I'm starting a new blog to concentrate on my photography, Foto By Wes. So check it out for more fun stuff! [View Full Entry]

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I don't have time for the full story on our trip up to Pennsylvania to cover the Wilderness 101 this past weekend, but let's just say that it was brutally fun. Liz & I didn't get out of town until almost midnight, and we pulled up to the starting while the race organizer, Chris, was on the P.A. announcing, "Ten minutes! Ten minutes till the start folks! Let's get up to the line!" I'm working up a story on tandem mountain bike racing, and we were lucky enough to be able to see [View Full Entry]

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We were halfway up Hankey Mountain, and I was gaining on Liz as she mashed up the hill in her granny gear. I, on the other hand, was in walking gear; pushing my singlespeed Gary Fisher Rig up the mountain. As I squeezed my helmet against my head with one hand, and watched the sweat drip out of my helmet pads, I remembered what one singlespeed blogger had posted, “I ride singlespeed because I like walking uphill.” [View Full Entry]

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OK, maybe I can't actually win the Tour de Cure, since it's not a race, but I will be riding in it next month. For the second year in a row several of my coworkers put together a team to ride in the American Diabetes Association Tour de Cure. While last year I couldn't make it since I was already planning on riding 400 kilometers the same weekend, this year they made me an offer I couldn't refuse, "Wes, do you think you could design a team jersey? We're giving one away to each rider." Now my drawer may be [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday while out on our regular Wednesday night ride, Liz gave me a warning- "Wes, you do not want to do the Shenandoah 100 on a singlespeed. Get yourself a bike with gears! Heck, we'll find you a bike with gears!!" Carol was there to witness it. Fair enough, Liz, the gauntlet has been thrown. Or should I say the bike glove? There's something absurd about riding an off-road century, and there's something even more absurd about riding a singlespeed. It therefore borders on the [View Full Entry]

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“How cold is it?” a kid asked his riding buddy, a thermometer the size of an oversized lollipop pinned to the back of his schoolbag, “Forty.” “What?? It’s colder than that!” “Dude, it says forty. Course, it said forty in the valley, too. It’s been saying forty all day long.” Another voice chimed in, commenting in cold irony, “I think your thermometer's frozen.” It was definitely colder than forty degrees fahrenheit. I had left my bike computer with thermometer at home on my touring bike, but having grown [View Full Entry]

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So it’s been over a month now since I finished BMB, and I still don’t have any desire to finish assembling my bike. I hung the pieces up and returned the bike box to the club, but after 750 miles in that saddle, I have no overwhelming urge to get it back together & get back on. Plus, I really, really need to do a complete overhaul, and I’ve got so many freelance jobs going on right now that I just don’t have the time. But today is one of those overcast, drizzly fall days, and it sure would be nice [View Full Entry]

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“How’s it feel to be done?” my mom asked. “Done?” In the eighteen years I had known of BMB, and during the nearly two years of preparation I had never really thought of being “Done” with it. I had read webpages and books on long-distance riding, prepared my body and bike for the rigors of riding through the night, night after night. I’d ridden out before the weekday dawn on training rides. I had slipped into my cubicle at work with a little smile on my face as I traded my biking cleats for the office shoes kept stashed under the [View Full Entry]

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So after 900 miles of qualifying rides, months of preparation and years of dreaming, I finally received my acceptance package from the organizers of the Boston-Boston-Montreal 750-mile brevet, addressed to “Rider #40, Wes Cheney.” Rider Number Forty. I don’t think that an hour goes by without my mind straying to BMB. Easily a quarter of front of the refrigerator is now devoted to BMB; from a training chart to the elevation profile of the ride, a checklist for my dad following in the support RV, and a list of my checkpoint time goals. Rider Number Forty. It&rsqu [View Full Entry]

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Somewhere around mile 280 I muttered, “To hell with this,” and kicked it into turbo. I’d already been riding over 28 hours, and I was determined to meet my goal of finishing all 375 miles in less than 36 hours. It seemed like a ludicrous goal, but don’t get in the way of an endorphin junkie. And I was an endorphin junkie on a bender. “Mind over matter,” I counseled myself, “You’ve been averaging 15.1 miles per hour so far. Keep it up for another 5 hours and you’ve got it made. 75 miles to the finish, you can cover that [View Full Entry]

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