team. I quickly realized I was in WAY over my head with Euro World Cup mountain biking but the cyclocross was what I was mainly interested in. Crankbrothers gave me infinite freedom in my ’11-’12 ‘cross season which allowed a full European cx season.  However, they decided mountain bike racing needed to be the primary focus of Race Club. So with my dreams and goals in cyclocross being too important to sacrifice, the dreaded search for a new sponsor continues…!

Koppenberg Cross, 2011. Photo by Kristof Ramon

As you mentioned, you spent nearly the entire 2011-12 cyclocross season in Europe. How was the experience for you, both racing and otherwise?

In a word: tumultuous. I had some of my highest highs and lowest lows. My high was my 6th place World Cup finish in Pilsen. My low was hardly being able to get out of bed when I was sick in December, missing a month of racing and training. It was grim for a while but I stuck it out and finished the season on an OK note. I loved living there. It was a much more simple lifestyle. Simpler, genuine, hard working people. In addition, the close proximity of all the races made it so I didn’t board a plane from the day I flew in, September 28th, until the day I flew back to the US, February 28th.

Did your European campaign have a positive impact on your racing? Are you planning on going back for another full season there?

I loved everything about racing in Belgium. It was the most challenging season I’ve ever had and I learned so much that I believe it would be a massive waste to not return this winter. The course variety and challenge was one aspect of it. I got in the habit of watching prior year’s races on YouTube because I didn’t know what I’d be facing at the race—sand, hills, woods, running, barriers, obstacles, etc. Another aspect I learned through error is how to balance it all. It’s a metric shit ton more races than I have taken on before, so to learn how to balance training, rest, racing is an integral part of the equation. A third aspect I noticed was the deepness of the competition. Don’t get me wrong, the competition in the US is wicked fast. We have Katie Compton and Katerina Nash racing in the US regularly and they have both won World Cups and finished on the Worlds podium. But the level drops off quicker and all in all is much less aggressive. I had to sharpen my elbows and growl more—whether I was racing for a top 10 World Cup finish or simply trying to finish and not get lapped when I was ill (and shouldn’t have been racing). You will battle the entire time for a top 3 or a top 40 and I think that pushed me more every weekend. I fully intend on spending the winter in Belgium again, if no other reason than for the bakeries.

Louisville USGP with the “infamous” re-branded wheels. Photo by Lyne Lamoreux.

Richard Sachs has said some very strong words in interviews about the fall out between you and he around you leaving (being kicked off of?) his cross team. What, in your words, happened in that situation?

Wow, I thought this saga was done with! This is what my nickname Cross Diva stemmed from. In short, the bike was too heavy for me so the Diva kicked off. At the time I thought re-badging wheels would be the ticket. It would appear I was racing sponsor equipment, but it could be light enough for me to be happy. What I did was very unprofessional. In sponsorship you race what the sponsor has to offer. The sponsor is proud of their product and they knows what their product looks like. In this case it was obvious the hubs were not sponsor correct. I hurt the sponsor and more than anything, I put the team’s sponsorship in jeopardy. Everyone on the team could have been hurt by what I did.

Have there have been any lasting effects from that fall out?

Well the Amy Dombroski Cross Diva t-shirts have become my supporter t-shirts …

Fortunately Richard and I have both moved on from it (I think) and Richard has been very cordial to me and supportive. I think and hope that people see the fall out for what it was—that I’m stubborn and picky.

Though women’s participation is increasing and progress is being made (Exergy providing equal payouts for men and women at the USGPs comes to mind), cross is still a male dominated sport. How can the cyclocross world—promoters, teams, the industry, etc—get more women racing?

It is happening before our eyes. Nothing can happen over night. The UCI made a step forward last season by requiring all C1 races to include a women’s race. This didn’t have quite the statement in the US as it did in Europe because men & women are treated quite equal in the US in cyclocross, thanks to the USGP, Exergy, Stan’s No Tubes, and others. But in Europe the fields seemed to increase throughout the season. We were allotted more & more time on the telly, start money grew, spectator turn out increased, and more respect was given to us in regard to start times, etc. If the money and treatment become consistently equal then more women will be able to justify traveling about to theses races at the elite level.

As far as beginners, again I think this is happening, slowly but surely. Clinics are happening throughout the US thanks to the majority of US women being wonderful ambassadors to the sport. This absolutely helps. I’ve done a few women’s only and kid’s only clinics and I think this is a big part of the growth—eliminating the intimidation factor of being grouped with the men. Patience is key, it is happening, we just need to keep pushing it. It’s similar to chasing down a break. If one person goes to the front and goes ape-shit it won’t do anything for the extended period of time. But if a team or two go to work on the front and slowly ramp up the pace there is a much better chance of reeling in what we are trying to achieve.

Noah Budnick is Deputy Director of Transportation Alternatives, a New York City bicycling, walking, and public transit advocacy group. TransAlt is regarded as one of the leading-edge transportation advocacy groups in the United States and Noah is right in the mix organizing and educating New York residents, pushing for policy and infrastructure reform, and more. Part one of this two-part interview covered Noah’s personal attraction to cycling, views on transportation options, and more. Part two picks up with New York City’s major bike infrastructure overhaul and its impact on ridership, how to increasing biking nationwide, and the anti-bike federal transportation bill.

