Chris Writes.

Recently, the people at Amazon.com launched a mobile app called Price Check, allowing anyone to use the camera on a web-enabled phone to scan a barcode, and then the app scours Amazon’s site for that product, letting you compare prices.  This news should be entirely unremarkable given how long this technology, and others like it, have already existed.  Not only that, but other longstanding barcode scanner apps, such as RedLaser and ShopSavvy, will search a wide array of online merchants, not just Amazon.

Quite simply, this isn’t news – rather, it’s something else entirely: PR.  Egads, we’ve been hoodwinked again, this time by Amazon marketers who cleverly repackaged something you already had, and sold it to you again with extra glitter and some hot fudge topping. No need to fear though, because it’s a technology thing, and technology things change really fast, so by the time I finish writing this, it could all shift again. The more time we worry about what’s already happened, the less likely we are to spend time actually thinking about what’s about to happen next.  That, right there, is the important bit.  You can stop reading now if you like.

It’s worth noting that the fans on this particular PR flame were powered in part by the company I work for, and specifically by our President, Mike Sinyard, in a letter he wrote to all Specialized dealers in the USA alerting them to this technology – but not for the reason you might think.  Mike was letting dealers know that if products they carried from other brands were also available through Amazon, either directly or indirectly, that this meant their shops were becoming showrooms for these online sales channels of other retailers.  This is absolutely true, and has been true for some time. Specialized has a long (and at times imperfect) history of selling only through independent retailers, and the logic is that if a retailer elects to only sell products that are available in other independent retailers, you’re unlikely to lose the sale to an undercutting online competitor. If you haven’t seen the letter, you can read it (and some related commentary) here.

Bike shops, along with many other retailers, are vulnerable to this brave new world where information symmetry between retailer and customer is coming into ever-sharper focus.  People buy stuff online for all kinds of reasons: convenience, geography, selection, less pressure, online reviews, and for sure, price.  And even within a trusted retail environment, it’s pretty reasonable to use a smartphone to check online reviews, whether of the product or of the retailer you’re in, and yes, to compare prices.

Back to Mike’s point: by carrying brands that Amazon doesn’t sell, bike shops (and other retailers) are ‘defended’, which is true to a point.  They’re certainly better off than bike shops who sell products widely available online at deep discounts. But this defensive strategy only goes so far.  If I walk in looking for new bike tires, and I can pay $NUM for brand X tire that I quickly learn is not available online anywhere, then sure, I might feel confident in my purchase. But imagine what will happen when Amazon (or any other similar app) gets smart enough to suggest a comparable tire from brand Y that *is* available online, for 30% off, and it has 17 reviews that are all 5 star, and 8 of those reviews are from riders who live within 100 miles of me.  Eventually, information symmetry will mean this: every retailer is competing not just with retailers that also sell the same products, but also with retailers who sell products that are ‘comparable’ in terms of whatever the salient metrics might be: performance, weight, color, style, size, material…anything.  Everything.

That’s the piece that I think seems to be missing, and that’s where I think this will end up: retailers (bicycle and otherwise) are not just competing with on price. They’re competing in a pair of landscapes: one of “same product for $NUM less”, as well as a parallel landscape of “comparable-or-better product for $NUM, now on sale!”.  A customer’s ability to cross reference products as being comparable has never been more powerful, but we’re only seeing the start of this trend: through something as simple as a google search, or as advanced as aggregated user-generated reviews and feedback, cross-brand comparisons will become common.  Just look at the comparison sites that level the field for TV’s, cameras, and computers.  This means that retailers will need more than just a brand amazon doesn’t sell.  Unless they’re comfortable being a high-volume, low-margin retailer that can survive by operating at large scale, then retailers should probably be looking to combine four things:

1. Trusted and respected brands that are effectively controlled online – perhaps unavailable, but more likely: just consistently priced & presented.
2. Products that are, in the eyes of customers, incomparable with others once they’ve committed to a favorite (think: perfume).
3. Perfect, individualized customer service.

And lastly, but most crucially,
4. A digital strategy that accepts, and supports, the reality of sales channel agnosticism. Customers don’t see much difference between buying in store and buying online anymore, and that’s only going to become more true. Related: did you know that Ebay is the world’s largest car dealership?

I think, in general, this is all good for customers right now, and eventually it will be good for many bike shops.  If we can reduce the intimidation factor in bike shops by empowering people with information, buying a bike gets less scary, and (maybe) we get more people willing to go into a bike shop instead of relying on the comfortable anonymity of a Walmart or Costco. Years ago, car dealers bemoaned their fate when people could walk in having already researched the invoice price of a car that was on their showroom floor. Today, buying a car is less intimidating, and the brands and dealerships that offer great service and an integrated online/offline sales channel are thriving. That better service and seamless sales experience creates reviews, social buzz, and endorsements. It’s a virtuous cycle, as long as you’re on the right side of it from the customer’s perspective. Just ask Apple, they’ll tell you.

So retailers need to assume customers know everything – that’s the information symmetry in full effect. Many times, people will willingly pay more for something when the purchase experience is as good as the ownership experience.  And seriously, and speaking as a customer myself: if you try to prevent me from scanning a bar code in your store, I will assume you have something to hide.  Instead, try treating it as an invitation to a conversation, and an admission that I’m actually considering buying that product, and not “just looking, thanks.”

I have never been to burning man, I’ve never made any sort of pilgrimage to any sort of holy place, and I’ve never participated in any sort of organized protest or rally.  Despite never having done these things, I understand the sense of community that lives within these events – shared place, shared vision, shared experience.  Bike racing, particularly at the amateur levels, shares a similar camaraderie, as many of the same people show up weekend after weekend, leveling up against each other, and doing battle on a weekend course that will, come sunday night, go back to being whatever it was before the race covered it in caution tape, course marshals, finish line arches, and sometimes a bit of blood.  Last weekend, this sense of community blossomed into something spectacular at the Single Speed Cyclocross World Championships, held in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

Didn't catch his name.

