Seven – Page 66 – Seven Cycles

We Couldn’t Have Said It Better – Linda Freeman

A lot of our riders end up here at one point or another, coming to see where their bike was/will be born, and recently we hosted Linda Freeman who is a fitness consultant and freelance writer from Vermont. We built her bike, an Elium SLX, with our friends at Fit Werx in Waitsfield earlier in the year. If you read Linda’s 7 or her regular feature in the Rutland Herald, Active Vermont, then you know she’s a deep thinker on fitness and cycling. We had a great visit with her, which she wrote about here.

Mo Bruno Roy’s Mudhoney PRO

Mo Bruno Roy has won a lot of races on our bikes, including this year’s Single Speed Cyclocross World Championship. She makes us look good, and for this we are enormously grateful. This season, in addition to standing on podiums, she also got her Mudhoney PRO (affectionately known as Mo Pro II) all kinds of cool coverage, some of which we share with you here:

There was a cool write up and photo gallery in Cyclocross Magazine.

Another gallery in Velo News that documented the design, build and race process for the bike.

On the Road: Evergreening Austin

With the relative calm the holidays bring, we thought we’d go someplace warm and ride our bikes on trails and roads we’d never seen before. We got on a plane and headed for Austin…where it was colder than Boston. Oh, well. Adventures seldom work out as planned. Otherwise, we’d call them vacations.

A large portion of Austin is in a flood plain, so extensive measures have been taken to provide safe runoff for flash flood waters, which means an extensive network of wide culverts, intersecting and rambling across town below street level. Graffiti artists and vandals alike have decorated these subterranean spaces. Nature has intruded in interesting ways. Because Texas is in a prolonged drought, we spent some time exploring this alternative space, evergreening a place that is often not green at all, but still super fun to ride through.

Another great thing about riding in and around Austin is the variety of terrain, everything from primitive mountain bike trails to manicured and paved river paths.

Here is sunset in one of the many arroyos, dry creek beds, that spider through the countryside outside town.

Exploring the arroyos was maybe the coolest thing we did on this trip. They’d twist and turn, test your skills, force you to get off and carry the bike, and then reward you with a waterfall, like the one below.

The landscape surrounding Austin is one of those magical places where you can find yourself spinning through a desertscape one minute, broad stands of thickets the next, and then on under a sprawling hickory at the edge of green meadow.

We woke up on a sunny Christmas morning, snug in our sleeping bags, unzipped the fly and cooked breakfast on the fire. It was colder than we wanted it to be, but it’s funny how a campfire breakfast will put you right.

All photos by Rob V.

On the Road – The Blayleys in Ireland, Part III

When the Blayleys were last on the west coast of Ireland, the touring was a bit more seat of the pants. In the intervening decades, the tourist bureaus have organized, simplified and marked a vast number of routes that make seeing the grassy green sites a much less involved job. John and Pamela met John’s brother David, an archaeologist, to take in as many of the West’s sites as possible.

Catch up on the first two parts of this series here and here.

The Dartry Mountains range across the Northwest of the country in Counties Sligo and Leitrim. A series of limestone plateaus, the Dartries include Benbulbin, which features prominently in the poetry of Yeats.

Here are Pamela and David in the shadow of Benbulbin. Yeats is actually buried nearby in the churchyard at Drumcliffe.

Just inland from Benbulbin is Glenade Lough. A legend holds that a large otter-like creature called a Dobarchú attacked and killed a local maiden here in the 17th century. Neither John nor Pamela reported any sightings.

North along the coast from Benbulbin you find Fintragh Bay, just west of Killybegs, Ireland’s biggest fishing port.

North from Killybegs in Donegal is the Glengesh Pass. Things get pretty pastoral this far up, expansive sheep-dotted moors stretching away in all directions. The Pass itself is a little-traveled road that meanders through the mountains with swooping, whorling switchbacks and some precipitous descents that make for fine riding.

From Glengesh, John and Pamela headed straight out to the Atlantic Coast to see the Slieve League Cliffs, some of the highest sea cliffs in Europe, and were rewarded with the rainbow below, one of the few upsides of Ireland’s persistent rain.

The rain-slick return from Slieve League.

To see more of the fantastic photos from their trip check out their cycling 7. For those of you in New England, we also highly recommend visiting their routes page, which collects so many great rides it’ll take you years to ride them all.

Gifts

We wouldn’t normally talk about our business here on the 7 where our main goal is to share the awesomeness of riding bikes and to show some of the amazing ways people are riding Sevens out in the world. But it’s Christmas Eve, and we’re feeling all happy and sentimental and above all grateful for where we are in the life of our little bike company. 2015 will mark our 19th year building custom bikes, and that is a gift unto itself. Work is work. It can be hard sometimes, but there’s nothing we’d rather work hard on than building bikes.

If you’re reading these words then you’ve contributed to what we’re doing in some way.

We’ve built more than 30,000 bikes now, all of them one-at-time, by hand. More than money earned, that work is the reward. We do what we do because we love bikes and we love cycling, so the opportunity to work with so many riders on THEIR bike is a gift.

Doing what we do also turns out to be a pretty great way to explore cycling. We ride what we build and evolve our designs out on the road and the trail, bringing back ideas and experiences that inform the next bikes out the door. It’s an amazingly rich way to ride. It helps you feel connected to the bike in ways that are hard to articulate, and that is a gift, too.

When we started out we made a conscious decision to try to bring custom bikes to as many people as possible, which meant doing things differently, developing a manufacturing model that allowed us to turn out more than one bike a day. The core group here, all of whom came from Merlin Metalworks, already had decades of bike-building experience, but what we wanted to do with Seven required us to share that experience with a larger group, and that has brought us so many great young bike builders over the years, all of whom had their own ideas, their own passion. Seven has turned out to be an incredibly rich place to work with a vital collective energy, and that is another gift.

We are also part of an industry with virtually no downside. Bikes improve people’s lives, make them healthier, bring joy, allow them to explore, to connect with friends. It’s nice to work all day and feel what you do has that sort of positive impact on your customers.

The old trope says it’s better to give than to receive, but it can be hard to tell in some instances who is giving and who is receiving. We’re here on Christmas Eve, working so that more people can ride great bikes in the New Year, but we feel like the receiver. We’ve had 18 years of fun, and 2015 looks like another log on that fire. Coming on two decades here in our shop, we’re not nearly out of ideas, and the minute we run low, you, our riders, will come up with the next great thing and gift it to us, so we can build it for you.

Happy Holidays to all, from your friends at Seven.