New York City has undergone a transformation in the last few years from being unfriendly to bikes (or at least having that reputation) to implementing some of the most cutting edge bike infrastructure of any U.S. city. How did this change come about?

The long-story is that the changes we’re benefiting from are the product of 40 years of work. Transportation Alternatives was founded in 1973 and has worked diligently, organizing New Yorkers to reclaim our streets from cars and to reapportion the public space to more healthy, city-friendly ways of getting around.

New York City has always been a leader in transportation reform and bicycling. Safe Routes to School started here in the Bronx at the same time that advocates in Marin, CA were importing the concept from Europe. Safe Routes to School is now a federally funded program. The first dedicated bicycle path in the U.S. was built in Brooklyn in 1895—the Ocean Parkway Greenway, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who also designed Central and Prospect parks and the Emerald Necklace of parks in Boston.

In 2005, Transportation Alternatives launched the “New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign” with The Opening Planning Project and the Project for Public Spaces and we and changed the conversation about streets and traffic to one about livability, community, and quality of life. We used speakers, events, surveys, blogs, and media to put a face on how we move about the city. We changed the evaluation criteria for streets from traffic flow to quality of life. We moved from a transportation discussion to a social one with human emotions. Before this, we had been trying to solve the wrong problem.

Traffic flow will never make people happy.

Transportation Alternatives articulated and brought forward a vision that didn’t have to do with solving traffic problems. It had to do with people and their neighborhoods and how they feel.

Because the old New York City Department of Transportation (and most traffic engineers the world over) was afraid of things that didn’t solve traffic problems, it weakened them politically to not be able to talk about streets and social issues and quality of life.

Advocates had a few tastes of our new vision. We had the Hudson River Greenway on Manhattan’s Westside and pedestrian plazas in Herald Square. We visited Bogotá to see car-free days, Copenhagen for bike rides, London for congestion pricing, and Paris for Vélib and Paris Plâge. We talked about these things and more and more people learned how they improve quality of life and made the city better.

Much of the Streets Renaissance campaign’s success was realized by the social settings and events Transportation Alternatives and our partners hosted and where like minded advocates met. They reinforced the notion that our mission is a social and emotional one, not a traffic-fixing one. Photos, videos ,and inspiring and creative graphics made these events memorable and this strengthened people’s faith and grew the movement.

A lot has been captured for posterity. Transportation Alternatives’ quarterly magazine, Reclaim, is like our history book and our twice-monthly StreetBeat e-newsletter gives ongoing coverage of our work. The documentary film “Contested Streets” is a good prologue into the last six or so years of advocacy. Whatever issue you’re interested in, Streetsblog and Streetfilms have probably covered it though. They made transportation and streets a daily news beat, prompting big media like the New York Times and the Gothamist blog to regularly report on bicycling and public space.

New York’s 9th Ave separated bike lane. Photo by flickr user rllayman. 

What sort of impact have projects like the 9th Ave separated lanes and other dedicated bike infrastructure efforts had on ridership in the city?

Bottom line: the innovation of protected bike lanes in New York and other U.S. cities have catalyzed a massive increase in bicycling. And at the same time, they’ve made roads safer for everyone, whether they’re moving by bike, foot, or car. What’s simply amazing–the superpower of protected lanes–is the diverse array of people you see riding now.

I think of my mom as my model bicyclist. She has a bike, she likes to ride it, and even goes for recreational rides when she’s on vacation. She’s come to New York to do Transportation Alternatives’ rides like the NYC Century Tour and the Tour de Brooklyn, but if I were to ask her to go for a ride in NYC the day before one of T.A.’s rides, she’d look at me like I’m crazy. She’s comfortable riding through the Big Apple on a large, organized ride surrounded by thousands of other bicyclists, but when she looks at the streets on an average day she sees an uninviting scene. She’s got a bike; she likes to ride; she wants to ride. What’s our responsibility to make her feel comfortable to get on her bike on a normal day?

It all starts with infrastructure. As a public space, streets have to be designed to help people do what they want. The latent demand for bicycling in cities is huge, but if people look at a street and all they see is rough, rushing traffic, there’s no way they’re going to get on their bike and go for a ride. We need to build roads that give everyone safe space—this keeps them out of each other’s way and out of harm’s way.

9th Avenue is a beautiful story, but the lessons learned there go back a decade and a few blocks west to the Hudson River Greenway. The Greenway is a car-free path from Battery Park to the northern tip of Manhattan, connecting the two largest business districts in the country to some of the densest housing in the US. It’s the busiest bike path in the country because it’s safe, traffic-free bicycling for anyone interested, from 8 to 80. People need to feel protected from traffic.

The 9th Avenue separated bike lane was the first physically protected, on-street bike lane in the US. The Hudson River Greenway and similar bike paths proved that “if you build it, people will bike.” The trick in cities is that there isn’t always space available to build off-street bike paths, so we need to be creative in carving out dedicated space for people to ride bikes. Fortunately, the past sixty years of street design has left our roads massively over-designed. There’s way more space than we need to move the cars that use them. 9th Avenue showed that cities can reapportion road space and build 21st-century streets that make bicycling safe for people of all ages and abilities. And, even if you only care about traffic flow and level of service, 9th Avenue showed that converting a car lane to a top quality bike lane won’t cause gridlock.

Fortunately, public opinion research consistently shows that city dwellers prioritize providing safe transportation options much more than focusing exclusively on the movement of private autos.