It wasn’t just that the normal community of cyclocross racers were all out in full force.  Nor was it the fact that some of them were in charge of the entire event.  It was how quickly and easily all these out of towers were so quickly welcomed and assimilated into our hive of mud-mucking defashionistas.  “Where you from?”, asked casually, and answered equally casually with anything from “Seattle” to “South America”. Shared values of coffee, craft beer, and the contact high of tubular glue were unremarkable, not because they weren’t true, but because they were just so obvious. The weekend family we shared in the bay area CX community, it seemed, had once again joined up with an array of visitors from the same original but unknown mothership (whatever the hell that crazy place must be), and we partied and high five’d and rode our way around the city like we f**king owned the place.  Because, clearly, and according to the mustachio’d guy dressed like a sexy Reno cop, we did own this place.  it was ours, and we were happy to share it with these out of towners.

Saturday’s qualifier event was a 20-mile leisurely ride around the city in don’t-draw-attention-to-ourselves, permit-free groups of 10. During this, and underneath remarkably sunny SF skies, the locals provided the out-of-towners with an unbeatable tour and a think crust of locals-only knowledge that included the sordid background of certain landmarks, and the vintage history of certain gentlemen’s clubs.  I believe most of it was true, and the parts that were made up were at least more interesting than the truth, so what they lacked in veracity they more than made up for in entertainment.  For example, I’m pretty sure the columns at the Palace of Fine Arts do not date back to the 1700′s.  But that’s pretty funny to think.

To qualify for Sunday’s main event, we were challenged to five different “feats of strength”.  This pentathlon of chaos was part sprint, part gladiator, and part summer camp.  As one might expect (at least for those in the know), it began with the option of beer and/or coffee before the first feat, a 4 block sprint up the 23% grade of California Street.  On a single speed cross bike. My 46x16T gear choice was nothing other than wrong for this, but I soldiered through, turning the cranks over at a rate approximate to the speed of growing grass.  However long my knees last me, which I hope is a long time, I am sure this single 4-block effort reduced their life by at least a year.

The following four feats included sprints across a field that involved bicycle re-assembly, a sprint up an endless flight of stairs with your bike on your shoulder, a scavenger hunt melee for dollar bills, and a beach sand sprint up a sand dune.  Each time, we’d get our cards marked with our rank, ramping up the competitiveness with each new notch, feeling the pressure as we wondered what score would be needed to qualify for the race the next day. All we knew was that faster was better. And that there would be an unreasonably good party that night, no matter our placings.

After finishing with what I thought was a pretty questionable score, I was entirely uncertain whether or not I’d be racing in the big event the next day, and only at the party that night would I find out that I did just barely scrape by, sneaking a coveted starting spot at what might be the only World Championship event I ever compete in – regardless of how dubious that title may be.  Baseball calls it’s championships the World Series, so it seems as though we may be, at worst, the second most offensive custodians of the “World” title.  I’m okay with that.  There is probably a World title in checkers too.  I’d put us above them in deservingness too.  Besides, we had far better costumes.

Costumes?  Oh yes, the costumes.  Declared optional, but only optional if you’re keen to have your face heckled off by a rowdy bunch of misfits on the sidelines.  Cheers of “Do you get paid to wear that?” were aimed not at the guys in sequined hotpants with matching overalls, but rather at the guys who were in the typical lycra-clad getups that one might expect from a bike race.  The costumes were better than most halloween parties that I’ve ever been to, not to mention that the SF location meant that most saw this as just another typical day in the city. I can only imagine how a more conservative town might react.  Probably some combination of “badly” and “arrest that man in the G-string”.

My costume, it should be noted, was lame – in an attempt to “keep things classy”, I added a bow tie and cummerbund to my skinsuit, and due to the matching blackness of all of it, it was a pretty invisible costume.  My lovely-and-clearly-better half was dressed as a Vegas showgirl, complete with feathers and a helmet that shot fluff and sequins about 3ft above her head.  What I lacked in costume, however, I made up for in accessory, as my custom “ShakeBell” proved to be a popular noisemaker.

After all was said and done, I placed a solid 67th, which of course, wasn’t the point in the first place.  Granted, first place does win a pretty bitchin’ gold bikini and a celebratory tattoo that commemorates the victory forever.  I considered getting my own “67th place” tattoo but, so far at least, I’ve decided against it.

So there you have it: shared place, shared vision, shared experience, shared interests, and in some cases, shared costumes.  All in the interest of having a really, really good time.  As weekends go, I can’t think of one in recent memory that quite pulled it all together like this.  But I suspect that there’s a reason for that, and that reason is that a good chunk of it is probably not allowed if you have to ask permission.  So, looking forward to next year already, I’d only ask that you not tell the lovely town of Santa Cruz what to expect.  Just let them know that we’re bringing a few friends over for a couple beers.

All the photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrismatthews/sets/72157628076320519/

There are some annual events that make sense to hold annually: birthdays, first day of summer, and carving pumpkins.  Other annual events are held annually just so we remember to do them, because otherwise we’d simply never get around to it.  Changing batteries in smoke alarms comes to mind.  I believe most business conferences fall into this category as well.  They happen once a year, they’re (hopefully) a benefit to the people who go, and if we waited until we needed them, we’d probably never actually get around to actually doing it. A few days ago, I made the annual trip to Sea Otter, a lovely bicycle race known for its unpredictable weather and swarm of springtime-fed cycling enthusiasm.  Attached to the two days leading up to it was the annual (there’s that word again!) Bicycle Leadership Conference.  This is a post not of just notes, but of key nuggets mixed in with things I thought about because of what I heard. This was an admittedly brilliant cross section of our industry’s leadership talk about topics from macroeconomics, to doping, to technology. It was pretty damn cool to be there. For even more perspective on the event, check out Matt Haughey’s write up on bikehugger.com.

The first panel discussion was focused on the Federal investment in cycling, and trying to determine how (if at all) it has paid off.  This panel was simply OWNED by Jim Oberstar, a recently unseated politician who spent 35 years on Capitol Hill, much of that time advocating for cycling and cyclists. I’ve rarely heard someone so empassioned and compelling speak about cycling, particularly in a way that makes it sound like we’re in a state of crisis, and yet we’re all simultaneously being fooled into thinking that things are fine and no action is needed.  Be clear on one thing: action is needed. Yours. And the person sitting beside you.  Get on it. In Minnesota, Oberstar’s home state, they have 12ft wide road shoulders. “They’re needed so snowplows can put the snow somewhere!” he advocated, knowing that in the summer, a lack of snow would result in a bike lane that could support a Cat 3 road race.  Clever, that guy.  And to those who say bike lane infrastructure is too expensive: an urban mile of bike lane costs about $80K to $120K.  An urban mile of light rail costs $26M to $40M.  And a mile of roadway?  $70M to $120M.  So anyone who says they can’t afford to keep bike lanes in their budget is making (relatively) meaningless cuts to win political favor, or simply doesn’t understand what things cost. Or both.

