Had a fabulous shop at Yellow Bike this evening.  Very busy.  All 12 work stands were full most of the night and we had a lengthy waiting list.  Even allowed a deviation from shop guidelines and let people work on bikes away from stands.  Even the wheel truing stands were full.

As hectic as it was I love it when shops are busy.  Lots of bike healing going on.  It sharpens my teaching skills, especially since I have to switch gears so often reacting to the steady stream of questions and requests for advice.

Now it’s time to wind down, sip a few beers and read my latest book:  Bike Tribes.  Hope I’m not disappointed like my last book.  So far I’m enjoying.

…but even a dog, the sworn enemy of cyclists since the invention of the bicycle, can wrap its mind around this kind of math: Bicycles + People + Cycling.  This means that understanding cyclists should be easy, but the hard truth about cyclists is that very few of  us understand each other.

This is how the misunderstanding happens: Millions of people are involved in cycling worldwide.  Some ride bikes for transportation.  Some ride for exercise and fresh air.  Some ride for competition , racing bikes on the road or on the track or on trails or in fields of mud or across the United States or on a long loop around France every July. Some people are as dependent on their bicycles as a heroin addict is on heroin. Some people ride their bicycle one time a year and think that’s enough. In general, cycling itself is a highly individual, highly idiosyncratic activity — the type of sport where people quite regularly get into it by riding alone and without having to submit to the greater will of a group. And as a consequence, the people who are drawn to cycling seem to be spirits who follow their own advice, their own guidance, their own way of thinking about the world and how they ought to be riding bicycles in it…