Since the 9th Avenue protected bike lane was installed, it’s been amazing to see planners and engineers continue to develop the designs for protected, on-street bike lanes. Whether protected from moving traffic by parking, bollards, or other physical separation, designers across the country are creating great standards that can be adapted to cities’ unique characteristics and the neighborhoods and blocks that make them special.

Photo via flickr user Regional Plan Association.

Despite relative success in cities such as NYC, Portland, Minneapolis, and others, bicycling only makes up about one percent of the mode share nationally. What do advocates need to do to increase the number of riders nationwide?

Meet people where they’re at. Before anyone gets on a bike, they need to imagine themselves riding a bike. If its advocates’ job to promote bicycling, then how can we help people have their own vision and realize it?

Of course, there’s a balance between meeting people whether they’re at and pushing the conversation with new ideas. As I mentioned above, this was the sweet spot that the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign sought: bring the vision and present it in a social space where people feel comfortable being exposed to new ideas.

The demand for bike riding is here and it’s only growing. People like routines though, so the more they’re engaged, the more they’re asked to think about getting from A to B in different ways, then the more they’re going to be able to get their heads around the “new” idea of riding their bike and give it a try.

You’ve got to advocate like there’s no tomorrow for protected space and safe traffic. Protected bike lanes make people feel comfortable going for bike rides more often. Twenty miles per hour is plenty fast for urban streets. Set the speed limit there. Design roads to prevent crashes so when collisions do happen the penalty isn’t death or serious injury.

Imagine a place where people of all ages and bicycling abilities can go out their front door and feel comfortable getting on their bike and going where they want to go. What does that look like? That’s what advocates should aim for and help others see that vision and aim for it too.

Although it seems somewhat unlikely to pass in its current iteration, the proposed House transportation bill would deal a problematic blow to the work you and similar bike, pedestrian, and transit advocates are doing. What would happen if the bill passed? What does it say that House Republicans are pushing for these kinds of rollbacks on alt-transportation progress in America?

It seems like the debate in Washington is about power, not about transportation, and that’s leaving everyone across the country in pain. It’s sad really. Bicycle and pedestrian funding is a teeny tiny part of the federal transportation bill—less than 1%. Why is the bill stuck in partisan gridlock?

The reason we have a six year transportation bill is because it takes at least a few years to plan and build transportation projects. Government needs stable, multi-year funding to see projects through, whether they’re bike lanes, subways, or roads. How can you complete a project that’ll take, say, four years to plan, approve, and build if you have to apply for new funding every three months? That’s a pretty big risk for everyone involved: elected officials, government agencies, contractors, tax payers.

Fortunately, we’ve got a good team of federal advocates looking out for Americans. The America Bikes Coalition, the League of American Bicyclists, and Bikes Belong are some of the top groups working on protecting federal funding for biking.

Bicycle advocacy at the state and local level is very strong and getting stronger, so even in an unconscionable scenario where bicycle and pedestrian and Safe Routes to School funding is gutted in Washington, local advocates will continue to make these improvements are made. Everyone should join their local bike advocacy organization (you can look it up on the Alliance for Biking & Walking’s website).

My First Bike explores the origins of professional frame builders by going back to the start and looking at the first bike they ever built. Today’s My First Bike features Jeremy Shlachter, the builder behind Gallus Cycles in Fort Worth, Texas.

Give me the short rundown of your first frame: when was it built, where, materials, any special details about it, etc?

My first frame was a track frame built under the guidance and watchful eye of Koichi Yamaguchi at his frame building class in Rifle, CO in December 2006. It was made out of True Temper tubing that Koichi had designed many years before, along with Long Shen lugs, fork crown, bottom bracket shell, and Henry James Dropouts.

As far as lugged track frames went, it was pretty standard with steep head tube and seat tube angles, high bottom bracket, and short chain stays. I went for a wishbone seat stay attachment, but other than that kept it straightforward as I was mainly trying to get my head around basic techniques of brazing and filing.

Why did you choose to build a track bike for your first one?

I decided to build a track frame because I had been working as a bike messenger and had been riding a fixed gear bike exclusively for the 3 years before I built the frame. Being relatively short, it was always hard for me to find a decent frame, especially a lugged one, and that was part of my motivation for building it.

How did you learn to be a framebuilder?

After learning from Yamaguchi I started to piece together my shop space back in Texas and built a few more frames on my own. In 2008, I went to Michigan to take another class from Doug Fattic. I then stayed on for a couple months helping Doug out in his shop and then went to Ukraine and spent a couple of months building frames for a project Doug had set up over there.

Learning from Yamaguchi, Fattic, and my time spent in Ukraine helped me develop and refine both my skills and knowledge of frame building. After 3 years of building frames for myself, family, and friends, I set up Gallus Cycles as a business building frames for other people.

However, I feel that to keep progressing as a frame builder, craftsman, and a cyclist the learning process should never stop. Repetition; constant research into the past, present, and future of cycling/frame building; and trying new and more difficult things are the keys to becoming a better builder.

Did you go into it planning to make frame building a career or did that come later?

Yes, I started with the very naive notion of becoming a frame builder. I was living in Scotland and going to architecture school. I lucked out and had gotten a part time job as a bike messenger. It did not take long for me to realize that I enjoyed bikes more than just about anything. For fun, pride, and to some extent, poverty we did all our own repair work and bike builds. We would always be swapping out parts and frames, trading components. Everyone taught each other what they knew.