Related, from a bureaucrat perspective, Washington is mostly asked to care about cycling as a sport or a healthy pursuit.  But they need to think about cycling as a business: one that employs a lot of people, contributes to GDP, and fuels economic growth. Unfortunately, at the moment, congress currently views cycling in a dangerous “middle category” – one that has a high enough perceived value to be a “difficult but necessary spending cut”, just above the “too small to matter” category (ie Gov’t spending on envelopes), but well below the “untouchable” categories like social security and military spending.  Cycling is seen as spending, not as investment.  That’s a perception that needs to change, and one that will only happen by making cycling to be seen as an “industry”, like cars or textiles.  One that employs people, and generates spending.

An interesting anecdote from Oberstar: in 1956, the first interstate highway bill was introduced, costing $127B, funded 90% by the feds and 10% by states.  Eisenhower paid for this with bonds, and then repaid the bonds by instituting a “use tax” of 3 cents per gallon of gas.  in 1958, they raised the tax from 3 cents to 4 cents per gallon.  This 1 cent increase was passed in a voice vote in congress, because in 1958, Oberstar feels, government was taking a much longer view of the situation than they currently do.

It was about this time when I realized that we don’t think about sidewalks (a public good, and a car alternative) in the same way that we think about bike lanes, at least from a public policy perspective.  At some point, sidewalks became “necessary” and roads aren’t often built without them, particularly in urban areas. Bike lanes have not yet earned this level of perceived necessity.  Why do you think that is?

The second panel discussion was centered around a 5 year forecast of the cycling customer base: not “who are they?”, but rather “who will they be?”.  This was a discussion that almost got irreparably lost in meaningless aggregate statistics and macro global population figures. But then, at the last minute, they had a point, and it came to the rescue: 30% of the core cycling market are buying used bikes. Omfg, right?  You are reading this on a blog, so this is not news to you at all.  You know about ebay, and craigslist, and forums. The fact that people buy bikes used is about as surprising as the fact that people wear shirts. But to this crowd of self-described “older white men”, this was a tsunami: surprising, violent, and probably not going to end well.  The interesting thing wasn’t the observation; the interesting thing was that the observation was some sort of surprise to the audience.  As bikes improve, and thus hold their value better (and longer), and as mechanisms to sell them on secondary markets improve (ebay, craigslist, forums), it’s not at all surprising that used bike sales are increasing.  I wonder if the automobile market in, say, the post-war 1940′s, faced similar issues.

At one point in this discussion, the panel tried to make the case that the surveys the were referencing showed that the the lower income customers *want* to buy at independent bicycle dealers, but don’t.  To this, I couldn’t help but think that sure, lots of car buyers *want* to buy their next car at a Porsche dealership, but don’t.  Intent rarely lines up perfectly with actual action.

A clever guy named Robin Thurston, one of the founders of MapMyFitness, made one great comment that stuck with me: the gym business model is one where, for the business, non-use is better than use: they want lots of people to sign up, but few people to actually go to the gym.  Cycling is different: use is better than non use, because the more that people ride, the more often they wear out their tires, chains, bike shorts, gloves, and who knows what else.  Pretty interesting, given how people might naturally assume the business models of these businesses might be closer to each other, rather than total opposites. Takeaway here is to stop assuming that every athletic industry operates on the same principles.  If we’re looking 5 years into the future, we better make sure our initial assumptions are solid.

After lunch, the discussion turned to kids, and how to get a younger generation back on bikes. The title alone presupposed the problem: that youth have stopped riding. Turns out, this is pretty accurate.  Pretty common & predictable preamble: kids ride less, as TV/Xbox/Facebook take more of their time, and their parents increasingly worry about their safety.  Not much new in this information.  So let’s accept that the world is changing, and try to figure out how to live in a changed world. Cycling won’t defeat Facebook, and it doesn’t need to. This isn’t a logical conclusion.  Instead, how can the changed world that kids face include cycling?  Trying to fight video games isn’t the way forward, cuz I promise, we’ll lose that one.

One of the coolest things I saw at the conference was this: www.projectbiketrip.org – seriously, check this out. It’s a system that puts a bike shop into a high school, just like they might have a wood shop, or a machine shop. Classes on bike maintenance and repair. Volunteers and guest speakers from nearby bike companies. If I’d had this in school, I suspect I would have *far* more positive memories about my high school experience. Instead, high school was mostly wasted time as I aced classes but learned little.  Instead, I found this same style of education at the local bike shop, under the leadership of a guy named Vince who ultimately was the reason I got into the bike industry in the first place, and from whom I learned a hell of a lot, bikes and otherwise.  Education like this makes more difference than you think. This is more than a good idea. It’s the kind of thing that can change a life.

In the stories about getting kids into and onto bikes, one theme resurfaced several times: that inspiration doesn’t have to come from a pro rider.  it only needs to be someone who can provide inspiration. This means it could be you. Yes, you.

One parting thought that came to mind several times during the kids discussion: in one of my favorite books, the author noted how when he talked to school groups, and asked the question “who here is an artist?”, the first graders all raised their hands. As the grade levels increased, the number of hands decreased.  By middle school, no hands went up.  This offers a potential learning point for bikes: we need to ensure they are not “socially risky” in the eyes of kids.  Young riders need the reassurance that riding a bike is at least neutral, and at best cool.  As soon as it’s a potential source of being ostracized, then we have a much bigger hurdle to leap over than the competition from Xbox and the safety concerns of overly cautious parents.  That’s where the inspiration from actual riders, mechanics, and advocates can make all the difference.  Kids need a reason to want to grow up to be like you. What can you do to make that happen?  Go do that.  Because advocacy is not the same as giving; it’s advocating for something, in a way that convinces someone else that something you care about is important.

The day finished out with a discussion about “The 90% we don’t reach” and trying to identify what keeps them away.  This seemed to be the weakest discussion of the day, possibly because it was last and the audience wasn’t as vibrantly engaged, but I think more probably because they kept talking about the same lack of infrastructure, and the perceived need in changes to personal behavior.  Said more plainly: people don’t have enough places to ride, and they don’t want to anyways.  Cyclists complaining about lack of infrastructure and motivation isn’t going to fix the infrastructure or the motivation: we can lobby for it, want it, justify it, but we can’t create it in the same way we create bikes. Yet we talk about it like it’s another category of bikes we can add to the catalog. I simply don’t think the right people were in the room to have this discussion.

