Gum Tape Deathmatch
I’m partaking in one of my favorite pastimes, sitting here at Home Slice with a beer appreciating all the beauty that makes its way up and down the avenue.
As I pulled up, there were a bunch of muscle cars parked outside of La La Land. Chevy C10 sitting on my favorite pair of American Racing wheels, Daytonas if I remember correctly. Parked beside it a Mustang also on Daytonas.
I creep up a little more and kicking off this row of American muscle is a ’96 Impala SS.
Of course.
First vehicle I ever drove down Sunrise Highway in. My grandfather’s car.
“When you merge be smooth, you’ve got time. Don’t be thinking you just gotta jump right in, take the time and see everything that’s going on around you…
Alright now get on it.”
First time experiencing a V8, could immediately notice a difference in power delivery. It was so linear.
Legs for days just building and building like a progressive run.
A shame they keep trying to replace such perfection with hybridized inline 4’s and twin turbo V6’s.
Feels much like super shoes and 40mm stacks.
I don’t understand why we continue to optimize past the point of experience but it bothers me.
“This pizza will come out as soon as I finish this beer,”I think to myself.
“Whole pie for Bakkar!”
Optimizing past the point of experience and now I find myself rushing the last swig.
---
I rode fixed gear for the first time today.
The legendary yellow Godzilla.
Yellow.. like the RX-7 I drove around Tokyo for two weeks.
History doesn’t repeat but it certainly rhymes.
The RX-7 was cool but you really needed to be revving it out to properly enjoy it. The handling was sharp. Butterfly knife sharp. It’ll make you look effortlessly cool but get a little too confident, a little too cocky, and you’re getting cut.
The same can be said for the yellow fixie adorned with a “Red Suns” sticker that currently sits against my dining room wall.
Am I dreaming?
---
“How long have you been riding bikes? You’re strong.”
“Uh I commuted a couple miles every day for a couple months, this is really my first time ‘cycling.’”
No one knows that my 5-kilometer bike ride to work every day was always an all-out effort in steel-toed boots and OCP’s as was the 5-kilometer ride home.
Delivering tofu.
---
Here I am now.. Racing this weekend on a yellow fixed gear with a “Red Suns” sticker after only just riding fixed for the first time today.
Gumtape death match.
Eurobeat intensifies.
---
Second day riding fixed gear and I find myself at the only circuit designed for F1 in the United States.
I did 22 or so miles.
Fixed gear is fun in the most masochistic way possible.
It is—
More difficult than running.
Running might be a little more intense, but fixed gear is.. more difficult.
I think the best way I can put it is like—
Running is like driving, but fixed gear is like steering a rocket.
You can’t be a pussy and kind of just have to commit to everything.
It’s intoxicating.
Wade and Ariel have created a monster.
---
What I like riding through the city the most on the Aethos is the puzzle-solving.. fuck the bike lane, how do I keep my momentum. Fuck the lights, fuck the bike lane. Fuck the rules. Solve the puzzle.
Fixed gear ups the ante. The calculations have to happen quicker. The presence of mind is even higher.
Jeeeeez I really do live for this.
Motion is great. The mind in motion is my favorite place to be in.
I feel like.. I’m talking myself into or out of hard drug use by saying that I should keep the track bike on the track.
“Nooo I’ll be reasonable, I won’t push my limits—”
The fuck I will.
I am jonesing as I type this.
---
Here we are again.
I’m sitting here at Home Slice.
Seems to be the right place for this moment in time.
I wasn’t sure where I’d end up. I wasn’t sure that I’d even set out again today after getting groceries this morning.
But honestly, if given a reason to ride this yellow fixed gear Wade has loaned me, I will take it.
“Are you going out anywhere?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Well.. would you take this package to the UPS store for me?”
“Hmm guess I can cosplay as a bike messenger? I’m gonna get a beer though, just so you know.”
“That’s fine.”
I put my Africap on, and my cycling shoes, loaded my backpack and made my way out.
I briefly debated the best way to get to the UPS store with the bridge being out but with the weather being so prime, I realized it didn’t really matter what the best way was. I’d enjoy the weather and enjoy the ride.
---
Riding the fixed gear seems like an act beyond me.
I had to take a moment to laugh about how my thoughts towards running didn’t carry over to cycling.
“A runner needs nothing more than a pair of black shorts and running shoes.”
“Why does everyone try to make such a simple thing so complex?”
The fixed gear is the same spirit, albeit I don’t feel like I have to be a lone wolf. There seems to be a collective consciousness shared amongst single speed, fixed gear riders.
“This is the way.”
Ariel would say.
And right he may be.
I’ve always found there to be a sense of community, congregation in cycling, but reducing the amount of gears, foregoing the brakes, and subtracting one’s ability to coast.. if cycling is congregation, the fixed gear world is.. a monastery, covenant.
---
And with all that being said—
Riding a fixed gear bicycle is fucking hard.
I was feeling good about myself heading to Wrong Turn this past weekend.
The second day on the bike, I found myself in a flow state at Circuit of the Americas. Nonstop pedaling for an hour chasing down S-Works and turning the Turn 1 mountain climb into a molehill.
The third day I was humbled at state champs.
The roadie in me took for granted the efficiency of dropping a gear on a carbon road bike and not having to actually work that much harder to accelerate.
In a 35-minute race, I lasted maybe 10 minutes with the peloton. And spent the next 25 alone thinking to myself how fucking hard what I was doing actually was.
But that’s exactly where I found the joy in it.
It was hard, and there were 20 or so other people doing the same hard thing (actually even harder given the size of some of the chain rings I saw) exceptionally well.
And with consistency, with practice, I could do the hard thing just as well as them but they’re already ahead of me.
But none of that even mattered because before the race had started, during the race, and at the end of it all.. I felt I was graciously welcomed into a world, a tribe of sorts.
I learned a language that couldn’t be explained.. one simply that must be participated in.
---
Will my carbon fiber, electronic shifting, hydraulic disc brake adorned, tubeless tire precision instrument of an Aethos still bring me joy?
Absolutely.
Will that joy ever compare to what I found racing fixed gear bikes with the homies?
Probably not.
N+1 though I guess.
---
One more beer and a Coca-Cola.
Thinking about how I got here.
Approximately 60 days ago, Ariel sits across from me as I drink my first cup of coffee as a 30 year old.
“Are you gonna race bikes again?”
“I don’t know.”
I think I knew all along.
One must adapt a mindset that looks ahead, commits to the line, and understands that there’s no room for hesitation.
Once you’re in it, you’re in it.
Now get on it.