My knowledge of handmade bicycles was quite limited. I was not aware of the handmade boom that was starting to take off back in the States. All I knew is what I saw, and that was either the great vintage British bikes my friends kept finding or the not so great Chinese/Taiwanese bikes at the bike shops. I thought to myself “Someone needs to start making nice handmade bikes again.”

Having a strong background in design and being pretty good with my hands, I decided that I was that “someone” who needed to build these handmade bicycles. If I get a good idea in my head I stubbornly go after it instead of sitting around talking about it for ages, so once I had come across Yamaguchi I was back in the States getting flux on my hands and firing up the torch.

That was nearly 6 years ago, and it has been an interesting journey. I had definitely underestimated what it would take to get everything set up, both the time to acquire the skills and knowledge, the funds to get tooling and start a business, along with juggling that with part time work, social life(I used to have one, I think), and still getting some miles in on the bike. You can never expect reality to turn out just how you envisioned it, otherwise it would simply remain a dream.

All that aside, I am more than happy and comfortable with how far I have progressed since that first frame back in 2006. I couldn’t see myself doing anything else and look forward to what the future has in-store for me and my bicycles.

Noah Budnick is Deputy Director of Transportation Alternatives, a New York City bicycling, walking, and public transit advocacy group. TransAlt is regarded as one of the leading-edge transportation advocacy groups in the United States and Noah is right in the mix organizing and educating New York residents, pushing for policy and infrastructure reform, and more. In part one of this two part interview, Noah discusses his early love affair with bikes, his views on the severe crash that hospitalized him in 2005 and his eventual recovery and return to bicycling, his appreciation for transportation options, and more.

When did you first get into bikes? Were you one of those kids who learned to ride and never stopped or did bikes come later?

I rode growing up in Vermont. Low traffic dirt roads, potholes to “jump,” lots of coaster brake skids. Fun.

I don’t think my experience growing up and riding is that different from most people. In fact, if you’re the type of person who rides a lot and is really into bikes and doesn’t think there’s much more to say about biking, then I’m writing this for you. I’m writing this for me too, to see what kind of new ideas come out, what new ways there are to talk about ideas, how people will react to them and then what we can do with it all.

What attracts you to bike advocacy? How did you start working as an advocate?

My bicycling breakthrough was a truancy scheme. It was all about getting an extra free block my senior year in high school and it all revolved around bike riding. The thing was that if you played a team sport at my high school, then you could “contract” out of gym class for that season, meaning you didn’t have to go. They figured that you got more than enough exercise at practice and games and students could use the extra time during the day to study since time after school was committed to the team. I took advantage of this for most of my high school career.

However, two of the things standing in my way of having a glorious final spring semester were my required gym class and the fact that I hadn’t planned to play a team sport, so, as high school senior, I was stuck in gym.

At the time, my friend Marc and I were really getting into mountain biking. We had started a club at school the year before and we managed use everything we’d learned in high school to put together a case to convince the head gym teacher that our rides should count towards gym class. We set up a regular riding schedule and kept a log of the days, times, and miles we rode and he let us “contract” out.

There are two great lessons that I take from this. One is that you have to meet people where they are. This is what my colleague Brodie always says and it’s true. There’s no way I could’ve convinced the head gym teacher to let me out of class if I told him I had better things to do in the final warm months of high school than run laps. I had to put my idea in his terms, so he’d believe I wanted what he wanted.

The second thing is that emotional experiences are very powerful and if you experience positive emotions around an activity, you’ll probably like that activity and want to do it more. Getting out of gym to ride my bike is just one of the great experiences I associate with bicycling. I’ve had so many good ones that even the few not so good ones don’t deter me from riding. Even with the bad, I’m usually able to see a silver lining in them, learn something, and continue to keep riding something I love.

You had a really terrible crash in 2005. What happened?

I don’t know and here’s the thing: when we talk about bicycling, the conversation comes around to crashes too often. I’m trying to promote this activity, get more people to do it, so the last thing I want to do is tell them about a scary experience I had doing it. What is it with us? It’s like the anti-cycling, highway builders, auto-industrial complex conspiracy put a chip in our heads that gets us to tell horrible crash stories as soon as we start talking about bicycling. I mean, if you owned a restaurant would you tell everyone about the time your customer got food poisoning?

If people want to know about my crash, I’m happy to talk to them. There’s a great ending: I’m back on my bike, I still love to ride; the City of New York built an amazing protected bike path on the street where I crashed; my life goes on. If I can ever be a resource to anyone recovering from a crash or people dealing with the trauma of a loved one who’s suffered a crash, please reach out to me. I’d love to talk, tell you what happened during my recovery, what I went through, what my family and friends did for me. It was amazing, really amazing.

Noah at the site of his crash in Brooklyn, four years later. Formerly a dangerous stretch of road for bicyclist, the city built a high-quality, separated bike path in 2009. Photo by Sean Patrick Farrell.

Was it hard to return to riding after you recovered? Did it change your viewpoints about advocacy in anyway?

The first time I got on a bike after my crash, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was in physical therapy and one day the therapist said, “OK, next time we’re going to go for a bike ride.” They didn’t ask me if I wanted to or not, they just said we’re going and I didn’t question it. When the day came and I got on the bike, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know if I would be able to pedal or balance. Would I fall off, starting crying, lose it, have a breakdown?