On day two, we kicked things off with a macro economic perspective of the bike industry: an economy that was allegedly in free fall, and a lot of bike companies that were simply sold out of product to sell. Was the bike industry a bright spot in an otherwise dour economy? An interesting question, but I don’t feel like we ever actually addressed it.  instead, the panel discussed (but could not agree on) the topic of an excise tax for cycling to support infrastructure projects, as both milk and fishing had done to some success. One panelist  kept mentioning the Tea Party in what seemed to be random non-sequitors, while Stan Day (panelist and president of SRAM) spoke clearly and plainly, as his typical style, and in a single shot dismissed the excise tax option because the government couldn’t be reasonably trusted to spend the money on cycling.  I can’t help but agree with him.  Stan also introduced a term that I liked: he referred to bikes as “lifestyle equipment”.  This suits so many applications, and makes plain the relationship that many people have to the bikes in their garage. It’s not a new concept, but it’s a neat and tidy way to label it.  Thanks Stan.

The only other standout statement for me from this panel was the revelation that our industry is still getting older and whiter.  Given the shifts and trends in global demographics, this should be nearly impossible.  Yet we’re somehow doing it.  Let this be a warning to us all, because this trend is not aligning our industry with the foundations for future growth and success.

Second in the morning session was a discussion of the internet, and a related industry-specific SWOT analysis. This was the discussion that seemed to offer the clearest evidence that our industry needs more youth within its leadership.  A peppering of nearly random internet usage statistics that may (but probably don’t) apply to the cycling audiences, mixed with a bunch of mutual reassurance that the cycling industry still needs retailers and that online sales are dangerous and worth fighting against. When I led the supergo.com website from 1999 to 2003, it was clear then, 10 flipping’ years ago, where we were headed – we sold thousands of bikes online, no problem, and our retail stores across the west coast were simultaneously thriving.  The internet and the local bike shop can and will co-exist, just as local car dealerships co-exist with ebay (the world’s largest car dealership, btw).  But the discussion is more than simply ecommerce.  The Internet connects users across time and geography, allowing anyone to connect with the culture and events of the cycling world from anywhere, in real time.  I followed live tweets of Liege-Baston-Liege this past Sunday morning from my bed, on my phone, as Gilbert swatted away both Schleck brothers to take the victory.  That capability simply didn’t exist only a few years ago. Think about that for a second, and ask whether the internet is a benefit for cycling.  Of course it is.

The interesting thing that I think came out of this discussion, but wasn’t said overtly, was that sites like ebay, combined with improved product quality and longer product life, plus a measured increase in used bike sales, all equals more acceptance of online sales in general.  Taken one step further, customers won’t see much difference between buying used online, and buying new online – despite the audience’s apparent desires to the contrary.  And so, by looking forward and reasoning back, we need to find a way to fulfill that customer expectation in a way that utilizes the existing network of independent bike shops.  Because we’re nowhere without them.  There isn’t a single car company I can think of that could survive without dealerships. Or consider that Apple grew *because* of it’s retail stores, complementing their ecommerce. The evidence is plain, and obvious, and everywhere.

After lunch, we were treated to our Social Media panel, which had a refreshing array of non-industry experts to guide the discussion. I’ve got a lot of opinions here, more than I think I’ll share openly. My friend (and admitted co-conspirator via the Specialized Trail Crew) Heidi Swift was pretty much the unquestionable rockstar diva of the panel, and she made a strong point early: Social media is more social than media: you actually have to *do stuff*.  Gasps from the crowd.  “Oh shit,” they collectively thought, “that sounds like work.  I thought this was just free and easy.”  No chance.

Think about social media this way: if you, personally, organize a party, will anyone show up?  Why or why not?  The same things that make people show up to your Saturday BBQ are the same things that will make social media work (or not work) for you.  It’s intensely personal, and public, and your fans will only show up if they’re willing to be seen with you in public.  Scared?  Good. That’s the first step in admitting that you have a problem.

One sidebar discussion (it’s inevitable in these social media panels) was around tracking ROI.  To this, I ask you: do you measure the ROI of your friends? or even the ROI of personally supporting a brand or project you believe in?  No, you don’t.  You know who your friends are, and who you avoid, but you don’t have a dollar figure you attach to each friend so you can cut friends in times of social budget crunch.  Cycling is something people care deeply about, so social media simply works for the bike industry.  Measure the results, sure, but don’t let metrics get in the way of starting to develop your social presence.

Heidi also made a great and important point regarding Twitter as an engine for PR and communication with journalists: there is no cc: function in twitter like there is in email.  A press release received via email is deleted, while a thoughtful @reply took individual effort and consideration, and is far more likely to elicit a return inquiry.  It works *because* it’s personal.  That’s awesome.  But what’s not so awesome is the fact that this fact was so surprising to so many people in the room.

This was the big takeaway from the social discussion: seriously, how long do we need to keep saying the same things to the same people for this to stop being news: be honest, be authentic, listen to your audience, engage your critics, accept your faults, and use social to broadcast your successes quickly to your fans.  This should not be news to anyone, yet it remains the same as it was when I was giving a similar talk two years ago at this same conference alongside Rich Kelly.  Are we not learning anything?  What will it take for this to sink in: Social media is here to stay; if you’re not already deep into it, there’s simply no other way to say this: it’s time to get off your ass and get to work.

The final discussion of the day was a doozy: Doping. I’m not going to recount the vitriol or the platitudes, there were plenty of both. The most interesting and relevant point of this discussion was that the cycling media discusses doping as a sport problem, not an athlete problem.  This is a total PR failure on the part of cycling: in every other sport, the athlete is vilified.  In cycling, the entire sport comes down.  Event organizers, testing agencies, riders, and sponsors all have competing interests, so the messaging around doping are fragmented and uncontrolled.  Perhaps the worst part is that our own cycling media perpetuates this problem, as cycling magazines have done and continue to do in recent articles. It’s no wonder that publications like Sports Illustrated and NYT follow in our own examples.  Doping will never stop, because athletes will always have an incentive to cheat, or try to.  What can stop is how we react to it.  This discussion was a GREAT one, perhaps it should have been first discussion of the first day to gain maximum audience and vigor.

