It was an ugly October for cyclists up in Portland. If you haven't heard, two were crushed to death by right-turning trucks in separate incidents less than two weeks apart. Final reports have been issued for both tragedies and each report sports some eyebrow raisers.

In the first incident, on October 11, a 19-year-old rider pulled up alongside a cement truck at a red light in downtown Portland, apparently intending to continue straight. The driver didn't notice her ride up next to his truck, and where she stopped she didn't appear in any of his mirrors. When the light turned green the truck turned and the rider didn't stand a chance.

My men can eat their belts. Give me fuel for my tanks!
-- General Patton

In the second edition of Art of Urban Cycling (which was retitled Art of Cycling), I added a lengthy footnote about what I felt to be a troubling societal dilemma looming in our near future – a growing inability of global energy supply to meet global demand. (Page 37, for those playing along at home.) Anyway, I wanted to check in and see how we’re doing on the energy front one year later.

After spending a good deal of time riding trails out of Breckendridge this summer, we've really come to love the extensive singletrack trail network that connects Breck with Keystone and Frisco. More than that, we've learned to respect the propensity for heavy clouds to gather, coalesce and dump their colossal loads of rain and hail here before rolling eastward over the Kenosha Mountains. After a notably dry first half of the season we'd been thrashed on four consecutive trips to the slopes of Georgia Pass. With this in mind we started Friday's ride carrying backpacks full of rain and cold weather gear, but the familiar 'storm tubes' never formed. Crazy ol' Mother Nature would challenge us in a new and exciting way, however.

I'll quickly report on a few interesting race results.

First, Leadville. The news that Lance Armstrong would not ride (I'm admitting this) kept us from following up on our tentative plans to lookey-loo up in Leadville, race-side, and sent us up to Vail to mountain bike instead, so I can't provide any firsthand accounts. But it was good to hear/read that Dave Wiens defended his 'title' and Flandis pushed him the whole way, beating a whole crowd of eager enduro elites, even after mangling his leg in a crash relatively early on. An epic ride from Floyd, without a doubt. (It would have been fun to watch, but really, it's just some dudes riding by for a few seconds with their tongues hanging out -- not a particularly mindblowing spectacle if we're honest with ourselves -- and then they're gone.)

In a very different sort of race, the 15th annual Cycle Messenger World Championships in Dublin, controversy swirled around like an Irish potato storm.

He's in. He's out. He's back in! He's ... out.

Armstrong's mouthpiece says he won't ride in Leadville after all. Guy came to his senses. Although there is still time for another change of mind or two before the pre-dawn start on Saturday.

First Lance said he was probably going to enter the Leadville 100 mountain bike race. "Wow!" we all said. Then Flandis said he too would probably do it, and everybody clapped hands, danced jigs and said "it's on, suckas!" But then Lance said, hey, I forgot I have this crazy 'scheduling conflict,' you know, sorry. And everyone sighed with disappointment. But recently, it's been reported, Armstrong was up at Leadville with his familiar cohort Chris Carmichael, and he was checking out the course's multiple climbs -- just like he used to pre-ride the climbs of the Tour's mountain stages. Seems like he just might go for it.

No, not Scott Moninger.

Watching Discovery's Tom Danielson ace the Bob Cook Memorial Hill Climb a few weeks ago, I had no idea that he had quite recently been so chronically ill that he couldn't manage 15 mph on his bike and feared he might be dying. He must have been somewhat relieved to find out in June that the culprit was a common parasite -- Giardia. (Word is that he caught the bug while winning the Tour of Langkawi in Malaysia way back in 2003, not from some muddy stream near the beautiful, albeit cow-infested, surrounds of his home town of Durango.) Within a few weeks of the diagnosis he improved so much that he felt better than ever. 

Christie has been training for the Bob Cook Memorial Hill Climb (July 21), and has conquered the big mountain and the highest paved road in the world several times in recent weeks. She also went to Maui for a short vacation, rented a bike, and pedaled up Haleakala, the massive volcano that dominates half of the peanut-shaped island. When I asked her which mountain gave her the most trouble, she surprised me a bit.

She looks harmless enough, doesn't she?

The first time I ran into Jaimie Lusk was at the start of one those wacky courier races. Here were all these guys, nervously joking around, making excuses in advance for the embarassment we were about to bring onto ourselves, while Jaimie stood there with a stone face and the proverbial Eye of the Tiger. It was obvious before the race even started that she was going to put everything she had into winning it. As serious as Polonium-210, she appeared to be visualizing her triumph and the terms of victory. It was impressive and, I'll admit, frightening as all Hell. When her speed and determination were made clear on the streets a short while later, most of the racers dropped out in shock, complaining of phantom mechanical issues [1].

The photo was taken by R. Reid on Road 550 near Buffalo Creek. Seems to be 'greening up' more than usual.

The mountain bike season is off with a crackle here. A crackle and a crunch -- the sweet sound of mountain bike tires rolling over Pikes Peak granite.