I got on and started pedaling and everything was OK. You know the saying…

The ride was amazing and I couldn’t wait to do it again. The catch was that part of my rehab program was that I wasn’t allowed to bike in traffic for a year. I bought my first monthly unlimited ride MetroCard.

During that year, I learned to embrace other ways of getting around. Before my crash, I was one of those people who pretty much rode everywhere, all the time, which was fine and I think is awesome. For me, being forced to take a break from riding made me appreciate the ability to live without bike or a car. I got to read a lot because I took the train and bus everywhere. I walked a bit more too. Going on seven years after the crash (so six years back on my bike), I love riding as passionately as I did before my crash, but I ride less and take transit and walk more.

These days, the thing I love about riding is that when I ride, I ride because that’s how I want to travel. I ride for the pure enjoyment of bicycling. I don’t ride because I feel like I have to prove anything or because I’m a “cyclist” and I have no other choice. Or because bicycles are superior to other forms of travel and I can’t use any sort of less healthy, less environmental, less city-friendly way of getting around. Other times, I take the subway for the pure enjoyment of taking the train (i.e. reading or listening to my walkman). I take the bus because I want to take the bus or I walk because that’s how I want to get from A to B. I’ve even been known to take a taxicab from time to time.

As an advocate, I’ve come to appreciate the necessity of having multiple of ways of getting around everyday, especially in a city. If you want to live in a healthy city, then we all need access to transportation choices (transportation alternatives, if you will). It’s like your diet: everyone knows that a healthy diet includes a mix of grains, fruits, and vegetables; you can also throw in some meat and diary, a little fat and sugar from time to time. It’s a mix, that’s my point. People are healthy, streets are healthy, neighborhoods are healthy, and cities are healthy when choices are available. People will pick them if they offer competitive advantages; we like variety.

In recent years, I’ve worked a lot on public transit advocacy, ensuring secure, sustainable funding for transit in New York. Transit is the lifeblood of the city, region, and state (given the size of New York City’s economic wealth, you could even say it’s critical to the U.S. economy). Even if you drive, you benefit from transit. What would happen if the eight million people who ride subways and buses everyday decided to drive? What would the air be like? Imagine the traffic jams. Where would they park?! Transportation Alternatives has advocated for programs like road pricing and other innovative ways to fund public transit. This is essential to keep New York’s hundred year-old transit system running for another hundred years and to keep the city prosperous and ensure a good, healthy quality of life for the people here.

I’ve also done a lot of work on road safety. We need to set a goal as a city, as a country, and as a society that no one should be killed or seriously injured in traffic. In Sweden, they call this Vision Zero. All traffic crashes have contributing factors, so if you understand what happened, then you can work to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Almost all traffic crashes are preventable. It’s like any other public health problem: you examine what leads to it, and you apply countermeasures to keep it from happening in the first place. Like a vaccine.

This is the 21st century. We’ve wiped out scores of infectious diseases; we identified environmental harms like lead and have stamped out lead poisoning. We know what causes traffic crashes, so no one should be killed or seriously injured on our roads. We have the greatest engineers, the best designers, the savviest media who have ever lived. How can we not design our streets and public space to be as safe as possible?

Tommy Godwin redefines what it means to be a dedicated cyclist. In 1939 he set the world record for most miles ridden in a year by riding 75,065 miles (120,805 kms). In order to do so, he had to average 205 miles every day for the entire year. He rode the equivalent of three times around the Earth’s circumference. To top it off, he did all of his riding on a more than 30-pound Raleigh with a four-speed Sturmey-Archer hub (Raleigh and SA were Godwin’s sponsors). When he finished his record setting year, he spent several weeks re-learning how to walk before heading off to fight in World War II.

Godwin was born in 1912 in Stokes-on-Trent, England. He began to realize his potential as a cyclist while working as a bike delivery boy for a grocer. He went on to a successful amateur and professional cycling career winning over 200 road and time trial races before tackling the world record.

Cycling writer Dave Barter has details on Godwin’s history and record breaking year on his blog.

My First Bike explores the origins of professional frame builders by going back to the start and looking at the first bike they ever built. Today’s My First Bike features Eric Estlund, the man behind Springfield, OR’s Winter Bicycles. 

Give me the short rundown of your first frame: when was it built, where, materials, any special details about it, etc.

The first bike I built was a grass track fame built under the eye of Ron and Gary at United Bicycle Institute. It is made from Kaisei tubing with Paragon drops and one of Andy Newland’s wishbone rear castings. The fork crown is a Long Shen unit I still use. Nothing terribly notable about the design—I wanted to build something fairly simple the first round to learn about the process without getting bogged down in the minutia. I appropriately guessed I would have my hands and head full. Once I left UBI this was also the first frame I personally  powder coated and has the first stem I built independently.

Why did you choose to build a grass track frame first?

At the time, I was an outdoor experiential education teacher at a private school in Utah. I was slated to teach a cross skills course, and I thought a grass track frame would be a fun way to mix it up. As I mentioned, I also wanted to concentrate on the process of building bikes at UBI, and I thought going for the “most simple” design would allow me more time to work on the hand skills.

How did you learn to be a frame builder?

