Author: Dan Brekke

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Cyclers in the Sky

The Vail Daily News calls Lance Armstrong “arguably the best cycler of all time.” The occasion: the former maillot jaune‘s performance in the Leadville 100 on Sunday, where he finished second (by 1:56) to defending champion Dave Wiens. The winner broke his old record in the 100-mile tour of the Colorado Rockies (AKA “The Race Across the Sky”) by 13 minutes; the second-place Armstrong broke the old record by 11 minutes. Meantime, the third place finisher was 33 minutes back. Among our responses: Holy crap.

(Lest we forget: This is the second year in a row Wiens has schooled a Tour de France champion. Last August, he beat the bloodied, bowed, but not forgotten Floyd Landis. )

Beyond yesterday’s results, the Vail Daily News story makes it sound like Wiens and Armstrong were having some fun out there:

For the first half of the race, a herd of competitors remained close as well. But as the lead pack, which included both Armstrong and Wiens, was nearing the half way point, in which competitors faced a steep ascent up to the highest elevation of the course at Columbine Mine (12,600 ft.), the two cycling champions began to separate themselves from everyone else.

“It seemed the pace was slow. So, I just accelerated a little, and no one stayed with us,” Armstrong said.

Wiens and Armstrong were separated by a mere two feet coming down the descent, nearly five minutes ahead of the herd they left behind.

“It was probably about 35 miles just the two of us,” Wiens said.

The two took turns drafting and pushed each other to a quick pace.

There was no let up in either rider as Wiens and Armstrong both chose to stay on their bikes through a steep, technical ascent in an area towards the end of the race that competitors normally push their bikes up.

“I would have never have done that,” Wiens said of scaling the area called Power Lines. “ … That was Lance’s idea.”

It was soon after that ascent that Wiens felt that his hope for winning was slowly vanishing the longer that Armstrong stayed with him.

“If Lance and I come into town together, there is no way I win that race,” he said.

Fortunately for Wiens, he soon didn’t have to worry about that, as Armstrong’s seemingly endless stamina finally ran out.

After a crash by Armstrong a few miles later, the race was all but over.

“Just not thinking,” Armstrong said of the crash, “too much speed going into a corner.”

Even after accomplishing an Armstrong-like feet of consecutive wins, Wiens was careful about comparing himself to arguably the best cycler of all time.

“The guy I raced today isn’t the same guy that won the Tours,” Wiens said, acknowledging that Armstrong has been retired since 2005. “So, I don’t put myself in that category.”

OK–the mountain “cyclers” are now finished with Leadville. Next weekend, the runners do the trail. We know one person whom we could imagine giving that a try.

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Quote of the Day: ‘Silent Murder’

“It was like silent murder. The pain was there, but there was no screaming, no cheering, so it was very bizarre.”

—Stuart O’Grady on the nearly absolute absence of fans on the closing portions of the Olympic road race course near Beijing. (By way of Bobke Strut.)

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Man for Our Times

Kate picked up an old copy of Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt” from the Berkeley Public Library. She wants to read it because it’s the basis of a play a local group is putting on–“Ubu for President.” She was struck by the opening description of the title character. After a description of a marvelous American city called Zenith, a place “built … for giants,” Lewis introduces his protagonist:

“There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was beginning to awaken on the sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house in that residential district of Zenith known as Floral Heights.

“His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay. ”

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Culture Wars, On-the-Road Edition

An overview piece from The New York Times "Moving Targets"") on the hostility cyclists encounter (and sometimes return in kind) on the road.

Friday morning, July 25, around 6:50 a.m., he was pedaling on a
residential street, wearing his green hospital scrubs, when a
Volkswagen roared out of a driveway in front of him. Swerving to avoid
the car, Mr. Cooley cursed loudly and rode on.

The driver and his
passenger cursed back. As Mr. Cooley pulled over to the sidewalk, the
car turned onto a driveway, knocking him off his bike. In Mr. Cooley’s
narrative, the passenger, swearing, jumped out and pummeled him. Then
he got back into the car, which zoomed away. Mr. Cooley lay prostrate
on the sidewalk, bloodied, with a concussion and a torn ligament.

“We’ve had a car culture for so long and suddenly the roads become
saturated with bicyclists trying to save gas,” Mr. Cooley said 10 days
after the attack, still feeling scrambled, in pain and traumatized. “No
one knows how to share the road.” He doesn’t plan to bike to work again
this season.

The piece is fine as far as it goes — and the paper let it run to a pretty good length. But disappointingly, it fails to really test the position that this is a problem with no solutions.

Coincidentally, we’re reading a book the story mentions: "Traffic," by Tom Vanderbilt. Very interesting stuff in there about the psychology that goes into road hostility–and how it is exhibited in some form by all of us in all of the roles we play: driver, rider, and pedestrian.

