Soon her gears will be but a distant memory...
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I gave my New Year's resolution some thought. Did I want to be nicer to people? No. Did I want to save the world? Hmmm, naw maybe next year. How about expand my horizons as a person? Been there, done that, not happening. So what does that leave me? Building my new single speed...

Yes, 2004 has rolled around so it is obviously time to build a new bike for myself. So what will it be? Right now I am obsessed with Fixies. I was going to build one from a cyclocross bike, but that seemed expensive. Instead, I have decided to build the coolest bike for as little cash as possible. I am going to turn my race road bike into a svelte 14-15 lbs fixie road bike for the winter.

Is that cool or what?

So how will I pull this feat off? Simple my friends, build a single rear wheel with one of those funky White Industry eccentric single speed hubs. Instantly, my vert-drop Opus race bike morphs into a fixie with NO stupid add on chain tensioner, the hub takes care of that. Then I simply strip off all those unsightly gears, cables and brakes to be left with a 14-15 lbs uber commute bike that is friggin' a bitch to ride. No fenders of course, because that would mar the lines. I will be riding this super pain machine everyday with a gear that is WAY too big up a fickin' 800 ft mountain to go to school for yet another degree. How cool is that? (Beside the degree part of course.)

I figure this is about as cool as I can possibly hope to get, which is fine because I suspect it will be more than enough to encourage hordes of cycling groupies to hang off me as I ride into campus each day. "Ladies, ladies, two at a time please!" I can hear myself clarifying. Yes, and all this is made possible because no yuppie wannabe would be stupid enough to bother with the pain of such a cool machine. [Edit: little did I know that fixies would become such a phenomenon in Vancouver]

And that brings me to the lesson of the day boys and girls, this is what cycling is all about... spending far too much money to pick and choose pieces of technology that will inevitably leaded a heightened sense of pain. Bring it on!

And of course bring on the beer for when I blow my knees out