UBI was a great foundation and I highly recommend frame classes as an intro. They quickly give you a proven method to build a bike and set you on a proper path of self-education. In my particular case that meant looking for an opportunity to accelerate my learning curve. My wife and I decided to move to Eugene, OR and by the end of the first week I found myself working as a full time brazer on Bike Friday’s custom line. For two years I pushed brass with them; about 11 miles and 380 lbs of the stuff over the surface of roughly 3000 bikes. Nothing teaches you to build bikes like building bikes. For the first year, I built bikes as a hobby after hours. By the end of the second year, Winter was taking up more and more of my time—enough that I decided to pursue it full bore.

Did you go into it planning to make frame building a career, or did that come later?

When I went to UBI originally I knew I would build frames afterward, but was unsure if it would be a hobby or a business. Even then, I didn’t assume it would be my main gig. I had been in the bike industry for a while and I knew frame builders that had come and gone. I was attempting to keep my pipe dreams in check, but I also did not think I would be bitten quite so hard. Moving west sealed the deal for me and it’s been a passion (and a bit of an obsession) ever since … and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Eben Weiss’ (known to most as Bike Snob NYC) second book, The Enlightened Cyclist is modeled after a religious self-help book, albeit with tongue firmly planted in cheek throughout. Weiss’ goal is ostensibly to help all cyclists reach a state of commuter nirvana while using their bike to go about their daily businesses—something he readily admits he has not achieved with complete success. In order to build the case for the advice he offers, Weiss starts by taking the long view of the history of commuting and then draws on his experience as a commuter in New York City to examine the current state of commuting in America.

The book’s history of commuting begins in the Garden of Eden (Weiss’ biblical-parody extends nearly cover-to-cover, with somewhat mixed success. It’s also worth noting that while he parodys the Bible’s structure and makes endless biblical analogies, you’d have to work hard to actually take offense). Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden marked the beginning of humanity’s commuter suffering. Weiss writes, “eating from the Tree of Knowledge was the Original Commuting Sin, and we’ve been paying for it ever since.” His history of commuting continues throughout the old and new testaments: forty years of wandering in the desert, Noah’s Arc (the birth of “humankind’s lust for gigantic vehicles”), Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem by donkey, and Paul’s delivery of the epistles. Weiss continues his history through “The Olden Days” (The Crusades), the “Old School” period (17^th century European explorers), and eventually makes his way to modern day.

The religious analogies wear thin at times during the long history of commuting, but it is nonetheless a humorous explanation as to why commuting makes us miserable so often. We’ve got (at least) 6,000 years of suffering as commuters bearing down on our subconscious. With history behind him, Weiss begins his examination of our modern state of commuting affairs. He looks at cyclist, driver, and pedestrian relations (including the awful things drivers do to cyclists, cyclists do to drivers, and that we all do to pedestrians). He talks about the ridiculous things bike commuters do around other bike commuters such as salmoning, shoaling, wheelsucking, and commute racing (summarized eloquently as the “anonymous dry humping of the cycling world”), and others. He examines the seemingly ever-present backlash against cycling and bikes-vs-cars meme that the media loves to espouse in tandem with any news related to bikes-as-transportation.

It is in his exploration of the current state of commuting that Weiss’ is at his best. He possesses a keen ability to articulate the absurdities of human interaction. The greatest BikeSnobNYC blog posts have always been the ones that deconstruct the ridiculous things human beings do and especially do to each other. In doing so, he is able to shed some light on why we do what we do, which in turn allows us to be understanding of our fellow humans for a little longer, before dismissing them as assholes.

When he looks at our modern commutes, Weiss deconstructs some of the myths surrounding bikes and cars. With that, he begins to make his compelling case that the better we understand our fellow commuters—bicyclists, drivers, and walkers alike—the happier we can all be. This is certainly not to say that we should all pretend everything is great all the time, even when it’s not. But instead, we should choose not to get “right up in someone’s face and [call] them a ‘cocksucker’” just because they inconvenienced us momentarily on our ride to work.

This understanding is only the start of the path to Enlightenment. Weiss spends the final section of the book laying out a how-to of sorts for being the happy and satisfied bike commuters we all ultimately want to be. Given that this is the crux of his book, I’ll spare you any spoilers. Instead I’ll just say, Weiss’ advice is practical, levelheaded, and sincere.

The Enlightened Cyclist is a demonstration of Weiss’ maturation as an author. His first book Bike Snob was funny and at times poignant, but ultimately reads like a disjointed collection of blog posts that sometimes suffered from its excess of extended-metaphors. The Enlightened Cyclist is very much a cohesive book (and one that mostly reins in those really-extended metaphors) and provides valuable insight to and understanding of the often-crazy world of bike commuting in America.

We’re launching a new feature today on The Bicycle Story called My First Bike. My First Bike explores the origins of professional frame builders by going back to the start and looking at the first bike they ever built. The inaugural My First Bike features Tony Pereira—Portland, OR-based frame builder, multi-time North American Handmade Bicycle Show prize winner, and master egg-poacher.

Give me the short rundown of your first bike: when was it built, where, materials, any special details about it, etc.

I built my first bike in 2003. At the time I was working in a bike shop in Salt Lake City and we were selling a fair number of 29ers. I liked the idea, but thought I could make some improvements, so my first bike was a 29er. I had been singlespeeding for a little while, so I made it a singlespeed too. The materials and construction were the same as what I use today: fillet brazed steel.

