Saturday, April 2, 2011

One fixed-gear rider who's going to love hell

The Fat Cyclist just wrapped-up a series of posts on his version of hell, aptly titled Fatty's Inferno. It's funny. You should read it.

In it, Fatty talks about various roads of this cyclists' hell, each one dedicated to a different type of heinous cyclist, such as whiners and eternal attackers. He also has a section just for fixed-gear riders. Here's an extract:
Before me lay a pristine valley. Clean air. Pines and aspen. Tall grass, waving gently in the light breeze. Not a single building in sight. A single road dropped sharply down into this valley, at which point — with no flat to speak of — it immediately climbed steeply back up. The only riding to be had here would be hard climbing and steep descending.
“This is a beautiful place,” I told The Cyclist. “And this is an incredible road. How can you call this a level of hell?”
“No kidding,” agreed The Cyclist. “Actually, I vacation here. It’s one of my favorite places.”
And then I saw something far down at the bottom of the valley that perplexed me, deeply. Thousands — perhaps millions — of bikes laying down (drivetrain side down, of course), littering the valley floor.
Meanwhile, not a single rider was in sight anywhere. “Where is everyone?” I asked. “Why is nobody riding?”
“Take a closer look at the bikes,” replied The Cyclist.And then I got it. Every single one of them was a fixed gear bike, built without brakes, for showing off and for urban riding — and entirely useless in a place like this.
“But where are the riders?” I wondered.
“Oh, they’re here all right,” smiled my guide. “It’s just that I have made them invisible. You see, fixie care much more about being seen than about the ride itself. In the absence of an audience — not to mention coffee shops and thousands of pedestrians and exhaust from a road choked with cars –they quickly lose interest in riding.
I read this and I chuckled. Then I thought to myself, "I know of one rider who is going to have a great time in hell. Patrick Seabase."

Check him out climbing and descending the Stelvio on his fixie (if you don't know of the Stelvio, just understand that it's big and steep).

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