Evergreening – Page 15

Checking in with bRad Across America

Brad’s been on the road for ten days, and he’s made incredible progress, passing from Oregon, into Idaho, Montana, and now Wyoming. This is the wide open West, pine country, Yellowstone.

Part of us envies him this time, spending whole days on the bike, exploring, seeing beautiful things, thinking. And part of us still can’t comprehend the size of what he’s taken on. A ride like this promises all the good of an epic adventure, but it also promises hard work beyond much you’ve experienced before. There will be highs, and there will be lows.

While we’re not privy to Brad’s evolving thoughts about the race, he has sent a lot of great photos, more of which we share with you now:

The Lost Double Century

Our friend Matt Roy is no stranger to the Green Mountain Double Century. He owns individual and team course records for the annual event. Last year he was out on the course, gunning for a new best time, when things went wrong. He crashed. His buddy Dave Chiu had been following along, taking photos, but Dave wasn’t there when Matt crashed near the end, giving himself whiplash and gashing his elbow to the tune of 16 stitches, which might also be a course record in its own right.

Now, nearly a year later, we are looking back on the images Dave and Matt released, and, as is usual with Dave’s photos, they are stunning.

Check them out here. Check out more of Dave’s work here.

On the Road – bRad Across America

Who knows what inspires/possesses a young person (or an older one) to race a bike across America? The sheer scale of a ride like that defies understanding. It’s more like an act of faith really, hurling yourself into the void of 4,000 plus miles and a month on the road, believing that the adventure will be worth that super-human effort.

Maybe we’ll find out when our own Brad Smith gets back from the Trans Am Bike Race, which started this weekend in Astoria, OR. The Trans Am follows the route of the 4,233 mile Trans America Trail between Astoria and Yorktown, VA. This is a self-supported event, so the right bike set-up is important.

Brad's Bike ready to go — Here is Brad’s Evergreen SL, ready for travel.

Summit McKenzie Pass Elev 5325 — McKenzie Pass, in central Oregon.

We’ll be following Brad as he rolls east. You can check his Instagram, too, for photo updates from his adventure.

This Is Why We Do This

It was Thursday morning. We’d met at the usual spot and rolled West, crisscrossing some trails, then turned south on the road towards more trails, and eventually to Seven.

Mike said, “This is why we do what we do. This right here.” By this point, we’d been to the coffee shop down the street from the shop and were all riding one-handed up the hill to work. The sun shone. It was cool, and we’d done 15 or 20 miles of road and trail in a lazy, pre-work ramble.

We like what we do all day, building bikes, talking riders through their designs, figuring out component compatibility, researching the new cycling trends, but none of it means much without riding.

Riding feeds bike-building, and riding the bikes we build tightens the feedback loop, so that we are so closely engaged with what we’re doing that the riding and building seem to be part of the same process. In some ways, they are. But the riding is why we do what we do, the nurturing of that feeling of freedom and adventure, and the hope that we can spread it to as many people as we can.

There Are No Bikes

There are no bikes, but only riders, more than 30,000 of them. They came to us and told us about their riding, the roads and trails they wanted to ride, and we gave them a way to get there. It’s true that, in some ways, it was the bikes that took them where they wanted to go, but without the riders, there was nothing.

This is an important distinction to make. We have never built a bike with the express purpose of convincing someone to buy it. We have only ever built the bikes that people asked us to build. The rider comes first, always.

We get somewhat regular calls from people who ask something like, “Hi, I wonder if you have a 56cm road bike in stock that I can just buy.” And we say, “Sorry, we don’t actually have any bikes in inventory,” which is true.

There are no bikes until there are riders who want them, and what they want is very specific. We wouldn’t build the same bike for you, because you are different. We have built more than 30,000 bikes, and never two the same in a row. It is a lot more fun to do it this way.