I started mountain biking in 1987 and started working in shops shortly after that. I remember seeing the early Ritchey, Fisher, and Salsa bikes and admiring the flow of the fillet brazing. When I started building I had a little brazing experience and was drawn to that technique because of those early mountain bikes.

I’m pretty much fully self taught. There were no other builders in Salt Lake, so I was left to my own devices. I discovered the Framebuilder listserv, so I had a community to turn to when I got stuck. But I mostly figured things out by trial and error.

I remember having an epiphany one day. I had built a few tall bikes, a crazy moped, and a cargo bike by hacking old frames apart and brazing and welding them back together. When I was building the cargo bike, I realized that I was on my way to building “real” bikes from scratch and I knew that I just had to do it. There was never any thought that it would just be a hobby. This was totally naive. I didn’t really know what I was doing and I had little idea how to run a business, but I was driven to make it happen.  Luckily I had some great friends willing to help me work through my mistakes for the first couple of years. I’m forever grateful to them for helping me realize my dream.

In the early 2000s, Gregg Bleakney was on a strong path to (one type of) success. He was earning a six-figure salary as a software salesman, owned a house in Seattle, and was generally enjoying his career. Then Gregg and his best friend from college set out on a two-year bike tour from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina to raise money for the American Diabetes Association. Towards the end of the ride, Gregg realized he couldn’t go back to his old life. He quit his job, sold his house and started making inroads to a new career as a self-described visual storyteller focused on adventure travel. Now he’s traveling around the world telling stories as a photographer and writer, often with a focus on bikes. I spoke to Gregg on a short break he was taking in the United States after covering the Tour de Langkawi in Malaysia. We talked about his Alaska to Argentina ride and its sea-change effect on him, his new career and world travels, and more.

I’ll start with the first trip that kick started your new path in life. What originally inspired you to take a leave of absence from work and ride from Alaska to Argentina?

I basically just wanted to take a one year sabbatical from my software job then come back with renewed energy and vigor for building my career. I’d worked in that career for a decent amount of time and was starting to work my way up the ranks pretty well, but I wanted a little break. So that was how it all started.

I had started riding my bike to rehab an injury I’d gotten from running track and field. I used to do the triple jump and I blew out my knee. I met some guy at a coffee shop on the coast who told me about someone who was riding down through Mexico on a bike. I didn’t even know anything like that was possible at the time. I found that bike tourist on the internet and followed some of his trip reports, I think on a Yahoo Groups message board. That all played into me deciding to do my trip.

I planned and began the trip with my best friend Brooks from college. We rode together all the way through Mexico. Then we were assaulted and nearly killed by some rebels down near the border, near Guatemala. He decided to call it quits after that. We both went through some pretty intense post-traumatic stress issues after that. Our families came down and met us. Brooks was engaged at that time and he decided the wiser move would be for him to go home and abandon the trip. I decided to keep going.

After Brooks left it became a solo trip and everything changed. I ended up taking two years to do the ride and realized towards the end that it wasn’t about trying to work my way back into my old job. I don’t think I could have gone back to my old nine to five technology career. After two years on the road it wouldn’t have fit well with my psychology.

Along the way, I bought a camera and made lots of pictures and met all these great photographers on the side of the road and in some of the spectacular locations where I’d stop. I started quizzing them on how to take pictures and what the photographer lifestyle is like. At the end of the trip I got a scholarship from a guy named Rich Clarkson, the former Director of Photography at National Geographic. He gave me a scholarship to come to a workshop. I got to meet a bunch of great National Geographic adventure photographers and that really encouraged me to keep going with a photo career instead of going back to my old job.

So that’s the two year trip in a nut shell.

You mentioned you were cycling to rehab your knee, but did you have any experience as a serious cyclist or bike tourist before you began your big tour?

It had been a few years since my injury and I started doing Team in Training century rides where you raise money for charity and ride a hundred miles. I did a few of those and got pretty into training. When I was running track I was training for the Olympics, so all I knew was high-intensity, competitive, winning-focused athletics. That summer I rode 20 or so weekend warrior type 100-mile endurance races all over California, where I was living at the time. I remember competing and just trying to beat everyone up every hill and always going all out.

Thank god for my friend Brooks. He was doing a longer distance, multi-day fundraising ride down the California coast to raise money for AIDS. I linked up with him and that ride is more about meeting people and enjoying yourself. He raised a bunch of money for the AIDS ride and later discovered that most of the money didn’t go to the charity, a lot of it went to event organizing costs. So we decided to do our own ride the next summer down the coast from Seattle, my home town, to San Francisco, his home town. We raised money on our own to give to the charity of our choice. His mom had recently passed away from diabetes, so we decided to give the money to the American Diabetes Association.

That was the first long-distance bike ride I did.

Later I went to a talk at REI by a guy who’d done the Alaska to Argentina ride over ten years in different bits. I got to be good friends with him. The last piece he hadn’t done was the very northern section from Prudhoe Bay down to Fairbanks. He invited me to join him on the trip and I did. He showed me how to camp out in the wild. I’d never even camped before that trip.

That was one or two years before starting my own ride, so I’ve actually done that section of it twice. It’s kind of funny. Not many people do the Prudhoe Bay road twice.

Photo from The Daily Randonneur.

Your new career has taken you all over the world covering bike races and various adventures, cycling and otherwise. Do you have some favorite assignments and places you’ve traveled?

