nahmbs

i am missing being at the NAHMBS. here is my fave guy from last year ( not surprisingly, he is nipponese ). he flat out rules:



he is not the most skilled builder, from a boutique-craftmanship level of lookin at things. maybe not the hippest guy - he looked earnestly bewildered and wanting desparately to be polite to everybody there. but his bikes were magic. steel bikes, filled with wonder and imagination and freshness. so so cool. so so utterly lacking in pretension ( hello seven and vanilla ), just love and vision and passion. dude's little booth was everything that is right with a handmade bike.

http://www.cs-cherubim.com/

i made this secret tape of russell . . . . .

. . . . . down in the double-secret chamber of the rusty toolshed, when he thought nobody was around:





i gave him a chance to pay me off, but he refused. now his darkest secret is revealed - INDOOR ROLLERSKIING !! ??? !!

some are matheticians, some are carpenter's wives . . . . . .

so, we made our first-ever f2f contact with an old friend that facebook put us in touch with. in this case, a female friend from a crew i used to run with maybe 30+ years ago. facebook seems to be a lot of whacky things, and according to one buddy maybe even a secretly dangerous thing. but in case of meeting for coffee with an old friend long lost to time and circumstance - it was cool. very fun.

in other news, nicky is taking the news of a Ray's Bike park a short drive away with massive stoke. even tho he regularly shreds various concrete parks already - he has responded to this most righteous news by selling off one frame, a bunch of parts, and is working resources and the interwebs most diligently in order to build up a kickass park-bike. he knows the bar is high - ain't no stink-bug bike comin out of the studio. he is looking at a stylee start . . . .

it is simple enuf to see that sean white is haed&shoulders better than anybody in the half-pipe. it is not so well know that this is a newer situation. . . . he is pulling away from them, even after all these years. there was talk about the sick foam-pit private snowpipe and all, but here is the reason why:



over the last couple years, white has quietly become one of few legit world-class vert skaters in existance. this is extremely rare - most of them are old grizzled and time-tested guys. but white hucked himself like a madman into their midst over the past 4 years. vert skating is waaaaaaaayyyyy focking harder than snowboarding. it takes everything snowboarding does, but DEMANDS precision and CONTROL. there is no slopping nothing, at no time. the board is not tied to your feet. the ground is solid.

when you watch white, it is the fact that he rides like a skater that sets him apart. he lands with precision and pumps BOTH sides of the transition speed - nobody else does that - because they can't. he has board/body presence in the air like nobody else does, because he can do it with the board NOT tied to his feet.

so long as he keeps skating, and they don't, they will never catch him.

it's been a while since we had the fun of getting somebody skate-skiin' for the first time. when we started, you had to chop down your own skiis to size, re-epoxy them together, and then go find a snowmobile trail or frozen lake to try and figure out to do it from some still photo's you might have seen someplace. things have moved on.

check out liz here, on her 2nd day. lots of good stuff goin on. more importantly, a whole lot of bad stuff NOT goin on !! note the lack of duck-walking, stinkbug-style, floundering, and generalized unpleasantness. she was wise to heed our counsel of forgeting about the poles, and forgetting about how fast she was going, and forgetting about the 'workout'.

dig the nice flat ski she is running on. that means she is balancing on it and it alone - not easy to do. dig also the rotation of the upper body in anticipation of the new ski goin' down, but the hips still running the old ski, kinda winding up for a powerful new drive, but not wasting any energy with excessive floundering or counter-rotationv - just a tight driven weight transfer about to happen. check out that upraised boot, close and tight to the body perfectly positioned to pivot outward and accept her center of gravity smoothly and with no energy loss as she glides out onto it - REALLY not easy to do !! nice forward position, too. most of all, dig how she looks like she doesn't really need those poles at all - the sure sign yer getting it right.

gotta be honest - i cain't take too much credit. when gretchen skiis no-poles she looks like ginger rogers. all liz had to do was watch that, and keep tryin.

sometimes i dig the modern way-o-doin things.

who, me ??

thru what can only be described as an administrative oversight, i find my name on the covetted roster for the cheq 100. 3 months out, in the worst shape-o-my-life. on the other hand, i've never done a hundie mile mtn bike race, and always wanted to. plus, the entry fee is right up my alley. worst case, i die and my bones get picked clean by some possums in the cheq forest, which is fine by me.

i am reading something about GPS foolishness for the course, tho. i just got a cell phone a few months ago for god's sake - i leave GPS to NASA and do not want that manner of geegaw anywhere near my bikes. bikes were a form of ANTI-people knowing where you are at all times in my day, and i intend to keep it that way.

so i hope they will also have some paper plates with arrows stapled to the trees or somthin'.

little known fact

the best snow for XC skate skiing in the USA falls not in colorado, nor utah, nor the san juans. it falls in the midwest.

for XC skatin', ya don't want pow. ya want some moisture. ya want some silkiness. and ya even want a little transitoned icy stuff tilled in there once in while. makes for a firmer, faster, perfect skate deck.

not only that, but the terrain is better, too. rolling, winding, rollicking - as opposed to crab-ass sideways on the side of gigantic goddam mountain.

take tonite . . . . a layer of ginzu-ized pulzerized icy speed, mixed together with an inch and a half of new-fallen small-sized flake snow and packed to gentle firmess, with a layer of another 1/2 inch of pure silk on top. too, too sweet. better than the mountains, indeed - we should groove on that.