Sorta Cutting Edge News

Sorry for the delay between this web posting and the last. Between personal trials and a vicious vomiting/diarrhea parade (courtesy of the latest variant of Taiwan-Monkey-Swine-Kirstie Alley Flu), I’ve spent a lot of time lying on the floor within arms’ reach of the nearest commode. Consequently, getting all jiggy on the keyboard hasn’t been quite as attainable a goal as usual. But here I am, on Christmas day, typing away, reigning in my run-away large intestine, and I’m just chock full o’ industry rumblings, evil tidings and personal meanderings. So here goes….

SPECIALIZED GRABS RECENT TREK HIRE

When it comes to selling bikes, a lot of ink is sacrificed in the quest to convince you that this year’s model is the glorious by-product of technological innovation. But what exactly is technology? When bike companies get around to explaining this point, they invariably trot out confusing algorithms (which supposedly describe axle paths and the like) or they pimp their proprietary, hollow-forged/hydro-formed manufacturing techniques.

Mike McAndrews: suspension guru and man of the hour

What is odd about all this is that, at some point, a real, flesh and blood, belching, farting human created all this super-secret, high-tech stuff. Without getting too sappy or Isaac Asimov on you, what I’m saying here is that a company’s real technological edge isn’t defined so much by today’s pivot placement, but by the people they employ to dream up tomorrow’s designs. This point was brought home to me the other day when I heard about the recent employee swapping brouhaha between Trek and Specialized Bicycles. Here’s the story.

On December 1st, Trek sent out a press release announcing that they had just hired Mike “Mick” McAndrews to head up their suspension design department. The press release included a quote from Joe Vadeboncoeur (Trek’s director of product development) which summarized the importance of their new hire, “Trek believes that the full-suspension market will continue to expand, with new categories and new usages of the product. I have known Mike for many years, and could not pass up the opportunity to enhance our future abilities with his addition to Trek’s already strong roster of designers and engineers.”

Sounds fair. High-end hardtail sales are in the crapper (at least for the bigger bike suppliers, anyway), so hiring someone to improve your suspension bikes is probably a pretty sound decision. Okey-dokey. But why would Trek (the country’s biggest and most profitable bike company) make such a fuss about McAndrews? McAndrews, as the kids were inclined to say a few years back, has got game.

McAndrews worked at RockShox, where he helped design groundbreaking products such as the Mag 21. He also spent time at Specialized, co-designing (along with Bob Fox) the BRAIN inertia-valve rear shocks that make Specialized Epics a must-have item for the heart rate monitor and recovery drink set. Lately, McAndrews has been manning the drafting table at Maverick and consulting with various suspension companies on the international scene. Zap Espinoza, Trek’s brand manager, explains McAndrews’ draw thusly, “McAndrews has history and an incredible amount of practical, first-hand knowledge. He’s really smart and has an ability to explain suspension designs precisely without getting caught up in the gobbledygook.”

For a short while, Trek’s coup seemed like, well, a coup. Then, within a month of being hired at Trek, Specialized Bicycles sent out a press release of their own, which claimed that they had just hired McAndrews. The news came out of the blue to everyone at Trek. McAndrews had been collecting a paycheck and had even purchased a home in Madison.

What prompted the McAndrews’ about face? “Everybody wants to know why he left for Specialized,” says Espinoza, “but the only person who can say why it actually happened is McAndrews. Ultimately, he’s the only guy who knew what was going down. He came here and told us he wanted to work here. In the original press release he said how he wanted to work at a bike maker that had the ability to go from a design to manufacturing, all under one roof, and that’s something we pride ourselves on here at Trek. It’s certainly something Specialized can’t offer. So, yeah, it did take us by surprise, but it’s better that this happened now than in April. The split is amicable in the sense that, for me, I totally dig McAndrews. He’s a great guy. I’m completely shocked, though, that this happened given the discussions we had about him being here.”

FOX RACING RALLIES TO SAVE TRAIL

Every December, companies in the bike industry send out Christmas cards to other folks in the industry. It’s a nice gesture…in a holly/mistletoe and gingerbread kind of way. This year, however, a raft of companies are saving trees and boycotting the whole card-sending tradition in favor of spending the money on worthy causes (why I’ve never used this excuse to explain my own inability to send birthday, anniversary or holiday cards to my loved ones is beyond me). Fox Racing, in particular, is putting its money into creating and selling t-shirts that will raise money to help keep an endangered trail system open to mountain bikers.

A t-shirt with a conscience.

The trail network in question is found in the Nisene Mark State Park—one of the better places to ride in Santa Cruz County, California. It’s the usual Northern California story: hikers and joggers rally and kick the shit out of cyclists. First a little background… The California Department of Parks and Recreation recently adopted a new plan that would expand mountain biking at Nisene Marks: essentially allowing mountain bikers to access singletrack trails.

A group called Citizens for the Preservation of the Forest of Nisene Marks then filed a lawsuit to restrict mountain biking on the grounds that mountain biking would erode the trails. Their main contention is that mountain bikes, hikers and singletrack can’t peacefully co-exist and that the Marks family didn’t intend for the 10,000-acre preserve to be ridden by mountain bikers when they donated it to the state way back in 1963 (mind you, mountain bikes didn’t exist back then so the fact that the deed doesn’t mention mountain bike use in the park is really a non-issue).

Well, a judge ruled in favor of the “Citizens” group (which is run primarily by just two individuals) and sided against the state’s effort to increase recreation in the forest despite the fact that mountain biking has been successfully managed in the park for 15 years and every scientific study to date has conclusively shown that mountain biking is no more destructive than hiking.