Overall, a great couple of days of thoughtful discussion and interesting insights.  It’s hard to take the time away from the office, from the iPhone, from the chirps of incessant meeting requests.  But now it’s done, and I’m back into the routine, and I’m hoping next year will be just as good, maybe better.  If you’ve never been, it’s worth your consideration.

“Why?”
It’s a pretty common, and altogether reasonable question that often follows when I share a story about any cyclocross race I’ve competed in.

Why, as in: “Why would you do that?” And the also-reasonable: “Why the hell do you keep doing it?”  In answering these questions, I fully admit that from the outside looking in, it might appear to be about as much fun as removing your own fingernails with an acetylene torch.  But it’s not quite that bad.  It’s glorious.  It’s a beautiful, intense, and euphoric departure that simple “exercising” or “workouts” will never come close to replicating.

To call cyclocross “exercise” is rather like referring to the sound of a Formula 1 race car as merely “noisy”.  Sure, technically it’s correct to call it noisy, but it entirely misses the romance.  It’s not about the volume, it’s about the harmonics.  At some point, the number of decibels of the car cease to matter.  Instead, it’s the beautiful anticipation created by the doppler effect, the climactic convergence of the sound and the sight of the car passing, and the gorgeous discord they create between the speed of light and the speed of sound as they weave together and apart.  It’s never about the noise. It’s the feeling the noise creates.  It doesn’t hit you like a brick, rather, it coats you like honey.

Cyclocross is similar, in that it’s not about the workout as much as it’s about the unparalleled experience of being completely overtaken by the race.  Eyesight sharpens, but narrows.  Sensations heighten, yet pain goes away. Your heart rate is pegged, yet the body feels calm.  It seems counter intuitive, but think about the last time you blended a margarita: underneath the surface of the cold slurry, there was a violent blade that will obliterate the next cubes of ice you drop in.  Yet other than a slight spiral on the surface, it appears calm. Inviting. Hungry.  In this way, the race course becomes the entire world.  There isn’t anything else.  A cross race is where you decide if you’re the blade, or the ice cube.

Hurts so good.

During a “workout” in a gym, the goals are simple, and isolated.  20 reps of something.  3x of a certain weight.  40 pushups in a minute. There isn’t a podium that will relegate you to second place if you slack off.  At a cross race, competitors are more than performance targets.  They’re the difference between you and winning.  They’re *everything* that defines the time between the start and the finish. They’re gristle around the filet mignon of victory, to be cut off and discarded as the blood runs freely.  If you relax, if you let up for even a moment, it can all vanish like a dream that evaporates in the moments just after you wake up.  So you keep pushing.  Cross races are somewhere between 30 minutes and 60 minutes, depending on the classification and age category.  I always found this amusing, given how much of a time vortex the race course becomes.  The difference between 40 minutes and 60 minutes is an eternity, but you’re going too fucking hard and fast to notice it.

At the bottom of it all, there is an intensely personal appeal to cross racing.  It may not be for everyone, but I think everyone owes it to themselves to find something that achieves this sort of escape.  Something that becomes so acutely intense, so searing, so focused as to make it impossible to think about the world that lives outside the experience itself.  It doesn’t have to last a long time; it’s not about the time.  It doesn’t have to hurt; it’s not about the pain.  It just needs to get you out of the place you are, so you can find out what you’re made of.  Day-to-day life provides too many hiding places.

That’s all well and good, but it’s not a complete picture.  There’s a second element of cross – the social element – that is at once the polar opposite of nearly everything I’ve said thus far, and simultaneously interwoven within it.  Before you accuse me of blatant and callous obfuscation, let me clarify: cross racing is social, because riding alone ain’t racing.  But the social aspects of a gathering, a congregation of like minded cross racing miscreants – this is truly fantastic.  For many at cross races, this *is* church.  It’s a place to commune, to be with those who carry similar values and ideals, and to scream and heckle together as the mud-drenched demons scream by, lap after lap.  Those same poor souls then trade places with those in the crowd who are competing in later races; they pour a beer, and scream right back at them.  Circle of life and all that.  There is no way that cross could be what it is without the social aspect of the event itself, and in a chicken-or-egg sort of way, it’s very hard to decide which one came first.  But like chickens and eggs, it doesn’t matter, because they’re both delicious. That’s what matters.

Earlier today, I raced one last cross race this season; an unexpected bit of serendipity that overlapped with a business trip, in Tokyo of all places.  The scene here is alive and vibrant, and the fields are fast and aggressive.  It’s not a growing sport, it’s full blown here.  Tons of racers, good crowds, great mix of great bikes, and a lot of the same enthusiasm and suffering that makes cross so fun.  Apparently, this delicious agony is a global thing.

I’m not sad that the season is over, I know it’ll roll back around soon enough.  Any good endorphin addiction is likely to find a way back in.  I can’t remember the source of the quote, but it’s a favorite: “The sun rises in the east every morning, you kinda get used to the idea.”

So yeah.  You wanna know why?  That’s why.

Another new year approaches, and instead of looking back, I’m looking forward. The mood at Specialized in recent weeks has taken a new and fun turn, one that’s tough to describe without living inside the biosphere we inhabit there.  But I’ll try.  We’re a culture of racers: of wins, of trophies, and finish line triumphs.  We arrive at work very early in July to watch the Tour stages live in the theater.  We stay late to get race reports on the website, often in a rainbow of languages around the world.  We build some of the very best bikes that are made, and we strive to obsolete ourselves all the damn time. We are a bunch of ambitious, competitive, relentless, driven, and often sleep-deprived bike-riding maniacs.  And we love it that way.

Here comes the “but”.  Ready for it?

But, we sometimes can’t see things – important things – when they don’t involve a number plate and a cadre of European athletes, on dirt or on pavement.  We sometimes can’t fathom an idea such as riding bikes for pure transport. It can be as if you’d just started speaking Italian – we’d understand the basics if you gesticulate enough, but we’d miss the romance.  We sometimes don’t see the simplest, most common, most fundamental aspects that cycling can offer.  And this isn’t an apology – any photographer will tell you it’s impossible to focus on everything.  But we do often wish for longer days, longer weeks, more time to do more stuff (even if we’d spend most of it riding).

