I LIKE BIKES
From mountain bike racing to cyclocross to long-distance cycling expeditions, pushing pedals is truly a passion. I got into competitive cycling by a rather unusual trajectory: five years ago I didn't own a bike, but since I love exploring far-flung, beyond-the-beaten-path places, I figured cycling might permit a perfect sort of nomadism.

So in a moment of inspired lunacy in 2005, I decided to bike across the USA. I saved money, bought a cheap commuter bike and panniers, and rode out of San Francisco wearing underpants beneath my shiny new chamois. Two months later, I arrived at the coast of North Carolina with some ferocious saddle sores - and an expanded sense of what is possible on two wheels.

The following year, I spent four amazing, grueling months cycling the Silk Road through Xinjiang and Tibet in China, retracing the travels of Marco Polo. From the Taklamakan desert to Kashgar to the high Tibetan Plateau, we followed a similar route to Polo's in space but a wildly different route in time. We discovered that the truth and reality of a place is best revealed on dusty winding trails, in remote communities, inside yurts shadowed by unnamed mountains. Those were worlds worth exploring, and worlds best explored from the vantage of a bicycle.

Bouncing along that rough excuse for a Silk Road convinced me that suspension was the solution, and I was inspired to try mountain biking upon my return. A dear friend introduced me to the sport by throwing me into a race, and though I fell often and hard, I also fell in love with mountain biking. This sport takes everything I love about riding my bike to the superlative (sublime challenge and suffering in wild, beautiful places), and eliminates everything I dislike about biking from the picture (like cars and concrete). So in 2008 I sagely invested my student loan in buying a mountain bike, and I've been smitten with singletrack, and quite broke, ever since.

That year, my first racing bikes, I started out a total beginner and to my shock finished the season with a handful of USA National Collegiate Cycling Champsionship medals in mountain biking and cyclocross racing. In 2009, I upgraded to Cat 1 in MTB XC and Cat 2 UCI elite cyclocross, and I've been racing on the October Factory Racing team while riding the sweetest handmade custom titanium bikes you can imagine.

But ultimately racing is a form of training for other adventures - the kind with no course tape, no race numbers, and no finish line. After all, bikes were built for the open road. And in the words of my dear pal Creighton Irons, "If I try/ at least I'll know/ I rode as far/ as I could go."

"Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am, a reluctant enthusiast, a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So go out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, and bag the peaks.... and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over your enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box... I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards." -Edward Abbey