The New Boredom

For the last 5 summers I’ve been traveling all over North America because of bike racing both on and off the bike. I’ve had a lot of good times but towards the end I just seemed to remember only the bad ones:

-Being stuck in the cold rain, soaked from head to toe, praying that your $10,000+ backpack full of camera gear isn’t getting trashed.

-Blowing out your knees in the hot beating sun carrying that $10,000+ camera bag down the hill that weighs 40 pounds.

-Hustling to get the shot that you know the magazine needs for the story and then finding out that the story isnt going to be run.

-Magazines and other clients paying you for your work 6 months later and having that be “fast payment” in the media circle.

-Broken gear, smashed flashes, chipped lenses all so you can get that shot that will never be used for anything.

-Seeing the racers hustling and breaking their balls (literally) and getting nearly nothing in return.

-Warrior course marshals busting your balls about leaning on the tape.

-Paying out of your pocket to do other people’s work and then making a fraction back of what the going rate is for media people.

-Lost baggage, food poisoning, high gas prices, never ending cross country drives.

-Bad venues.

-Bad race organizing.

All this shit added up and it got to be too much.

This summer is the first time I’m not traveling all over to these races to have what seems like the worst time of my life. But oh no, the real world strikes back and it hits heavy. I’m working at two “entry level” jobs right now which is a clever use of words. They call it entry-level because if they called it “kill yourself boring/dead-end” no one would apply. I dont have time between the two jobs to do much of anything fun anymore unless I make sure to put it in my planner.

What I’ve come to realize is that all the bad times dont add up to shit at all. They dont count and remembering that list was harder (and shorter) than I thought it would be.

I’ll take three straight days of standing in the cold rain, pointing my camera at dedicated racers any time over staring at the finishing/collating end of a Xerox CP7655 wondering why I bothered going to college when even a stupid monkey could do either of my square-ass jobs.

Living the dream is easy. Keeping the dream alive is the hard part.

Shot from my trip to Vermont for the 2007 US National Championship event, mystery rider playing in the puddles like a kid. Seen on LitterMag.com almost a year ago.

While hiking up a certain trail network the other day with my amigo Alex Vidal, we were discussing the art of hating on mountain biking when he said something that was dumb and obvious and brilliant and perfect all at the same time: “I guess I just dont hate mountain biking that much anymore. It’s alright.”

Damn right, Alex. It is alright. Despite the gripes (of which there are many) and all the hate (of which there is an ample sum) and all the d-bags (of which there are always too many), mountain biking is pretty alright. Nothing else gets me out of bed before 7am. Nothing else makes me invest two hours of hard labor (hiking) for less than 4 minutes of actual fun (maybe less if i would let off the brakes). Nothing else gets me together with good friends as much as mountain biking, nor has anything else given me so many good people with which to spend that time.

So yeah, mountain biking is alright.

Just to prove it so, here are three photos of Alex shredding the same turn:

1.

2.

3.

While shooting those photos, some hispanic dudes rolled by in a car and called us something that I didnt understand. It sounded like “meat nachos” which is cool I guess- better than being called vegetarian nachos. Also I got my first mosquito bite of the season on my arm and then proceeded to die of west nile but I had to get up and go to work the next morning so I got over the whole death thing.

Alex may be contributing some of his perspectives to The New Boredom if he gets some time this summer. He’ll be pretty busy keeping the pace in pro class this year.

Behind my apartment building lies Boulder Creek. Along Boulder Creek you can find these nice little dirt pathways which are supposed to provide you with a nice little nature walk tucked away in the city. Usually they are filled with trash, broken glass, passed out bums, and burn out high school drop out kids. Boulder has just given up on these people though and most just jog right by it all as if none of it ever existed.

This place in my backyard seemed like a pretty perfect place to set up a solo slalom track so I cleaned up about half a gallon bucket worth of broken glass shards and a trash bag full of burger wrappers and beer cans out there before moving all the dead fall from the trees (which was crazy due to our last winter here in Boulder where it snowed more than I can ever remember). Then all I had to do was clear out a rough sketch of the course with a shovel and start riding it in.

You begin in the neighbor’s alley way which is paved and makes for an easy place to get up to speed. You roll up a curb and into the first turn which is a wide flat turn (now rutted in pretty well):

Come in too hot and you blow the turn and beef it on the loose over hardpack surface. Too slow and you just suck. Follow that up with turn 2 which is a slightly tighter flat turn that you can (and should) pedal out of:

And then things tighten up a bunch. Turn 3 is a tight rut now with roots in the entrance and exit of the turn. Also, there is a shrub which I had hacked down before but now one stick points out of it. If you are leaned over far enough, the stick whips the piss out of your right hand/arm. I’d remove it but in a weird masochistic way, it is kind of rewarding to know you are leaned over far enough to whack your arm on a stick that is only about a foot off the ground.

Immediately after that you have to swap it over pretty quickly to get set up for turn 4 which is another tight one. i cant seem to do it without breaking out the rear tire to get around it, pedal hard out of turn 4 across the regular foot path and into turn 5 which is scary turds:

Turn 5 is kind of sketchy. It’s always been dug in as a rut so there is something there to support you through the turn but the “flag” for the turn is a 13 inch diameter tree. There is some bark missing from the tree on the incoming side… you might guess how it happened. Here I go around it like a wuss cringing and hoping like hell that I leaned in enough to make the turn but not so much that I destroy my shoulder and face:

And if you have made it this far you sneak in a pedal stroke or two across the foot path again and into the soft dirt/sand at the end and plow into the moto rut for the fun at the finish:

You can lean the bike over so far here that you can make secondary ruts with your inside crank/bb, rotors/brakes, and just once, I dug my bars in and beefed it pretty hard.

The whole thing takes about 10 seconds or so I’m guessing. I am not sure though as I just havent cared to time it. This thing is all about having fun and it’s right outside my back door. Plus it’s a better use of the land than say- a big trash can.

-Kevin

(Photos thanks to my awesome lady friend Stephanie)

The New Boredom is here. It’s going to be like the old boredom but… more like a blog and less like a magazine (hence the dropping of the “Magazine” bit) so articles will be posted here when ever they come up instead of packing them all together into an ‘issue’ like the old boredom. Contributing writers will be able to use this as a venue for the airing of grievances regarding cycling (or life if it includes cycling- I guess you would call that shit “lifestyle” in print). Occasionally there may be an article written in praise of something but don’t count on too many of those.