Month: November 2011

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Show #66 – November 26, 2011

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Guests: Chef Biju Thomas, The Feedzone Cookbook; storyteller and writer, Maynard Hershon; encore broadcast  with David Herlihy, author of The Lost Cyclist

Well, here we are in the middle of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and one of the many things Diane and I are thankful for is the opportunity to invade your ears each week and bring you our take on what’s happening in cycling. And naturally, we’re also thankful that you tune in or download each week. Without you, we’d just be two cyclists sitting in a small, dark room taking to ourselves.

So Diane and Brian up and run off to the Adironacks this week, but before she skipped town, Diane put together a show we think you’ll be thankful for.

First up is Chef Biju Thomas, who has combined his passion for bike racing with his passion and skill at cooking. Chef Biju has teamed up with Dr. Allen Lim on The Feed Zone Cookbook: Fast and Flavorful Food for Athletes. The book focuses on making tasty, healthful food that can sustain a competitive athlete, and yet require a minimum of ingredients and preparation.

After a short break, Maynard Hershon is back with an original story that’s just right for the holiday season, entitled “Nice Wheels”. Always nice to hear from Maynard, and we promise to badger him to return to TOC periodically.

We close out this Thanksgiving weekend show with an encore of an interview Diane conducted almost exactly a year ago at the now-closed Joseph Beth Booksellers in Lyndhurst, Ohio. Author David V. Herlihy was in town to promote his book The Lost Cyclist.

We hope you enjoy this week’s show, and we hope you found time for a ride or two in the unseasonably mild weather the past few days.

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Show #65 – November 19, 2011

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Guests: Steve Garro, Coconino Cycles; Amy Walker, author and co-found Momentum Magazine

Cyclists are so creative and resilient! Certainly we don’t have a monopoly on those traits, but most cyclists I meet are doing innovative, or at least interesting things. To wit…

Take for example Steve Garro of Coconino Cycles. Steve quickly brushed off a 45 mph encounter between his bicycle and a 1967 pickup truck to return to building custom bike frames and tending fruit trees in Flagstaff, Arizona. He also kayaks and rides an off-road hand-cycle, among other activities. You can hear the rest of Steve’s story as he’s our first guest on this week’s show.

If you’re looking for a good bicycle-related read this winter, look no further than a new book edited by our second guest, Amy Walker. Amy is one of the founders of Momentum magazine, and she enlisted the help of some fellow creative cyclist types to produce On Bicycles: 50 Ways the New Bike Culture Can Change Your Life. It’s got the Steven Bilenky seal of approval, but you don’t have to take his word for it; Amy’s is our second guest on The Outspoken Cyclist this week.

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Show #64 – November 12, 2011

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Gary Helfrich, Sonomo County Bicycle Coalition; Lauria Mellot, Reflect Sports

After living on the south shore of a Great Lake for more than a quarter century, I’m used to wild mood swings in the weather by now. But still, a day of accumulating snow sandwiched between two stretches of sunny and 60+ degrees in early November is wacky, even for northeast Ohio. Happily, The Outspoken Cyclist is a constant, calming companion for your brain, no matter what the thermometer reads.

Our first guest is an icon, not only in cycling, but in several other fields, including rock and roll, and transportation planning. Gary Helfrich was one of the forces behind the original incarnation of Merlin, went on the road with Aerosmith, and is now the executive director of the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition. We got to pick his brain on all those subjects and more in a lengthy interview this week.

Cycling, swimming and other outdoor activities can be hard on the skin and hair. Diane spotted some new products at Interbike from Reflect Sports. Their flagship product, Hoo Ha Ride Glide is a chamois cream that was developed to be friendly to female “saddle contact points” (aka the Hoo Ha). It was also developed to make you smile when you say its name. In any event, our second guest this week is Laurie Mellot, one of the partners in Reflect Sports to tell us about Hoo Ha Ride Glide, and their other products.

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Show #63 – November 5, 2011

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Jim Ochowicz (needs no intro!), Rody Walter, Groovy Cycleworks

Here in northeast Ohio we’re enjoying some unseasonably gorgeous weather, knowing that the ‘gales of November’ will be upon us soon enough. ‘Every day’s a holiday and every meal’s a feast’ as the saying goes, and this week’s Outspoken Cyclist is both.

Our first guest is none other than Jim Ochowicz, cyclist, speed skater, former manager of Team 7-Eleven, and current manager of BMC Racing (you know, Cadel Evans’ team). Jim, or “Och” as he’s known was the catalyst for the first U.S. pro cycling team to have success racing in Europe, and his new book, Team 7-Eleven: How an Unsung Band of American Cyclists Took on the World – and Won has just been released. Jim joins us from Palo Alto, California to talk about how he moved from the road to the ice and back to cycling as a team manager.

For the second half of the show, we stick a little closer to home as Diane welcomes Rody Walter of Groovy Cycleworks to the studio. Rody trucked on up from his home in Wooster, Ohio, where he’s a mountain biker, family man, firefighter/paramedic, and the mind and flame behind Groovy, not necessarily in that order. If you’ve got the patience and some cash, Rody can build you a custom road or mountain machine that fits you both physically and aesthetically, and it’s almost guaranteed that he’ll make you laugh out loud at least once during the process.