I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It makes even fixie polo seem tame. Is this going to take off as the new fad? I think we’d need to cultivate a love of David Hasselhoff and liver sausage first.

Here’s a primer on the sport:

Exactly one year after “the beginning of the end” I am in a completely different space with life. Different goals, different bikes, different aspects of riding which I have chosen to now participate in. Moving from the highly publicized long distance bike tours with refreshments and cheering to racing where every moment of the ride is filled with searing pain in the hope of creating achievement and victory.

Each ride, too, becomes purpose driven. Today is base miles, tomorrow is intervals for sprinting, next friday is climbing practice, an exercise filled with nausea from your heart rate shooting up to the redline for an extended period.

All of this is necessary to build the machinery inside of you that makes you stronger, because inside we are all weak, and if we are weak we are dead.

Chris Hoy on my wall reminding me that "greatness, therefore, is not an achievement, but a habit" from the film "Standing Start"

Houston to Austin by fixed gear on Saturday. Either we make it or we die trying.

Either way we’ll get it on camera.

Ride hard. Pedal harder. Never look back when you make a break.

stopped by some of the bike boutiques on the Champs Elysees. Was a little dissapointed at the lack of varietal products. Most of the stuff there you can find over here in the states. Really sweet presentation from the boutique of TIME bicycle company. Sweet bikes too. Priced pretty well into the dentist price range, though. Without Further ado, here are the pics

Time Boutique along the Champs

yeah, those bikes are just chilling along the wall. DROOL.

I like how they mounted the frames on the wall...I want that. I mean with the frames on it. Maybe a few hot women in TIME outfits to pose too.

Velo Oxygen, down the street. Mostly Bianchi stuff.

Really Rad old bike

I love scooters. It's inexplicable. Suffer my obsession for a moment.

Tokyo to Osaka Teaser from John Murillo on Vimeo.

I`m in Tokyo right now. Hurray! That`s all well and good until you fall sick with a high fever, inability to eat, inability to get up out of bed for more than a few minutes and a definite inability to pedal a bicycle, much less walk under my own power. Maybe I should invest in a grandma walker/suitcase apparatus that I see all the Japanese grannies carrying.

In the meantime, enjoy the vid, as I am currently doing from my ill coma.

About 3 years ago now (my how time flies) I was a young impressionable car/computer geek living and working in Tokyo. When I went for my company’s teacher certification training, I met a young woman from Madison, Wisconsin. The trainees affectionately referred to her as “Wisconsin” because of her accent. She was hip, outspoken and had this strange fetish for bicycles.

As we’d head out for a few post lesson beers, she’d stop constantly admiring bicycles. “Fixies” or “Fixed gear/Track bikes.” At first it was just some kind of weird fetish, but I noticed that the bikes were actually quite cool looking. I thought nothing of it at first.

Fast forward to a few months later, I went out an bought myself a cheap folding bicycle (Chinese made) to avoid the crowded commutes filled with drunk salarymen on the way home. The train often smelled like puke from one guy who had just happened to drink a few too many Kirins.

Then I decided to drag myself and my girlfriend at the time on a 30km bike ride. We folded up bikes onto the train and headed into town for a scenic ride. I was a pretty fit guy, but as I was giving it all I had, a lanky Japanese fellow dressed in superhero tights (which I would normally have scoffed at) burned me like I was standing still. Not only did he drop me like it was hot, but his pedal stroke looked like a gazelle gracefully and smoothly pulling away from me.

I was hooked.

Fast forward to a few months later, I was draped up in colorful camo cutoff shorts, my BAPE Tshirt, riding an old panasonic frame around AOYAMA and HARAJUKU where I picked up this DVD from a thrift store. Suddenly this whole track racing thing seemed pretty neat to me.

Enjoy the vid.

I’ll let you guess what we are building.  Full writeup coming soon.

M.I.T introduced this clever little gadget in Copenhagen touting it as the next big thing in cycling. Allegedly the functioning of the unit is to store kinetic energy from braking and allow you to release it later in a “burst of speed.” You might remember a similar idea being utilized in Formula One car racing.

Aside from the devices function sounding cool, I always thought the beauty of cycling was in the simplicity of the invention. M.I.T however, seems to disagree. I do appreciate that they seem to have put their device on a hipster friendly “track” bike (“tarck” is more appropriate) and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before it is available in every color scheme to match your Velocity Deep V or B43 wheelset.

Is this invention going to be as prominent as indexed shifting(where your shifter clicks with each gear change),which was met with some resistance, and even today some still prefer friction shifting, or will this invention go the way of  the recumbent bicycle, once said to be the next evolution, but shrank to now a small eccentric niche of the cycling world. (sorry, bent riders, don’t get too “bent” out of shape on this one!)

My take on it is that anything that takes away from the simplicity of cycling or has a complex operating method will detract people away from it. I have non cycling friends who are afraid to ride a bike with multiple gears, and cannot comprehend when or  how to know the “right” gear. I think this would only make matters worse and end up with people pressing the boost button right into intersection traffic.

However, my message to M.I.T is this: If you make it in lots of pretty fluorescent colors, they will buy it. Well, at least this guy will (and probably also press the boost button right into oncoming traffic)

original article and photo sourced from Gizmodo

Bitchin’ picture courtesy of Hey Okay

Stop. Wait. Step back for a moment: Each of these riders is different, but to the outsider, they all together represent cycling. They are all members of a two-wheeling, human-powered collective. But to each member, they are practiced disciples of their trade, separated by canyons. Out of these islands, Highflange was born.

What is Highflange? A type of bicycle part. A hub. A device from which spokes are laced to the rim. Though each spoke laces far away from the opposite spoke at the edges of the flanges, and reaches even farther away to hold the rim, the fringe, they are all connected at the hub. Highflange will cover all aspects of bike life, starting from its birth city in Houston, TX and radiating outwards through collaboration efforts in the cycling community. We are all members of the same sport. We are all connected at the hub of bicycle life: High Flange.