"I can bunnyhop 360s all day"

Submitted for your amusement: The New York Times visits the "peel sessions" to discover the brave world of fixed-gear freestyle.

il mio video

Kranked - REVOLVE Teaser from KRANKED/ReJeK+ on Vimeo.

Some of us are aging wanna-be shredders but as this video, which dropped earlier this month, shows there are some among us who are out ripping all the gnarly Front Range shit, racing Super D, and spreading our radness.

VIntage BCC Pic of the Day

Circa July 2007

Look Dave can fly!!!

Snow Day/Snow Angel

When it snows, BCC shreds. RAD.

Blame it on the snow (yeah! yeah!)

(All apologies to Milli Vanilli for corrupting their lyric masterpiece.)

I'd heard that it snowed in Albany, that there were such things as snow emergencies, and that there were times that you needed to budget an hour to shovel your car out of its parking spot, but until this last Friday these stories all sounded like attempt to pull one over on the silly little southerner. In fact, it seems that all of these things are painfully true.

Friday brought us somewhere around ten inches of snow in the matter of a few hours. Once we'd gotten six or so inches I figured it had to be about to stop (I mean, god doesn't have that much dandruff, does he?), so I ignored my better judgement and took to the streets, General Lee-style.

And lo there was ripping. And the ripping was good.

As it turns out, my marginal skillz are unaffected by what skiers refer to as a powder day. When you're already pretty challenged in terms of your shredability, the addition of snow makes everything a little more difficult, but also increases your margin of error. My four inches of bunnyhopability was constant and I still couldn't do a bar spin, but then again I didn't break myself, either.

I had backup along, so I was able to grab a few pics. Here I'm basically showing the very peak of my skills, the rarely seen snow-bound trackstand. Behold it's brilliance.

Since it normally is only light up here for like seven hours a day, during the snowstorm we were reduced to like four. It was already getting dark at this point in the afternoon, though it was only a little after four.

The very pinnacle of my trickery.

This was all pretty rad on Friday, and my amusement extended into Saturday. However, as it's continued to snow, and I've had to dig my car out twice, gotten stranded in the Albany airport for all of Sunday, and seen all of the world disappear under a blanket of white for the next three month, my love for the white stuff has diminished. I'm planning a New Year's Eve shredathon regardless of temperatures (and sobriety level); pics may not follow.

I hope you're all getting to ride some down south. Happy holidays from the Northcountry!

The Genr'l heads to the pump track

As Chris indicated, he and I both recently purchased cruiser BMX bikes (with 24" wheels as opposed to the standard 20" rims). Since BMX bikes are the very pinnacle of cool, and the Dukes of Hazard are like the coolness pinnacle's pinnacle, the DK General Lee in Hazard County Orange was basically the only choice for us.

We've spent some time learning some of the basics on the streets of Durham over the past few weeks. It might be an exaggeration to say that we're masters of the shred at this point, but we're getting better, and by last Thursday we thought it was time to try the Genr'l on the dirt. After a few miles on the mountain bikes with JD, Dave, and Ben, we convinced the guys to head over to Crabtree, where we traded the 29ers for 24s and hit the pump track.

It's safe to say that the experience was (almost) everything that I'd hoped it would be. The Genr'l is undoubtedly faster on the pump track, despite weighing over thirty pounds and sporting tires that could generously be described as sketchy. We weren't able to quite manual the rhythm sections like the pros, but even in our short stay I think we were able to get considerably better.

Of course we insisted that others get in on the action. I wasn't able to get a good picture of Ben on the little bike (it looked like some sort of clown bike, needless to say), but JD was happy to pose with the orange wonder.


We weren't the only ones into bermed track fun: it was a big night at Lake Crabtree, and JD figured out how to use my camera to capture a video of the action. (Note to self: always hand over the hardware to the computer guy.)



So we weren't exactly flying around the track, but after JD and the rest of the crew left Chris and I did stay to work on our skills a little longer, and we were looking a little stronger by the end of the night. Pros? Of course not. As good as most 14-year-olds? No. But closer.