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Art Racks

From today’s New York Times: David Byrne, Cultural Omnivore, Raises Cycling Gear to an Art Form With Bike Racks:

David Byrne is an installation artist, author, blogger, recording
executive, photographer, film director and PowerPoint enthusiast. He’s
even been known to dabble in music. But in certain New York
neighborhoods he may be most visible as a bicycle rider, a lanky figure
pedaling around the Lower East Side, or from Bay Ridge out to Coney
Island in Brooklyn or up to the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

In recent years his interest
in bicycles has expanded from riding them to thinking seriously about
the role they play in urban life, as he has started making connections
with politicians and international design consultants keen to keep cars
from taking over the city. So when the Department of Transportation
asked him to help judge a design competition for the city’s new bike
racks, he eagerly agreed — so eagerly, in fact, that he sent in his own
designs as well.

They were simple shapes to define different
neighborhoods around the city: a dollar sign for Wall Street; an
electric guitar for Williamsburg, Brooklyn; a car — “The Jersey” — for
the area near the Lincoln Tunnel. “I said, ‘Well, this disqualifies me
as a judge,’ ” he recalled, “but I just doodled them out and sent them
in.” He figured maybe they’d be used to decorate the contest Web site, nycityracks.wordpress.com.

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Ohio Sighting of the Day

Conneaut080508

Ohio sighting of the day: a bald eagle, flying near the railroad museum in Conneaut (KAHN-nee-utt), Ohio. I asked the women staffing the museum desk whether eagle sightings were common in the area. Yes and no. They’re often seen around the harbor on Lake Erie, and some are thought to nest near a highway bridge over a nearby creek. Still, they hadn’t seen any over *that* part of Conneaut. I was with my brother John and my dad; John said it was the first time he had ever seen a bald eagle “in the wild.” Wild enough, I guess.

No picture of it, though. The above is a view of the museum (the old New York Central station).

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Kassel After



Theater After

Originally uploaded by Dan Brekke

Here’s the same scene taken some time after the bombing. My dad bought three cameras at an Army post exchange–including a Leica and a twin-lens reflex camera–and took many scenes of Kassel in 1946.

At first seeing this picture in a stack of old photos, we supposed that my dad took it. But looking again now, the picture and others that almost exactly reproduce the perspectives seen in a series of prewar postcards seem to have been done commercially. At least that’s my guess, since they appear to printed on postcard stock (though without credits). In short then, the photographer or photographers who documented prewar Kassel returned to the scenes they had shot earlier for the “after” view.

This scene speaks for itself. I’ve put up a (still unorganized) colllection of similar views on Flickr.

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Kassel Before



Theater Before

Originally uploaded by Dan Brekke

Part of a project I’m working on during my family trip. My dad was drafted late in World War II and sent to Germany as part of the occupation army. He was assigned to Kassel, a city on the River Fulda that had a prewar population of about a quarter-million and was the site of an important locomotive works and some other industries. The city was heavily bombed, with the deadliest and most damaging attack coming in the fall of 1943.

This is a “before” view of Kassel’s opera house (officially called the Prussian State Theatre, I think). According to one account, a program was being presented the night of October 22, 1943, when the air raid sirens went off, signaling the start of the 569-plane British fire bombing that devastated the city. (It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it, a nation putting on an opera for the home front while engaged not only in a calamitous war but also in a side project of systematic extermination of millions. All part of maintaining an illusion of normalcy, or humanity, I guess.)

This image is from a postcard that is an obvious duplication of an original by Echte Photography and published by the firm Bruno Hansmann–apparently taken in the mid-1930s.

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Cabdriver Economics

I landed in Chicago just before 11 Friday night and took a cab over to my dad’s apartment on the northwest side. I got into a Checker cab outside the terminal. I threw my bags into the back seat and told the driver my approximate destination. He didn’t respond beyond a nod and started out.

Having driven a cab myself on and off for a couple years in the early ’80s, I take an interest in what’s happening with the drivers. One ready topic of conversation, if both driver and passenger are inclined, is the work itself. I asked my usual question: “Busy tonight?” No, it wasn’t–very slow. One thing led to another: He had started at noon. He works until midnight or 2 a.m. most days. How many days a week? “Oh, my God,” was the answer. He works every day, but just half a shift on Sunday so he can see his kids. He pays $100 a shift for the use of the cab, and another $50 for gas. “So you need to make one hundred and fifty dollars just to be at zero?” I asked. “Exactly,” the driver, whose name was Michael, answered.

I found out more: How he had come from Nigeria as an exchange student 25 years ago and wound up staying here (though he has gone back home, too). He earned a master’s in public health administraton at the University of Illinois. (If we had had longer to talk, maybe I would have found out why he had been driving a cab the last five years instead of working in the field in which he’d been educated). His stay in the United States had been affected by international politics when at one point his home government stopped paying tuition for the students it had sent abroad.

I heard more: about Muslim-Christian politics in Nigeria, about the country’s oil wealth, about the civil war in the late 1960s (the “Biafra war”) that killed millions–only this time told from the perspective of someone watching it happen in his own country.

Michael didn’t drive the exact route I would have taken, but it was worth the few extra minutes talking. We got to my dad’s at half past 11, and the fare was 30 bucks. Gladly paid. Michael bid farewell saying, “Good talking to you. You woke me up!”

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United States Air Blog

Mono080108

Mono Lake, with some clouds reflected in the surface, about 2:30 this afternoon. Flying to Denver–where I’m sitting right now, and where it’s 100 outside–and then on to Chicago for a family expotition. More later.

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