Through the hard work of a few really fantastic people, we recently saw a big shift happen, something foundational. And it’s one of those “important things”.  It was as noticeable as the smell of fresh paint; it’s something you first become aware of when you walk in, and you just know it’s there, immediately. The whole place seems brighter. We’ve committed to a new and focused approach to our advocacy.  Specifically, we’ve tasked ourselves with getting kids on bikes. When we announced this, it was like that moment when you wake up as a kid in the summer, no school, and the sun is already warming the windows.  People just understood, immediately, and it made sense – they could relate to that feeling, the feeling of what it’s like to be a kid with a bike.  Or even better, to be a kid with their first bike.  We all remember it.  This was not an “A-ha” moment.  This was an “of course” moment.  Of course we should focus on kids.  We all started as kids, and look where we’ve ended up.

http://firstgear.specialized.com

I’m thrilled with our new website for this project; we were able to build with the help of some very talented people. I’d like to invite you to check out, it’s here.  But this website is just the start – we’re not done, this is just where it all begins.  With a place to talk about what we do, we’re now able to actually do more real stuff, instead of spending time trying to figure out how we increase participation and awareness of the causes we choose to support.  And even more critically, we’ve hired a pro to do this full time.  Advocacy isn’t something we do when we’re not busy.  This is something we do because we’re busy.  That’s a critical distinction.  And we’re fueled up to be doing a lot more than we’ve ever done before, because we are going to find ways to get lots and lots of others involved.  It’ll never be big if it’s only us doing it, so we’ve found some clever ways to make it easy for you to join in.  Yes, you.  We’ve got a lot of ideas for how this can grow, and what we can do to make it something bigger than just us.  We’re excited about all of it.  I hope you are too.

And that’s the best bit.  it’s not just one or two people here at work.  The excitement about this…it’s in the paint.  It’s everywhere.  I hope you feel it too.

Had lunch at a great new cyclist-oriented place in Santa Rosa called Terroir, which I am pretty sure is french for “OMFG there is MUD in my eyeballs!”. This is a common French phrase. They were, after all, the people who discovered mushrooms.

The lack of cutlery, while unusual, did not imbue any sense of social discomfort.

This is a sort of “pop-up” style restaurant, moving from place to place each weekend, often setting up in parks or open areas, away from the crusty “restaurants of old” with their “kitchens” and “linens” and “waiters”, etc. For lunch, I ordered the Men’s B Cyclocross Platter, which in retrospect was probably a typo; I suspect they meant “Splatter”. But I will forgive them this typo, as we’re all human.

My first course was delightful, with a soupy consistency that was a real challenge to eat at first, as I was concerned that I’d pull some sort of gauche move and end up wearing it. Looking around at my fellow patrons, I quickly realized that this was, as they say, de rigueur. So I started shoveling the delicious fare directly into my mouth, nose, eyes, and ears. My thinking was that the faster I did this, the more I would get, as I knew there were a flock of others behind me who were scrambling for the same tasty morsels.

My second course turned out to be very similar to the first, again another soup. I was hoping for something more crisp, perhaps a belgian endive, but instead, more like belgians swan diving. There were other patrons all around me, running amok, as it were. Muck indeed. Not to mention that some of us charged ahead, engorging ourselves on the next course before the others were finished theirs.  Again, de rigueur.

By the third course, I was starting to realize that I must have missed the fact that this is an entirely organic, 100% vegan, 100% localvore establishment. Nothing I was served had an origin of more than 5 feet from my mouth, and it was all washed down by nothing more than rainwater. Shabby chic, for sure, but while it scored aces in organic crustyness, it definitely lacked variety.  Everything started tasting the same.

By about the 9th course, I was just plain getting tired, but I was determined to finish this prix fix menu, and there was only one other guy who was tracking to beat me to the valet parking guy. I opened my mouth ever wider in the hopes of dining and dashing right past him, but to no avail. I was surprised to learn that upon finishing, I was not brought a check but instead a medal – apparently I’d been elected as one of their top eaters of the day – 2nd best, actually!

There were plenty of opportunities to take pictures of this great new restaurant, and I would urge anyone who has the chance to try it when it comes to town next time!

Rating: 4 and a half stars (out of 5)

You were so new, like a budding flower not yet bloomed, yet bursting with promise.  We gave you every chance we could, installing you with the best of adhesives and the tenderest of care as you were eased out of your cardboard womb and wrapped lovingly around a fancypants carbon rim.  Five layers of glue, each one applied by the finest of hands, and the caution of eggshells – and yet, it was not the glue which ultimately showed us the harshness of the world, or the fragility of your existence.  A rock, a simple thing, but at times sharp, and certainly sharp enough to tear a hole in your sidewall just as it tore a hole in our hearts.  If we had to do it over again, we would have done it all the same, and though it’s hard, we have come to accept that the 100 yards you rolled in your short life were simply all you had. We  know we will try again, and we hope to be blessed with another, but we will not love it more than you, nor will ever we think of it as replacing you. You’re with us forever, in a way, because we’ll always miss you. You had no name, but you cemented a place in our hearts.

Unnamed, 2010-2010

In lieu of flowers, we ask that you send donations to the Cyclocross Tubular Relief fund, which supports grieving racers in their darkest times of need.

So the racing vein continues: a little over a week ago I finished what might have been the most grueling single-day bike ride I’ve ever done: the Tahoe-Sierra 100, a decidedly-ambitious 94 mile mountain bike race that I completed in just under 11 hours. I wish I had a better story to accompany this, other than to simply say “whoa, that was hard.” but as far as the race itself went, it was a monstrous, well-supported slog through some very nice Tahoe scenery. Along the way I scared a rattlesnake, I helped a co-worker limp to an aid station, and on the drive home, the roof rack came off Scott’s car and went crashing down the freeway at 75MPH, all three S-Works bikes firmly still attached.  Thankfully, in each of those cases, nobody was seriously hurt.  And now that my 100-mile MTB effort has been checked off the list, I’m not sure I have any motivation to try anything like that again.  Bring on cyclocross, with it’s 60-minute races and post-race beer and all the related rabble rousing! And no more roof racks, I now have trust issues.
I’ve now checked off Mountain Bike racing, road racing, and cyclocross racing, all in a single season. So much for retirement, eh?

