De Ronde van Vlanderaan: Great Excuse to get rid of some Chametz

It's spring, beginning of April to be precise, and for Jews, that means only one thing: Pesach is coming. Pesach, better known when incorrectly translated as "Passover", is a week-long holiday commemorating the deliverance of the Israeli people from slavery in Egypt. The holiday has many factors, but the main one is the dietary angle, where leavened and grain products are completely avoided. This kind of food is known in Hebrew as "Chametz", and Jews the world over are commanded to completely remove all chametz from their homes and their possession. The result is a major round of "spring cleaning" prior to the holiday, where Jews go through their homes with proverbial fine-tooth combs searching out every last piece of chametz to either eat, throw away, or sell to a non-Jew.

April is also the start of the Spring Classics, a month where we see the hardest, most epic one-day bike races in the world, and the first race is always the Ronde van Vlanderaan. For those of you who don't speak Flemish (a prerequisite to being a real cyclist), the Ronde is simply "The Tour of Flanders". And of course, the Flandrian countryside is in Belgian, the spiritual homeland of cycling (kinda like cycling's Israel). So of course I was watching the Ronde, and watching Stijn Devolder ride away to his second straight win, and as is compulsory with watching pro cycling in Belgium, I had to drink a Belgian beer. In this case it was Leffe Blonde, which doubles as my official Shabbat beer.

The whole point of this post is this: I got to enjoy watching the Ronde, and in the process of finishing off my beers, which are chametz, I was both supporting my sport, supporting a Belgian Brewery, and doing the mitzvah of ridding my house of chametz prior to Pesach.

Jewish Cycling indeed!

On Judaism and Crashing Nice Bikes.

Many years ago, I read a very useful tip in Bicycling Magazine.

The tip was about using the palm of your cycling glove to clean potentially hazardous debris off your tires while riding in order to avoid a puncture. Little did I know that this tip, which I've used successfully on countless occasions over so many years, would one day come back to bite me in the ass (almost literally!)

By many years ago, I mean back in the days when high-end race bikes cost a wallet-burning $2000, the lightest pro bikes weighed a feathery 19.5 pounds, and shift levers were brazed onto beautifully painted down tubes. And talking about those down tubes, all bike frames consisted of round tubes. So when you did this tip of cleaning the tires with your gloves, you gently touched the palm of your cycling glove to the tire while the bike was in motion. After brushing off the front tire, you reached back and brushed off the rear tire. Brushing off the rear tire was a trickier motion, so you reached back, felt for the seat tube, and then slid your hand between the seat tube and the tire. This was generally a safe thing to do, since between the round seat tube and the spinning rear tire, you still had a safe amount of space to work with.

Over the years, this practice became second nature to me, and I used it safely on six different bikes, all with round seat tubes. Then, one day a few weeks ago, I did it on my newest bike, a Giant TCR-C2. The one with the swoopy and curvacious carbon frame. The one with the compact geometry. The one with the airfoil down tube, which barely allows for a grain of sand to fit between the tube and the tire. This is how it went down, or rather, this is how the bike and I went down.

So I ride through a sandy patch on the road and hear the gritty sound of grainy rubber on asphalt. As always, I reach down and rub clean the front tire. Then I turn around to do the same to the rear, and the moment I feel the back tire, I realized that I was about to do something terribly wrong. As I make contact with the back tire, my pinky, then my glove, gets sucked into the airfoil. The back wheel locks up, the rear end slides out, and down I go.

It was quick, and thankfully painless. High-speed slides are easier on the bike and rider than low-speed slams. The bike suffered only a scuffed-up Ultegra shifter and a scraped-up Easton skewer on the rear wheel. As for the rider, my clothes stayed intact, but my butt and elbow shed a little skin, and that would become plainly evident the next morning in a most Jewish of fashions.

The next morning I'm at Minyan (yishar koach!). In an experience unique only to Jewish cyclists, I had the scathing pleasure to wrap Tefillin around fresh road rash. Yes, those first two wraps around the lower arm were indeed a bit to the sensitive side. Even better, the rabbi called me up for Hagba, where I and my sore and battered body would get to lift the Sefer Torah for everybody to see. Great! One day after nearly trashing $3000 worth of bike, I have to try to lift and not drop $100,000 worth of hand-made Torah, which itself weighs as much as a bike with Mavic Aksium wheels. Luckily, I didn't drop it, but my form was rather shaky.

Either way, the Giant, the Torah, and The Complete Jewish Cyclist all lived to fight another day. And BTW, if you do go down on your bike in the DC area, might I recommend having the folks at the The Bike Rack check it out afterwards. One reason my bike survived and survives is because of the phenomenal build and servicing my bike has received from them.

Trish Cohen is going to the Maccabi Games.

I am please to announce that my fellow Jewish Velo Blogger and fellow Jewish Bike Racer, Trish Cohen, is going to be representing the United States of America at the 2009 Maccabbee Games in Israel. Trish is the person behind the popular OyVelo website and blog, and has done a commendable job of popularizing Israeli cycling and the Israeli bike manufacturer, Segal, here in America.

