Every Wednesday on Ditch Your Car we’ll be bringing you just another reason to spend more time on two wheels. Be it a photo, a statistic or an inspirational video, we want to keep reminding you about why riding is great!
What’s better than a Danish music video about cycling in Copenhagen? Not a whole lot.
Don’t speak Danish? Not to worry, Copenhagenize has the lyrics for you.
We decided the sunny, sunny lanes of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil was an excellent choice for our last Monday in August. Anyone of you ever ridden in this city?
Have a lane that you love? Send us a photo! You can post it to our Facebook page, shoot us an email at blog[at]ospreypacks[dot]com or upload to our Flickr group and we might just feature it here on our weekly photo feature, Lane Love.
Image: Dylan Passmore
via Michael Henderson in Paris:
[The race] turned into an epic, which I shall detail in the next day or two. It started perfectly with the first day going as planned. What was not in the plan was getting no sleep the first night and catching cold at the same time… I thought I had recovered on the morning of day 3. That was not the case, it caught back up to me that evening. I stayed an extra unplanned night at the last control point before riding in [yesterday] morning in 78 hours and some change.
I’m a little upset at not riding the fastest I could, but I’m very excited to have finished despite the obstacles. Finding ways to overcome the problems along the way is what randonneuring is all about, and I did that in spades. Hope to have some time to begin recounting the details tomorrow…
Congratulations Michael!
Michael Henderson is the CFO at Osprey Packs HQ in Cortez, Colorado. Stay tuned… we’ll be posting updates from his race and recap when he comes home!
Earlier this month David Suzuki published a piece calling for improving cycling infrastructure. The environmental activist highlights that investing in bicycling infrastructure is in fact a crucial investment, both in the environment and the economy:
Human-powered transportation will only get more popular as gas prices rise and as the negative consequences of our car-centric culture increase. We should be doing everything we can to discourage single-occupant automobile use while encouraging public transit and pedestrian and pedal-powered movement.
Suzuki continues:
Building bike lanes also creates jobs and other economic spin-offs, according to a study from the Political Economy Research Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts, titled “Pedestrian and Bicycle Infrastructure: A National Study of Employment Impacts”. Researchers found that “bicycling infrastructure creates the most jobs for a given level of spending.” For every $1 million spent, cycling projects created an average of 11.4 jobs in the state where the project was located, pedestrian-only projects created about 10 jobs, and multi-use trails created about 9.6 jobs. Infrastructure combining road construction with pedestrian and bicycle facilities created slightly fewer jobs for the same amount of spending, and road-only projects created the least, with a total of 7.8 jobs per $1 million.
Every Wednesday on Ditch Your Car we’ll be bringing you just another reason to spend more time on two wheels. Be it a photo, a statistic or an inspirational video, we want to keep reminding you about why riding is great!
Image: Aurimas Rimsa
Mountain2Mountain‘s short film, Waking Lions, will show on the big screen this weekend in Golden, Colo. as the expo for the USA Pro Cycling Tour rolls through on its finale day into Denver. If you’re going to be in town for the tour, don’t miss this inspiring and thought-provoking film.
Also, make sure to swing by Mountain2Mountain’s booth and support the Panjshir Tour and their work for women’s rights!
Waking Lions Trailer from Allison Otto on Vimeo.
We arrived in Paris at 6 a.m. last Wednesday morning in preparation for Paris-Brest-Paris. All luggage arrived safely, we found the train, we found the apartment and then immediately went to a patisserie for croissants. Then it was time to get down to work. I assembled my bike on the terrace of our apartment, under the watchful eye of the Cathedral de Notre Dame.
View of Hermosa Peak from the saddle
One of the great things about working at an outdoor gear company like Osprey Packs is the necessity to become an expert regarding the product you sell. One of the ways that Osprey encourages team members to keep their product knowledge sharp while at the same time gaining some important rejuvenation time in the outdoors is through the Osprey Outings Program. Team members receive paid hours to get out in the field and use packs and/or travel gear for real world product testing. With the explosion in popularity of Osprey’s line of cycling specific packs and new cycling packs on the table for Spring 2012, we decided to put together a bikepacking trip on the Colorado Trail to really spend some quality time with a few of the larger cycling packs.
This photo was submitted to us during our Adventure Cycling photo contest a few months back, and we liked it so much we decided it needed to be featured as a Lane Love.
Having ridden Mt. Diablo’s road a few times I wanted to ride something I wasn’t familiar with, so I went with Mark. Trying to pick up the pace so I won’t get dropped I catch up to the four other riders. Looking back I find out that no one else follows. Not a good sign. We take Shell Ridge to get to Rock City. The ride was fantastic, hot and dusty. Half because of the trail and half because Mark was giving us a proper lesson of eating dust. I forgot the route we went mostly because I was tried, out of shape and tried to keep up with Mark. One route we went was Dusty Trail. Found out that the trail was in a word, dusty. So dusty is fact that I took a really soft fall down one of the trails trying to avoid a biker coming down.
You can read the full ride recap here.
Have a lane that you love? Send us a photo! You can post it to our Facebook page, shoot us an email at blog[at]ospreypacks[dot]com or upload to our Flickr group and we might just feature it here on our weekly photo feature, Lane Love.
This video has been making the rounds online over the past week. As part of the U.K.’s Channel 4 series on urban action sports, Concrete Circus, Scotsman Danny MacAskill shows off his unbelievable bike skills, balancing, hopping and flipping through an abandoned ironworks factory. Enjoy!
Michael Henderson loves to ride his bicycle… really, really far. Michael left earlier this week for France to compete in his firstParis-Brest-Paris Randonneur. First run in 1891, the 1200-kilometer Paris-Brest-Paris, or “PBP” as it is commonly called, is a grueling test of human endurance and cycling ability. Organized every four years by the host Audax Club Parisien, the Paris-Brest-Paris is the oldest bicycling event still run on a regular basis on the open road.