The Marin County-style logic of restricting mountain bikers to fireroads (where they travel at much higher speeds and are more likely to anger hikers) is also seriously flawed. A well-built singletrack with adequate sightlines will actually slow mountain bikers down and is therefore more conducive to positive relations amongst trail users (this has been proven in many parts of the world, thank you very much) but hey, this is Northern California and when it comes down to trail politics, the facts are often ignored in favor of vitriol from hikers who are convinced that hiking is truly the only manner in which God intended his people to appreciate nature.

This brings us right back to the topic of T-shirts. Fox is selling “Free the Trail” t-shirts in Santa Cruz-area bike shops and on the web at free-the-trail@foxracingshox.com Every red cent made from the sales will go directly to IMBA and the local mountain bike advocacy group (Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz). “We are having great success selling the Free the Trail t-shirts,” explains Fox Racing marketing manager, Elayna Caldwell. “Our goal is to raise as much money as possible to fight this ruling. With that in mind, we are covering the entire cost of the shirt, so all proceeds go to Free The Trail.”

What else can you do? Your best bet is to write in and persuade the Department of Parks and Recreation and get them to appeal this ruling. If you are not a latter day, Will Shakespeare-letter writing machine, just download a letter at www.free-the-trail.org, sign your name on it and send it in. Heck, just visit the website: it’s loaded with useful information (thank you, Fox Racing).

Mountain bikers up here in Northern California are an increasingly pessimistic bunch. We’ve lost so much access to trails that many of us are unwilling to fight the battle anymore. There are even riders out there who just shrug and decide to poach “illegal” trails instead, as some sort of modern Gandhi/civil disobedience gesture. Bad move. Doing so only adds merit to the anti-mountain bikers who claim that we are a lawless, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging bunch.

I strongly urge everybody to challenge the court’s ruling via legitimate means. After all, organizing, writing a few letters and being informed has enabled scores of hikers to kick mountain bikers off public trails. Why not use the same methods to maintain access across the country? Actually, we don’t have much choice in the manner. We either get involved or we start investing in lift tickets at the nearest ski resort. You pay for public lands, you might as well get to use some of them. Buy a t-shirt, write a letter, do the right thing.

MY FRIEND THE PARASITE

I was flying home from a recent trip when I felt this annoying pain in my…well, I don’t know the technical word for “backside of your knee,” but that’s where I was feeling it. I couldn’t pinpoint the precise cause of my pain, as I was wearing jeans and my knees were rubbing my chin. This, in turn, was due to the fact that I was flying on one of those twin-prop airplanes, best known for killing rock stars by the baker’s dozen and least known for their spacious leg room. Anyhoo, to put a point on it, I wasn’t in a position to see what was causing me the pain. I figured it was probably an in-grown hair or something to do with my Conan the Barbarian, leg-shaving technique. Consequently, I just rubbed my leg a bit, balanced my complimentary Dixie cup of coke between nose and knee, and thought happy thoughts about the reliability of propeller-driven engines.

What's nearly indestructible, disease-bearing and loves to burrow into your soft tissues?

When I got home that night I stripped and, before jumping in the tub, decided to take care of whatever was bothering my leg—that’s when I noticed six, black legs and a marble-sized body sprouting from behind my knee. The silky, black legs were waving merrily in the air. Apparently, it was happy hour below my belt line.

Now, I’m a fairly stout-of-heart kind of guy. I don’t wince at needles, I can watch doctors draw my blood all day and so forth, but I find the sight of something dining on my flesh, distinctly nauseating. After a few manly shrieks, I managed to gather my wits. Clearly I needed to extract the fat, bloated tick. Feeling decisive, I grabbed a pair of tweezers, firmly clasped the tick and pulled. Bad idea. The tick burst, a ruby, rivulet of blood (my recycled blood, no less) streamed down my leg and I'd merely managed to decapitate the tick. The head was still embedded deep in my leg. I dug around for a few minutes with a needle, but no dice, I couldn’t get deep enough.

As is often the case when I pull apart the VCR and can’t put it back together again, I decided the only thing to do was to call my wife. I’m always loathe to do this since she’s usually got more important things on her to-do list. When I called that night, for instance, she was stitching a lumberjack’s face back together. Naturally, my tick bite paled in importance to the chainsaw accident she was working on in the emergency room, so she simply promised to bring home some Lidocaine and a scalpel when she got off work that night.

A few hours later, my wife was dig-digging and tug-tug-tugging behind my knee. I was lying on my stomach, watching Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, and wondering just how far a tick can bury itself in your body.

The answer, I discovered, is plenty deep. My wife had made a neat incision behind my knee with her scalpel and was now probing around inside my leg with some long, metal hook-thingy. After a few minutes she extracted a little, black head and, well, that was that.

I’m not sure what that has to do with anything, but I felt like sharing. Above is a picture of the lidocaine and scalpel my wife used on me. Fun, fun, fun. Wait, here’s a worthwhile information nugget: apparently there is no longer a vaccine for Lyme’s disease on the market. That evening I suddenly became enthralled with everything-Lyme disease and spent a couple of hours web-searching the subject.

Back in February of 2002, GlaxoSmithKline announced that after two whole years on the market, they were pulling their Lyme disease vaccine, LYMErix, off the shelves due to slow sales. One of those rare cases where capitalism really sucks. Anyhoo, the kindasorta good news is that several studies indicate that a single 200-milligram dose of Doxycycline can reduce your risk of contracting Lyme disease if taken within 72 hours of being bitten by the I. scapularis tick. This medicine isn’t cheap (about $80 for two, 100-mg. pills) and it causes some folks to vomit uncontrollably, but it’s worth the peace of mind. At the moment, there isn’t a whole lot more you can do if bitten by a tick. My advice, don’t use tweezers. Just pull with your fingers. Bon Appetit.