It's National Oatmeal Day!

Surely this is a holiday on the level of Christmas, or way more than my birthday or even more than National cold cereal day. 

National Oatmeal Day is exactly 2.24 times better than Trekworld.  National Oatmeal Day is nearly 4.32 times better than my birthday.  National Oatmeal Day is much better than Christmas, precisely 2.67 times better.

If you are a betting person, you are probably thinking that I am totally screwing with the math here.  Especially, given that I have said that Flip Flops are better than my birthday and I made a previous statement about the value and endorsement of daily burrito eating (exactly √45.63÷6.1 times better, but you have to divide that by the number of days since your last burrito to get an exact number - math is hard). 

So, enjoy your oatmeal day.  Go ride your mountain bike or your road bike or your motorcycle.  In other words, eating oatmeal is best celebrated by riding something with 2 wheels.  4 wheels is so gauche.

Cheers.

Joe

 

Decisions, Decisions!

Is the ringing in my ears bothering you?

Sometimes I feel my life is out of control.  It's not a normal thing, just sometimes it hits me that the record player is on 78speed when it should be on 33speed (I realize that I just lost most of the people that are reading this - trust me, it means that things are playing so fast that I cannot really understand the lyrics).

look familiar?

 

There are lots of factors that make me feel that way, my job is fast pace sometimes, my kids are adults spread all over the world, I have a new puppy at home that is terrorizing the house and already runs everything, I am not riding my bicycle enough, my motorcycle is dirty, the camper stands half remodeled in the driveway, there are 4 different house projects left half completed...  See what I mean? 

This blog entry is about a bunch of loosely (I mean really loosely) related topics.  Most of these are keeping me up at night.  No Caffeine necessary.

 

Steven Tyler is now a judge on American Idol

Here in the USA, there is a show called American Idol.  (I think it was actually stolen from the UK).  I know the show has been around for a while, but since I do not actually know where the remote is for the television at home, I have not ever watched the show. Reading the latest copy of Rolling Stone magazine via Zinio informed me of the depths that the Aerosmith front man has fallen to. 

I find myself daydreaming about what that must be like.  Steven Tyler, huge mouth nearly swallowing a microphone, scarves flowing off the microphone stand, snarling and telling the contestant they suck.  But I am reading that he is actually nice to the contestants.  I guess I need to give it a test ride.

This is how most of us think of Steven Tyler.

In addition to this heresy of Steven Tyler on American Idol, while at the dentist office the other day (wilting under the barrage of talk and questions from the hygienist while she has her hands in my mouth.  How stupid is that, btw...? - but I digress).  While sitting in the dentist chair, I heard a Motley Cru song playing on the Classic Rock station - followed directly by an Elton John song.  Jeez.  What has the world come to?

Yep, its pretty much like that.

 

People are buying/riding hardtails in USA

What is going on here?  For a long time, we have been convinced that the hardtail was dead in the USA.  Interestingly, the Europeans and Asians have never stopped buying them.  But in the US, the percentage of people buying hardtails has continued to drop.  For example, Trek offers quite a few more hardtails outside of the USA than it does inside the USA.  (Buy a plane ticket and take an empty bike bag if you are chasing a high end hardtail from a US zipcode).  But, amazingly, people are now buying hardtails in the USA.  Granted, they are all 29'ers, but they still have stiff rear ends.  Sometimes the future is not much different than the past. 

Is this dehydrated breakfast cereal hour, or is this Cleveland?

Or, this section could be called "If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium."  This past week, I literally went to Belgium for a day.  It was not for a happy experience, but it was important.  John Burke and I went to the ceremony for Wouter Weylandt.  If you have read other stuff from me, then you know that the passing of Wouter was a tragedy that is hard to describe.  John put up a nice little blog entry about the day, so I will not try to repeat that. 

I will just say that the ceremony was excellent.  The ceremony was held in the huge church in the center of Gent, Belgium.  The church is one of those fantastic old churches in Europe that normally is the keystone of your tour through the city. There were easily 1000+ people there, and every single person was offered the opportunity to file through the church, pay their respects to Wouter and his family and take home a card to save and remember Wouter by.

Wouter had a lot of friends. 

 

I'm thinking of shaving my legs

I love bike racing.  If you haven't figured that out yet, I love it.  I watch it a lot, I listen to audio presentations, I read twitter feeds from racers, teams and races.  I spend a significant amount of money to support it, I am responsible for the race department etc...  Yet, I consider myself too old to be serious about doing it myself.  I ride a lot.  Almost every day, that I can.  On the weekends I ride with and get smoked by the racer groups.  I try and try, but I just am not as fast as them.  Maybe if I shaved my legs?

That would probably make me feel like a cutter.

Kinda makes you want to go and rent the movie again. eh?

 

I have a single speed Fuel EX

I have a bunch of friends that ride SS.  I have had them, but in general they are built on hardtails.  In spite of the renaissance of hardtails that I noted before, I just do not do hardtails.  God made FS bikes, so why should I avoid them?  So, I built a SS on a Fuel EX frame.  It is a compromise, but it works.  The suspension does what it is supposed to do, in the same way that it does when you have gears.  Nice.  But, I have to make note that there still are not any gears to use to help get up that hill.  Given the fitness and age point above, I find myself looking for a button on the right side.  I find myself in the middle of the hill wondering exactly what I was thinking when I bolted this all together without any shifters. 