Trish is also a powerful racer. She's a Cat. 1, which is very impressive since she began racing in 2006 as a Cat. 4. She's a common sight on the podiums in Florida and also races in the Professional National Race Calendar. She will be part of the 900+ delegation representing the USA, and a female cyclist can get lost in a crowd like that, especially amongst competators in more popular events like track or swimming (which, BTW, are more popular, but no where near as exciting). Think of her as the Katie Compton of Women's Jewish Road Racing, and let's give her support, both of the "allez allez" kind and also of the financial kind.

She needs to race $3,300 for the team, and you can help her out here:

http://www.active.com/donate/trishcohencycling

And you can also check out the Oy Velo website by clicking on the link to the right under the "Must-Visit Cycling Websites" section and also by clicking on the link to her blog.

Good luck to Trish, and to all of the cyclists at the Maccabi Games, but for The Complete Jewish Cyclist, he's pulling for Cohen.

Good News on the Kosher Cycling Front

Now that the season is winding down, I have a chance to start relaxing a little and give some thought to next year (can't relax too much though - I still have two 'cross races to do). One objective is helping grow the presence of kosher athletes in the energy supplement market. While there are plenty of supplements on the market, very few are kosher. Luckily, a few such as Hammer Nutrition, Clif, and now CeraSport offer products with kosher certifications such as the OU (Orthodox Union), Kof-K, and the CRC (Chicago Rabbinical Council).

I have a few forthcoming postings which will focus on kosher energy products. OK, I know posts about energy products are not as exciting as subjects like blingtastic carbon super-bikes or Euro-cool cycling action, but in the end, nothing is sweeter than a good ride experience, and supplements help add to the experience. And for the kosher cyclist, this will help you know what's out there and how they can help you in pursuit of everything such as crushing the competition at the local 'cross races, besting your personal century time, or simply surviving that little bit more on the next Sunday morning ride.

And yes, there will be pictures, because cycling blog postings without pictures suck.

The Rabbinic/Halachic Approach to Riding on Shabbat & Chagim

Every now and then, I like to type a combination of cycling and Jewish terms together into Google and see what comes up. Recently, I did this and found this interesting website, which is a rabbinic discourse onto the halachic (pertaining to Jewish law) views of riding a bike on Shabbat and Chagim.

Here it is:

www.thecornucopia.org/bikshbos.htm

Now while the guys who wrote this may not concern themselves with such matters as shaving precious ounces off of carbon superbikes, V02 max training and power wattage output, or if Carlos Sastre could've won the Tour de France against Alberto Contador, they do lay down some interesting points here. Not that I'm laying in agreements or disagreements (though I did chuckle when they mentioned 15 mph as a preferable riding speed), but overall it's a fair study for those who are fair and study, though hardcore cycling fanatics may have their own interpretations.

Long story short; don't ride centuries on Shabbat, don't plan on doing bottom bracket overhauls on the first day of Sukkot, but if you want to spin around the ol' shtetl on your fixie during Pesach, then go for it (though don't forget to have your cyclometers and PowerTap hubs disconnected beforehand, including the magnets from the spokes).

Signs That You Are an Orthodox Jewish Cyclocrosser

DISCALIMER:

Practically nobody is gonna get the humor in this post. Not only do many Orthodox Jews not know anything about cyclocross, but neither do most non-Jewish cyclists in general. And add to that the fact that many of the elements in this list pertain to the practices of an Orthodox Jew, it makes it all the more funny to me, yet confusing to practically everybody else.

Orthodox Judaism. Cyclocross. One plus one equals three.

Yet, I've had this list playing around in my head for some time, growing occasionally, and clawing at the inside of my skull just trying to get out. So as quite possibly the world's only Orthodox Jewish cyclocrosser, here is a list of the telltale signs of an Orthodox Jewish cyclocrosser (yes, that strange sound is me giggling to myself, alone...), so here goes...

SIGNS YOU ARE AN ORTHODOX JEWISH CYCLOCROSSER:

- When called up to do Hagba, you shoulder the sefer Torah and start running and jumping over things.

- Your tallit bag is the bright yellow Louis Garneau mussette bag handed out as Swag at the 'cross races.

- Pigs are bad because they wallow in the mud, but mud itself is very good.

- "Gin and Trombones"? Feh, give me Schnapps and Accordians.

- Your fans are waving Purim Groggers instead of cowbells.

- You ask your Rabbi if it is permissible for a Jew to race "cross".

- You follow teams like Fidea, Lambouwkrediet, and Rabobank instead of the Yankees or the Mets.

- Your convinced you can hammer for 40 to 60 minutes without eating or drinking because you just did 25 hours of fasting for Yom Kippur.

- At your wedding, as your bride is doing the traditional seven laps around the groom, you put out lap cards after the third lap and ring a bell at the end of the sixth lap.

- You always add "plus one lap" to the Hakafoth, the circular procession of the sefrei Torah around the synagogue on Simchat Torah.

- Your secretly wonder if Sven Nys' real name is Shmuely Nystein.

Ha Ha funny. I'm gonna go drink a Belgian beer by myself now.