[Updated: For my pal Chris Mayhew, who thinks this shot is Wayyyy Kuuuhl, brah]:
It seems Jacquie Phelan - a women's MTB legend in the same league as Ned Overend, Gary Fisher and Tom Ritchey, the hard riding, product-developing pioneers of the sport - has herself a blog. Thing is, I was out of riding for a long time. But before that, I did a good deal of low quality mountain biking in the early to mid '90s. I don't talk about it a whole lot because I had really long hair, wore plaid shirts, crashed my mountain bike a lot in the Adirondacks, drove a rusted out Suzuki Samurai and could drink anybody under the table, but usually only did that to myself... wild times. I stunk it up on the bike but had fun, but it's not me any longer. I was pretty different then, and although I'm fundamentally the same person, that was sort of a different me. Those times are past. But Jacquie was somebody I looked up to then along with some other wild men and wild women (like Missy Giove, for instance)... Seeing what she has done with her life since then, it's fair to say I still do look up to her.
Y'know what... her blog, not surprisingly, is teh funny. I'm not kidding. She's kind of a whacky artsy hippie chick, so you probably would think that I wouldn't like it. But I'll let you in on a secret - I used to be a hippie chick magnet. Can't explain why, maybe it's because opposites attract and in a lot of ways I've always been an enormous square. Even when I had really long hair and was doing the English major thing and going around all stupid drunk and recklessly deconstructing the newspaper and applying structuralist theory and postcolonialist resistance techniques in my critique of liquor store discount signs... even then, I was an utter square. Maybe hippie chicks feel it's their solemn duty (as if they had any sense of duty at all...) to corrupt squareness, and that with their patchouli perfume, long (frequently unwashed) hair, and penchant for jam bands and munchies, it's clear that God appointed them to that task. So I was a frequent victim of crazy-ass artsy left wing hippie chicks in my youth. A not entirely unwilling victim, I might add.
So basically, between the bikes, the good writing and the crazy hippie chick, there's no way in hell that I could dislike Jacquie Phelan and her not-often-enough updated blog. Check it out.
1 comment:
Do you remember that super cool Rock Shox ad that had her as some tibal mud woman playing the RS as a flute? Awesome stuff.
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