In other news, we launched an entirely new iteration of the Specialized Riders Club at work last week, a project on which I had invaluable help from many people, both at work and outside it. The short version of the long story was that the Riders Club site I helped launch 4 years ago had become a bit of a ghost town – nearly everyone had moved to Facebook, and it was clear our direction wasn’t serving our community particularly well. Conversely, we’ve grown a ton in the Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/RSS world, but there was no single place where you could go to see it all, so we built it: one single page that aggregates all our social content, as a doorway into the Specialized culture, offering existing fans an easy way to keep tabs on us.  Trouble is, because we’d never actually seen this done before, and because we couldn’t find a pre-built solution to aggregate the content in the way we wanted, we had to build it in order to try it out. We have no proof in advance that this is going to work, beyond our own intuition.  But if it works, it leads me to a question: as brands increasingly work hard to be present in all these different online spaces that extend well past their own website, why hasn’t anyone else thought to pull them all back together? Or has this happened, and we just missed it?  And the bigger question, one that we’re wrestling with now: of the myriad ways to measure this effort, what’s the best way to do so?  It’s not a trivial question, because standard web traffic metrics here are unusually unreliable. If someone uses this site to become a follower on twitter, and a fan on Facebook, and then bookmarks one of our RSS feeds, then the site has clearly done it’s job as we’ll be communicating (and hopefully interacting) with that rider on a regular basis in the future.  Yet they may rarely, or never, return to the riders club site. Site metrics would only count them once.

If you’ve got any thoughts on this question or the site in general, or related comments, or questions, please do write and let me know – I’m definitely curious to hear the opinions of both bike industry and non-bike-industry people on this one.

Moving on to other other news, Intel recently made headlines when they started shipping “crippled” computer chips that are designed to work at less than their full potential, and customers can unlock the secret powers of the chip they already own using a $50 code that they subsequently buy at the retailer.  Note that the computer chip itself didn’t’ change; it was just told that the ransom was paid, and it’s now allowed to work at it’s full potential. One bike industry equivalent of this has been available for quite a while from the guys at iBike, who make bike computers.  Their basic iBike sport model is *exactly* the same as their iBike Pro, but with key features disabled, and for $249, you can unlock them.  One could argue that this allows someone to get into the world of riding with their bike computer at a more reasonable price, and they can conveniently upgrade later, and there is truth to that. But that still can infuriate an owner if they ever end up feeling like they’re being held hostage.  And it’s when this idea of “if value, then right” goes any further that things get pretty absurd. Imagine if you had to pay for the right to put slicks on your old MTB, or add new disc wheels to your carbon Tri bike. As the argument goes, since you didn’t originally buy it for this purpose or in this specific configuration, this ‘new use’ must have new value to you, and thus, the original bike manufacturer should be allowed to charge you for that. This falls clearly into the realm of “doing things that make no sense to customers”, and when you do things that don’t make sense to the people you’re trying to serve, you end up like the telecoms or the insurance industry, hated by your own customers, and quickly abandoned as soon as a viable new option shows up.

My only point is one I’ve said many times before: Dear companies of all shapes and sizes: Please do things that make sense to people.  It’s a pretty basic, yet powerful rule.

Before cars, there were horses, and many of us have heard the near-cliche “If Henry Ford had given people what they wanted, he would have made faster horses.”  But he didn’t, and now we have traffic jams. Something important to realize though is that when Ford combined mobility with an engine, he didn’t rely on the design of a horse – he didn’t make a mechanical four-legged machine that mimicked a horse at all. Instead, he looked at the motor, and understood the underlying need (mobility), and designed the car around the new technologies at his disposal.   Think about that for a second.

Over at Eurobike this year, I saw a lot of ugly bikes. And they were all electric.  This is not to say that all electric bikes were ugly, but rather to make a point of something that struck me squarely between the eyes as I browsed around Eurobike: Electric bikes are evolving, but as they come into mainstream, they do not yet have an established design. We (the bike universe) simply don’t yet know what electric bikes are going to be, or even look like.

At the outset, I should draw an important distinction between North America and a healthy-sized swath of the rest of the industrial world.  In Europe, and even more so in Asia, e-bikes are nothing new. They’ve been around for years, and the mindset of the bicycle as “transportation” made the transition to e-bikes very, very easy for people to understand and accept.  But unlike the cheap electric bike swarms in Taipei intersections, the trekking or transport bikes in Europe are a hugely lucrative category.  Average price (depending on who you ask) seems to be around 1,500 to 2,000 Euro, and one brand manager confided to me that their european e-bike sales last year were $50M.

Meanwhile, over here in North America, bicycles are recreation.  An electric bike strikes some as about as sensible as an electric tennis racket, to make it electric defeats its entire purpose. It’s supposed to be exercise, complete with sweat and the promise that you’ll “lose 5 pounds in just one week, guaranteed or your money back!”.  Maybe, some might concede, e-bikes could be good for the elderly or the obese.  This is a dangerous conclusion to reach, as the electric bike is not likely an answer to questions that either of these demographics are asking.

It’s not that e-bikes are new; they’re not.  What’s new is the number of new brands getting into the mix, from new upstarts to established bigger players.  And with these new players and bigger guys come a unique new promise to e-bikes: more of the cycling industry’s top talent focused on it, and wider global distribution. These are the real changes to e-bikes.

For e-bikes to be commercially viable in an expanding market, it logically follows that the current customer base should show potential for expansion.  To expand the customer base, we’ll need new customer segments, or new geographies, or both.  This is where things got very murky at Eurobike this year: e-bikes for freeriding with dual crown forks?  Carbon fiber XC racing models with motors?  And who can forget the Cancellara debacle?  In trying to expand into new segments and geographies, e-Bikes represent an interesting congruence between chasing trends and rapid prototyping: in a short time, we’ve seen the introduction of lots and lots of new models, and everyone is simultaneously trying different things pretty quickly to see what might work. I’m reminded of the first full suspension mountain bikes, and how the first models were all vastly different, and the visual design was mostly a residual by-product of the engineering behind it.  I love prototypes – they’re an awesome and essential part of the design process.  But they’re rarely great sellers.