So maybe in the end I bolt some shifters onto the bike.  At least one. 

Arnold Schwarzenager is in the news for a baby out of wedlock

I don't really have anything more to say about that.

 

Do you walk to work, or do you carry your lunch?

I know that sentence makes absolutely no sense.  Sometimes other things don't make sense to me either.  It is the spring of 2011 - Yesterday I was at a sales meeting about how things are going with a few 2011 markets, today we are showing international distributors the 2012 lineups, later in the week I will be at a meeting to finalize the 2013 product development plans, early next week I will be at a R+D meeting which is more about 2014 and beyond.  

I want tickets to the Pearl Jam show at Alpine Valley

Yep, favorite band, playing at the end of the summer at the outdoor festival Alpine Valley.  Sounds like beer, sunburn, bee stings, long bathroom lines and Eddie Vedder belting it out.  Cannot wait.

 

cheers.

Joe

This picture has nothing to do with much else in this post, but I like it nonetheless.

"The Appearance of Shabbyness"

Working on our lifestyle products here at Trek, one of the biggest requests we get is "can you just make the bike black? I don't want to stand out." The thing about that statement is that it's not totally true and no, we can't make an entire line of black bikes. Yes, some people may not want to "stand out" but everybody wants to be at least somewhat noticed. If that statement were true, there'd be no reason to make the Trek District. And then there would be no trekdistrict.com. The underlying truth is that the requestor is probably scared that somebody will rip their bike off and they'd rather not see their investment in the hands of bicycle miscrients.

Well, now there's a way to deflect the attention from your sweet ride without haveing to actually sacrifice the paint.

UK-based desinger Dominic Wilcox has come up with a solution that is simple but seemingly effective. Dominic has come up with some super-realistic scratch and rust decals that can be slapped over a nice paint job to give the appearance of "shabbyness". You can deflect thieves while keeping a clean aesthetic for only £3.99 (which is only, like, 74 US dollars). While Dominic makes no guarentee as to the effectiveness of his decals, he has seen some success with his own bike in London. Capital idea! Check him out here.

BTW: While these are a great idea, I'm not guarenteeing they will work. You want to keep your bike? Buy a big lock.

Go By Bike PSA

Seeing as it's a Friday and it's also May 1 (Happy Birthday Chris!), the begining of Go By Bike Month, I wanted to get out my PSA about helmets. Bike helmets save countless lives every year. Ride your bikes, get out and enjoy the warmth, and be safe!

Had to post this video. Not sure where it was shot but you gotta love the vibe. bicycle commuters should be hugged more.

The Devo Bike

If you like Devo and custom fixed gear bikes, you will think that this is the greatest blog post ever. I can't say as I'm all that familiar with Devo's music (aside from "Whip It" of course) but I am quite familiar with dope rides and this is for sure the latter. Trek Industrial Design rockstar Mike Hammond worked up this custom fixie complete with "Devo Hat" spacers. After we wiped the drool from our fellow Trekkies off the bike, Mike decided that the bike could do more for the world than just reside in his stable of fly bikes. The bike is currently being auctioned and the proceeds donated to the Lance Armstrong Foundation. If you'd like a chance at owning this amazing piece of "Devo-tion", click here. Bidding is live now!
Two LAF posts in a row. I'd send those guys a bill if I wasn't feeling so.....charitable.

Behind The Curtain At Trek U

In an effort to better educate you, the consumer, we've embarked on a series of educational videos. It's something we've done for years in the hallowed halls of higher bike learning known as Trek University but we only accepted bike shop employees. In an essence, we're now offering open enrollment. And while they may not contain the sheer horror of the videos your driver's ed teacher showed you or posess the middle school giggle-factor of "Your Changing Body", they are pretty sweet. Here's why: They're short. We've already dropped FX and Madone on the web and now we're expanding the offering to the entire Urban and Mountain Bike lines. Here's some behind-the-scenes photos from our Urban shoot. I'll post again when the video is up but you're going to have to wait for the vid till December 26th.

Coming To Your World

If you've read between the lines of the Bike Lane Blog, you have probably discerned that it's written by somebody in Trek's marketing department. This is because that as a marketer I have the years of skilled journalistic training that it takes to write something people would actually want to read. It's also because that marketers are some of the only people who posess the ego large enough to believe that other people actually care about their thoughts and opinions.  Today however, it's not my opinions I'm interested in. It's yours.

If you watch "Mad Men" (Best Show Ever not named "Entourage") you may think that marketing is really just wearing a skinny tie, drinking too much, and cheating on your spouse while you smoke cigarretes in your office. That's really only half of what we marketers do. The rainy season has reached us in the Loo and pretty soon it will be snowy season which then spills into road constructy season. Road constructy season is what we live for because hopefully some roads are in enough shape to ride a bicycle on. Perhaps a shiny new Trek bicycle? You should buy a new Trek bicycle. See, just marketed to you and you didn't even see it coming.
 
