Here, you’ll find various things related to bicycles, such as ride reports and related adventures.
A brief history of me and bikes: I’ve always enjoyed cycling. In elementary school, I had the pleasure of biking down the street to school every morning. As a high school student, I would occasionally ride around the county, going to the beach or to the library. I loved the freedom and simplicity of going places on two wheels.
I initially hadn’t brought a bike to college, but at the start of the pandemic, I (like many others) got a bicycle to avoid public transit. Over the summer, I started to take longer and longer trips—a half-century, then a bike-packing trip, then a century—and I eventually started thinking of myself as a (road) cyclist. Before I knew it, I was in Europe riding the famous mountains of the French Alps and the cobbled hills of the Flemish countryside. I’ve since committed wholeheartedly to the role and gotten a nice road bike, and try to get in rides whenever the weather and class schedule align to allow it.
General Links
Here are some things related to bicycles but are not directly stories about something stupid that I’ve done while on a bicycle myself:
Watching Wout van Aert defend Belgian honor: I had the privilege of watching stage 21 of the 2021 Tour de France on the Champs-Élysées in Paris! Wout van Aert won the stage, denying Mark Cavendish the opportunity to take Eddy Merckx’s record for the most stage wins at the Tour.
My stable: a list of bikes that I’ve owned, rented, or borrowed.
Some useful links for local cyclists in Southwestern Pennsylvania:
The BikePGH website has a wealth of good information for new cyclists in the area, including a “Pittsburgh Biking 101” guide that I found very useful as a new cyclist and a frequently-updated map of the city showing where the major hills, bike lanes, etc. are. You can also pick up a free paper copy of this map at most bike shops around the city.
The Pittsburgh bicycling subreddit is not terribly active but is nice to have, especially for those of us who’d rather not use Facebook.
Cycling Ride Reports
Just for fun, this is a place for me to post more casual blog-type reports on my various cycling trips, mostly around Southwestern Pennsylvania. I’m not a particularly good cyclist, but I do enjoy it. I now do enough cycling that writing an entry for each ride is not practical, so I’ll only mention rides that are somehow noteworthy here. If you really feel like it, you can see my other rides on my Strava profile, although I’m not too sure why you’d want to see it.
Entries in color are my personal favorite rides. Those tagged with (video) have an associated video, and those tagged with (strava) have an associated Strava activity, which you can click on to see the route on a map.