I’m excited by the idea of electric bikes, and I am even more excited about their potential.  But as the market expands, I’m concerned about three big things:  First, if the world is introduced to electric bikes with such blockish, frankensteinish designs, we’ll miss an important opportunity to get people excited about them.  if the first iPods resembled a homemade bomb with a battery bolted to a logic board, connected by exposed wires, they’d hardly have gained a solid footing with the fashionable crowd.  These bikes have every opportunity to look f@#king cool, to be a fashionable and hip addition to an urban lifestyle, a non-douchey and practical alternative to the fixie. I’m thinking here about Vespa, about electric motorbikes like the zero, and about matching helmets and bags accented by a Burberry tartan scarf.  But with few exceptions, the e-bikes I saw resembled at best an unremarkable cheap bike, and at worst, the something tantamount to fashion suicide, right up there with recumbents.

Second, I don’t think we’re clear about how many different customer segments these new e-bikes might appeal to, nor are we clear who we’re targeting with these new options.  When mountain bikes got started, they were just mountain bikes.  Now there are dozens of categories of mountain bikes, from DH race bikes to lightweight XC race bikes to singlespeeds.  At Eurobike, I didn’t see much evidence of people trying to clearly identify who they were designing their bikes for, and I think that’s largely because collectively, I don’t think we’re very sure about the potential customer segments that might exist.

Third, an e-bike renaissance in North America would ask bike shops to hire and/or train electronics-savvy mechanics – it’s one thing to fix a flat, quite another to identify a faulty capacitor or a blown power supply.  Bike shops that are quick to embrace this new revenue could gain a valuable position as an entrenched expert in the e-bike domain, and become the go-to shop for a region that’s far wider than the current customer radius.  But somewhere, that training has to happen.  Those shops need to be retrofitted to deal with problems.  And we don’t know in advance what those problems will be.

All of these concerns are opportunities: the first is to design an e-bike that people get excited about, in the exact way Tesla did for electric cars in the sports car demographic.  The second is for manufacturers to understand who they’re designing it for, and why, so that the story gets told in the right way, to the right people.  The third is the retail support structure that will make it possible for this category to do well.  When Henry Ford started selling the model T, the first car customers couldn’t take the car to see the same vet that they took their horse to when it got sick.  But that’s not to say that some veterinarians didn’t see a more lucrative opportunity in opening a car repair shop.

Many of the e-bikes I saw were, essentially, motorized horses: previous bike designs, with motors and batteries bolted to them in rather haphazard ways. This is not design, it is panic.  It’s my hope that e-bikes evolve into bikes that don’t look much like the bikes I saw. Some of the options available now might have the right function, but the form seems questionable at best. To settle for nothing more than retrofit design doesn’t seem appropriate for a category that offers this much potential. There were very few I saw that seemed to approach this as an entirely new category that might not need to be limited by the classic frame design, or handlebar design, or drive system, or anything else.  Even fewer seemed to have a clear message of who they were built for.

Photos:

The first bike I remember was a 10-speed, a garage sale orphan that needed work.  I’m pretty sure it started out yellow, but dad and I painted it red.  But the first bike that really sealed the deal for me was a red mountain bike, this one brand new, a birthday present.  >>FFWD a few years (skip past the bits where I’d suffered through high school, flickers of puberty, the theft of that red mountain bike), and I found myself at about 18 years old with a number plate tied to my handlebars for my first ever race.  I spent several years racing mountain bikes, working in a truly great bike shop, and putting myself through college.  Racing was a big deal, and I loved it even though I never won a single mountain bike race.  I progressed up the ranks, but the best result I ever had was placing 2nd, missing the win by less than a half second.

When I moved to Vancouver, and then to LA shortly thereafter, I conceded that at the wise age of 23, I’d ‘retired’ from racing – I was riding my bike for fun, a lot, and that glossy sweaty attractive sheen of racing was replaced by the grit, the stubble, and the beer of the bike racer denouement.  Sometimes I’d even poke fun at my former self for taking it all so seriously.  I didn’t think I’d ever return to racing.  I remember putting away the heart rate monitor and bike computer, in the way you put away classic vinyl records when the day comes that you finally lack a turntable.  You don’t throw them out, or sell them. But you know exactly why they’re being put away.

In recent times, I’ve fully and completely fallen off that retirement wagon.

Two years ago, and with no good or apparent reason, I raced TransRockies.  That may have sparked something, a sort of demon awakening, annoyed and hungry. Then last autumn, my curiosity with cyclocross racing became more of an official thing, coaxed on by the infectious enthusiasm of my beyond-wonderful princess/accomplice.  I bought a carbon CX bike, rode like hell, experimented with tubulars, made new friends, and fell into the ever-so-slightly-crossdressy NorCal CX scene.  It was during last year’s CX season that I won my first race, 15 years after my first race, and 10 years after thinking that I’d ‘retired’.  Poking fun at my former self is now a layer cake of meta levels, each one poking fun at a self that was poking fun at a self preceding it.  I think that means I’m well adjusted.

This year, I added an entirely new rollercoster to the amusement park of my cycling story: I joined a local team, Third Pillar, and started racing road bikes.  Even after I’d agreed with the local team to join them, I very nearly backed out just due to my work travel schedule – but thankfully, they put up with my springtime absences, and I did my best to make up for it.  I started out as a lowly beginner, just like everybody else, in the green and unpredictable Category 5′s.  Full of fast triathletes who can talk smack but can’t steer, bi-curious mountain bikers, and legitimate total virgins to the sport, the start lines of my first few races were all games of chance.  I never knew if the guy beside me was going to be strong, or dangerous, or both.  A few races later, I upgraded to Category 4, and had a few teammates to work with.  After a few more races and one more victory, I upgraded to Category 3′s.  And now, after a couple of races as a 3, I’m starting to feel like I’m getting the hang of this.

One fun aside of racing with my team is the unwritten rule that you should write race reports, which we share with each other during secret meetings in underground caves. Having never written one before, I had no idea what a race report was supposed to be, so I wrote them however I deemed appropriate.  I’ve written a few now, and figured I’d share them here too.

• Panoche Road Race – I won this one!
• Mt Hamilton Road Race – Big hill.
• Dash for Cash Criterium – $10 to the leader on each lap
• Timpani Criterium – conveniently close to where I live
• Winters Road Race – Big team turnout

And, in a fit of airplane-inspired frivolity, a race report fashioned after a children’s book to commemorate a tough little circuit race in Santa Cruz:

And now, with the dawn cracking over the silhouette of my fresh Tufo tubular tires and Avid Shorty Ultimates, I’m really, really looking forward to the upcoming cyclocross season.  Who knew that racing as an adult could be this much fun?