  Subliminal advertising (like the kind I just dropped on you) is really the next wave. Aside from giving marketers an outlet for creativity and often returning higher rates of recollection and action (the holy grail of advertising) they can often liven up the environment around you. Why go subliminal? That's actually your fault. You and your TiVos and your hulu.com's, and your progressive insistance to tune out traditional advertising. That's ok, I understand. I'm a consumer just like you and I can't name 3 of the possibly 50 or so ads that ran during "American Morning" while I was getting ready to go to work today. Except that Wolf Blitzer is still on tv. I got that message.

So one thing I'm looking into for next year is some environmental advertsing. There are some companys out there doing some really creative things that make you stop and look and give you a little different experience. One thing media companys have been pitching me on is bus stop ads. Interesting thought so I looked into what some other brands have done. Ikea changed a whole bus stop into an Ikea-inspired living room and Adidas turned one into the Ajax soccer team's locker room complete with brick facade and hanging jerseys. So my question to you is, "is this cool?" Would you rather see this than a print ad? Is this more impactful than a traditional ad? Too invasive?

Bike Lane Blog Note: We're going to allow one of our newest designers to co-author from time to time on this blog. The attempt is to give you, the avid reader, a little taste of what we do behind the scenes as well as give an outlet to one of the artists we employ. While it may not be as exciting as the race results from some poorly attended mountain bike race, we'll try to do our best.

Burned you good King of the Mountain Blog!

Orange You Glad I Didn't Say Banana?

"Whoever said 'orange is the new pink' was seriously disturbed." - Elle Woods, Legally Blonde

As a blogger of bicycle culture and style it is my duty, nay, my responsibility to make sure that you're riding in the forefront of bicycle fashion. With great blog, comes great responsibility. A few posts ago we talked about on-bike fashion with Momentum's Urban Legends show. Now we're going to talk about Actual on-bike fashion.
Orange is back in a big way. Take it from us, we rocked an entire District with orange accents and, yes, it looks awesome. With Halloween, the orangest of all holidays, only a few days away it seems only appropriate to give some props to the only color that shares the name of a fruit.

Enter the Trek Valenica. A baseline urban assault machine with some nice orange accents but not particularly sexy. Add a Nashville shop guy's imagination and some orange housing and look what you've got. In the words of Horatio Sanz, "No! No! Too Sexy Senor! Too Sexy!"

Think about what's hot. Orange County (Bravo's Real Housewives new season Nov.25 - don't act like you're not excited). The Syracuse Orange (Not so much in football). The House of Orange (Unstoppable in the 1670's, William III's Act of Toleration guarenteeing religious toleration to certain Protestant noncomformists was off the meat rack, son! ). Reese's Pieces (Always a classic). You love orange. 

Just don't overdue it. Anybody else feel like "salmon" is due for a resurgence?

Halloween at the Salt Mine

When you spend two years growing your hair out just so you can be a character from an awesome movie for a future Halloween, you think that you could win a silly little office costume contest. But when you don't even place and you're beaten by a guy who spent $4.99 at Jo-Anne Fabrics and $2.50 at Walgreens the night before, you've got to be ready to throw down. Today I will expose such an injustice.

Trek industrial designer, Chris Carlson, spent two years growing his hair to just the right length for the world's greatest "The Dude" costume and didn't even qualify for a "nice try anyways" award. If you don't know who "The Dude" is than I have your weekend Netflix order all ready to roll. Order "The Big Lebowski" today so that it arrives on Saturday and get your popcorn and diet sprite and unplug the phone and fill the dog's treat ball with peanut butter and put ear muffs on your kids (there's some dicey language used in the flick) lock them in the basement and tell your significant other that it's totally cool if they go out with the girls/guys as long as they don't call or come back until the movie's over. I promise you'll like it.

That being said, the judging at this year's Halloween costume contest was totally bogus. I mean, Marketing had an 80's TV Character theme going so how is anybody going to top that? Here's how the top three shook out:

1. Shane's "Punky Brewster" costume
2. Sarah's "The Baroness from GI Joe" costume
3. Travis' "Michael Knight" (from "Knightrider") costume

Now, I totally understand how these guises are all legit contenders but how can a trip to Goodwill really top 1,051,200 minutes of Cost Cutters denial in training for a costume to be worn for one day? This ranks right up there with all of the greatly hyped flops of all time: Playstation 3, Britney Spears' VMA performance, Benifer, and now Chris' "The Dude" costume. While he may have not received any corporate props, I'm here to say spot on, Chris, spot on. Had I been the one judging, you'd have been crowned champion, instead, I'm standing in line at Jo-Ann Fabrics with receipt in hand. What do you say when you're trying to return a yard of fabric? "I'm sorry ma'am but this satin was just not satiny enough to satisfy my exquisite taste of such fabrics." Man, I'm going to sound like such a jerk. Maybe I can get some store credit or something like that. What would I use with my store credit? Basket weaving kinda seems fun but who has the time anymore? I'd cross-stitch a pot holder or something like that but I can't seem to recall ordering Chinese ever really requiring such an object. Any ideas?