I really love Colombia. Colombia is special to me because it’s the one place I skipped on my trip from Alaska to Argentina. That was in 2005 and it was a little questionable whether or not it was safe to ride a bike through the country at that time. But I met some Colombians later on in Peru and they invited me back to their country.

I just went for my fifth trip last month to Colombia. I’ve spent a lot of time with cycling teams there. It is one of the only developing countries that consistently produces world-class cyclists. These guys are coming out of nowhere and going to Europe and kicking ass.

I met one guy who was on the Café de Colombia national team. He bought his first bike by working in the coal mines in a small mining town in Colombia. I did a story for Bicycling Magazine and went with him to his hometown. We went down into the coal mines 600 meters below the surface in three or four foot tall mine shafts. All of his old coworkers and his old coach were still working the mines. The air was terrible, you could barely breathe. It was just a difficult space. A lot of the guys who work in the mines are competitive bike racers on the weekends. They have their own miners racing team. That was one of my favorite stories I’ve done.

Another, I just did recently. I got credentials to shoot photos from a helicopter at the Tour Down Under. It’s pretty rare to get credentialed to fly over the peloton in a helicopter to do aerial photos. Getting up and over the peloton and looking down helps put things in perspective and puts everything into place. It was a pretty amazing project to get to see the huge, amazing landscape of a bike race.

It seems like you’re doing really varied work, shooting commercial work, covering bike races, and otherwise. Do you have a particular sub-genre of adventure travel and photography that you like the most?

My first year or two, all my assignments had something to do with cycling. But I realized at the end of the day it was less about cycling and more about adventurous travel. The bicycle is just a tool to travel. I guess my sub-genre would be adventure travel with a bicycle. But I’m trying to do other things now as well and grow from that. I’ve been doing some investigative conservation work, which has been really fulfilling. That article will come out in the next month or two.

But, I always try to point this out. Cycling is the only major sport that really shows travel, whether through a landscape or a destination. There’s no arena. You’re out in the world, traveling through it. And that’s why I love covering professional cycling. And the only type of professional cycling I cover is stage racing that actually goes and travels through a place.

What’s on your short list of places left to go that you have not yet?

I’m really interested in Africa right now, especially when it comes to cycling. Green Edge, a pro cycling team out of Australia, just signed the first ever black African (Daniel Teklehaymanot from Eritrea) to a pro continental team. He says there are a ton of guys as good as him or better coming up through the ranks.

The UCI is trying to expand cycling to a more global sport by holding races in China, India and all through Asia. They’re also trying to recruit cyclists from Africa. I think next up for me, maybe even this year, I’m going to go to Africa and try to figure out what kind of talent pool there is and what the potential is for these guys adapting to be bicycle riders. With track and field, there’s no doubt that a lot of runners from Kenya and elsewhere have incredible cardio-vascular systems. They have an innate ability to run long distances at the highest level. But, running and cycling are total different animals, so we’ll see.

Gregg and Brooks on the “road.” Photo by Gregg.

Do you enjoy the nomadic lifestyle? Do you find it difficult to be away from home as often as not?

I just rented an apartment. I don’t have my bed yet, I’m sleeping on an air mattress. But I’ve been nomadic since 2005. I tried to count up the number of beds I’ve slept in and it’s well over 1000 beds in the last few years. There’s a thrill to being a nomad, but now with my career growing it’s become tough to execute everything I need to do on the road. There’s a lot of post assignment work, editing all your photos and writing a piece, doing interviews and references. You need a place to actually sit down and do all that.

In the first few years it was really what I needed to do. If you really want to be an adventure photographer and travel writer, you have to go out and do adventure travel. But I got to the point where I couldn’t be completely nomadic anymore. It’s kind of the latest phase of my life, where I really appreciate having an apartment. I probably won’t be there very much, but it’s nice to have a place to come back to.

Do you ever see yourself settling back in to a nine to five routine in one place?

I don’t know if I’ll ever do a nine to five. My goal right now is to continue building my career. I’ve stopped calling myself a photographer in the last year and started calling myself a visual story teller. I’ve been writing and doing video as well. I want to keep building that. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for that type of storytelling and people are actually starting to pay for it.

What do you have in the works for 2012?

It’s been a pretty amazing year so far for me. I actually had to make sure to take this month just to relax. I’ll be heading back to Europe soon and I’ll probably do something for the Giro d’Italia for the second year in a row. Then I’ll be back down in Colombia working on two different projects. Then towards the end of the year I’m probably going to go do some stuff in Africa. Those are some of the major projects I’m looking forward to, but I’m also looking forward to spending more time in the US this year. It sounds strange but I’m excited get my files organized. I have I don’t know how many terabytes of files stored and backed up on drives. Some are at my friends’ houses, some are at my parents house, so it’ll be nice to get that all in one place and in order.

Is there anything else you want to share with the world about your adventure life?

It’s been pretty amazing so far. It’s kind of a surreal experience to look back at what I was doing just a few years ago and what I’m doing now. It’s definitely a change of life.

I get emails from people all the time asking for help planning long bike rides or long trips. And the first thing most people ask me is “what kind of bike should I get” or “what kind of gear do I need?” But I tend to try and get people to look past the gear and think about how a year or two on the road will change their life. There’s a lot of things beyond equipment that mater. Being on the road for two years totally changed me. I try and encourage everyone to go out and do something like this and more Americans especially. A lot of people could benefit from leaving everything for a year or so and going out and traveling.