How to Become a Bicycle Badass

Attention, urbanites -- 2010 might as well be the year that you become a bike-riding badass. A vow to start pedaling would complete a cool trifecta of New Year's resolutions: You'd get in shape, you'd go green and you'd flip the bird at death in a way that'll have chicks swooning.

Sure, your most recent experience with a bike involved a 300-lb. Huffy -- or a $3,000 mountain rig that's been slowly rusting away in the garage. Since then, bikes have gotten lighter, sexier and even taller.

What's more, borderline-insane renegades have brought to the industrial wastelands of Brooklyn ridiculous bicycle jousts -- and also designed iPhone apps about those tilts, naturally. Fixed-gear aficionados regularly blow past cars in New York, San Francisco, Portland and beyond -- with or without brakes.

Ready to join in and make 2010 the Year of the Bike? We'll tell you how on the next page, with a little help from the Black Label Bike Club and Trek guru Eric Bjorling.

Ride tall
The infamous Black Label Bike Club, founded in Milwaukee in 1992, was the subject of the cultishly popular documentary "B.I.K.E." The BLBC turns urban bicycling into an all-encompassing ethos -- one that happens to involve plentiful boozing and a near-complete disregard for personal safety.

The club's signature is the tall bike, a two-wheeled mutant that welds two distinct frames together so that the rider can tower high above the street. Ryan Doyle, a rider with BLBC New York, says that people have been tweaking and radicalizing two-wheeled design for quite a while. "Since the velocipede was invented 100-plus years ago there have been literally hundreds of designs," he says.

Doyle himself has been instrumental in expanding the boundaries of what bike culture can be -- including affixing a legitimate jet engine to a bicycle. He's since branched out into other forms of visual art, such as the Regurgitator, an interactive "ride" that encourages viewer participation. But watch out. "The direct influence of spinning facing outward from the axis at up to 5 g's," says Doyle, "causes 25 percent of the participants to vomit outward toward the crowd."

Pick up thy lance
Because it's not enough simply to ride a tall bike, the BLBC decided that the next logical step was to host urban jousts. Participants face off, pedaling hard at each other while wielding lances made of PVC piping. "Other than going fast and aiming for the neck, a jouster should prepare for the blow from their opponent and stay on the bike," says Doyle, the bike jousting world champion. "A pre-joust psyche-out always helps, and getting the crowd on your side gives confidence, which is essential."

If you're not feeling quite man enough to engage in actual bike jousting, Doyle has paired with "B.I.K.E." producer Frederic King for a virtual rendition: an iPhone app, which debuted Jan. 1.

Get fixied
Still struggling with the obvious questions regarding tall bikes -- like "how the hell do I get on it?" Urban riders might want to consider a more conventional option: the lightweight, street-ready fixed gear bicycle.

"Fixies," as these bikes are known, are single speed, and the pedals are in motion whenever the wheels are. There's no option to coast as on a traditional bike, but that means more of your leg power is translated into forward motion. Fixies are built both with or without brakes -- applying backward pressure on the pedals can slow you down. We suppose running into a taxi would also help.

Eric Bjorling is the official "lifestyle marketing guy" for Trek bicycles, which produces a stunning line of urban-focused bikes. (We're especially fond of the Third District model, which has enough gold accents to make Lil' Wayne jealous.) For Bjorling, part of the appeal of a fixed gear is that it narrows your focus out of necessity. "There's so few things in this world that really force all of your attention anymore," he says. "Riding a fixie forces you to concentrate so much on what you're doing and what's happening around you. It heightens your awareness."

While naysayers may consider fixed gears as the hobby of holier-than-thou urban cool kids, there's history here. "The fixie trend was really born out of the velodrome and track racing," Bjorling explains. "Track racing requires fixed gear bikes – and at one time was bigger than the NFL."

Take the stairs
As with the Black Label Club, ordinary Americans are pushing the definition of what bike riding can mean. Bjorling has witnessed the myriad ways that the new generation is threatening to kill themselves in the name of fun. "The craziest thing I've seen is this kid in New York jump over a flight of stairs on a Bianchi Pista. I thought he was going to endo and die," Bjorling says. "I've also sat at the bottom of Filbert, a serious hill in San Francisco, and watched messengers fly through intersections and use rear tire skids to control their speed. You can hear them coming if it's a quiet morning -- sounds like annoying birds."

"One trend I've noticed is freestyle. It's this whole crossover between track bikes and BMX," he says. "Since they're not constrained by brake cables or common sense, these riders are whipping their bikes around like skateboards. It's unreal to witness if you're watching somebody who knows what they're doing."

Ready to become a bicycle bad-ass? Visit Trek's site for more info on their urban line, including the District, with its avant garde belt drive. Or, if you'd rather play pretend, download the iPhone bike jousting app.