To borrow one from my pal Stevil, "Here's one for the weekend."

Follow Me - the Teaser from Anthill Films on Vimeo.

Is this on?

I've been gone for a while, but I have a good excuse. A little more than a month ago, I was offered the position of Editor-in-Chief at Bike Magazine. I accepted the offer, packed a few things and headed south. Bike's Editor, Lou Mazzante, decided it was time to fly the coop, but stuck around until the 19th of February, in order to put his final issue of the magazine to bed. On February 22, I took over the reigns.

My head has been spinning since I walked into the office for the very first time. Bike is a very strong magazine, so I have my work cut out for me. But it's gonna be cool.

It was an assignment for my school newspaper that first got me interested in cycling. Once I'd gotten a bike and started riding a bit, it was a magazine first began to fuel my daydreams about becoming a bike racer. I guess you could say that my life in cycling has come full circle.

If you're a hardcore road racer or cross-country mountain bike racer, you might not have given Bike a look. Racing has never been a focus of the magazine, but that is fine by me—I've already used up all of my angry pedal-strokes. But if you like beautiful photography, and stories about some of the other things that can be done on a bike, check it out.

As I come up to speed, I might be a little slow here on this weblog, but I will still be here.

Cheers.

I'm sure that many of you know by now that Bob Roll was seriously injured in a skiing accident. In the crash Bobke managed to break three ribs and his femur. I've been friends with Bob for twenty-five years now, and have always known him to be a tough dude. I've broken my own fair share of ribs, and would wish that incredibly inconvenient pain on no one but, according to the Blob, breaking a femur takes pain to a whole new level.

When I was racing in Belgium, I would always know when my competitors were, shall we say, chemically altered with any number of drugs in the amphetamine category because they could

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Since this year’s Tour de France will be contested on the narrow, wind-swept, and cobblestone streets of Belgium during its first week, many of the top GC contenders have started making some noise about spending some time in that country to brush up on their cobblestone riding skills. Lance Armstrong, for one, is set to ride the race most consider the most difficult of the “flat” classics, the Ronde van Vlaanderen. Alberto Contador, has also indicated that he’ll be spending some time on the Belgian stones, in order to acclimate to the feel, so to speak. Other GC men will surely follow suit, since a rookie mistake on the cobbles during the fast first week of the Tour could take a rider out of contention in a heartbeat.

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Yesterday, a Flemish priest by the name of Joost de Waele died. Father de Waele was in charge of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges on Alpe d’Huez. Normally, I would afford a priest, or any other member of the clergy, only about as much attention as I would anyone else, meaning that unless I knew the person, I probably wouldn't take time to stop and think about his life or death. I’ll go ahead and proceed in this case, though, since Father de Waele was a Flemish person presiding over one of the most famous bike race climbs in the entire world. I also would like to bring this up simply to point out the meaning of bicycle racing in Europe.

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For those of you who follow international cyclocross, the sordid event that took place in the Belgian national cyclocross championships this past weekend isn’t news. For those of you who don’t pore over the international results, let me just recap the situation for a second – it seems that a drunken supporter of 2009 Belgian cyclocross champion Sven Nys reached out and grabbed the arm of reigning World Champion, Niels Albert, causing him to crash, and breaking a rib in the process. Not only did Albert lose any chance of winning the race as a result of the crash, but with a broken rib, he now has a difficult time with hard accelerations and any sort of climbing.

I have personally endured my share of broken ribs and am here to say that there really isn’t any possibility that Albert will be defending his rainbow jersey this time around at the Worlds. That, my friends, is a terrible thing. I really would like to write something harsher here, but am consciously making an effort to abide by my own rule of keeping this at least a PG -13 rated site.

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