THEY FIXATE, FOCUS, ENDURE AND OVERCOME. It can be anything: Riding, saving money, finishing a project, conceptualizing something seemingly ephemeral, reorganizing a morning routine. Big or small, mundane or extraordinary it exists and there are those driving for perfection. Yearning for it. Relishing in the quest, haunted by the result, tormented through the aftermath.

Not everybody chooses this route—and yes, ultimately it is a choice, but many do. And those that do can relate. Trudgers of this path are not unflappable, the quest for more is wrought with ups and downs. Roller coasters of emotions, successes, failures and existential re-evaluations. Standing up to try again. Life’s difficult in a fortunate sort of way.

excerpt from BikeMag.com, link to the full story here

GRIT.CX Magazine issue 9, June 2016

It took three full days to get here.

Nonstop travel. I’m tired and the riding hasn't even begun. Now I’m watching the altimeter of our guide’s GPS spin like the reels of an old gas pump. Three thousand eight hundred; 3,850; 3,900; now … wait for it … 4,000. Four thousand fifty; 4,075. The diesel burbles to a stop on a rise. Four thousand one hundred sixteen meters. Thirteen thousand five hundred feet. Our starting point. I creak open the door and am blasted by a gust. My head swims in heat, stifled.

How did this happen? I’ll blame it on Milner. I’m here with Trek Bicycles. Trek is launching a bike intended for big alpine terrain so they’ve turned to Mr. Raw and Rugged himself, photographer Dan Milner, to breathe life into the bike’s intent. Milner had posed understated snippets of out-there options—Mount Elgon in Uganda, the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, Argentine Patagonia and here. I’m uneasily poised in the northwest corner of Argentina. Just below Bolivia, barely east of Chile, listening to my skull burn.

excerpt from BikeMag.com, photography by Dan Milner, link to the full feature here

It lies just beyond the horizon, an ever gaining black mass of inevitability, creeping forcibly forward, strengthening and unrelentingly unavoidable. It's that thing that if your mind wanders momentarily, it pangs with the shuttering stillness of halting and sobering reality.

It's coming.

And there's nothing I can do about it.

Is what seemed to happen to me as the calendar ticked off February, March, then April. Game time.

Trans Iowa is a swallow you whole event. Overwhelming is an understatement. 340 miles of self-supported pedaling to be accomplished in 34 hours on rural dirt roads. No outside support of any kind. No GPS. No hitchhiking. No shortcutting. No worries.

excerpt from WTB.com, link to the full story here

Cover feature in Bike Magazine, March 2017 issue

I'm standing cautiously, a few steps back from the service counter at Brian's Bicycles and Cross-Country Skis in Mammoth Lakes, California. I'm having second thoughts about what I'm doing here. We're visiting Mammoth Mountain to test long-travel 29s, most of them carbon, some of them sporting bulbous carbon rims with cavernous inner widths, and half of them still embargoed. I'd called Brian's two weeks ago on the hope and prayer that the shop would accept an unreleased bike, shipped in a hurried manner, and not open the box.

Eyeing my surroundings, I'm now not so certain I needed worry about coveted product and secret embargos. I'm in a bike shop. Like, the real kind: one owner, the seasoned smell of service and known surroundings, old parts and sure bets of what sells. Nothing fancy, yet deep know-how that's felt—the force of it practically reverberates from old black-and-whites of road bikes above a wall of inner tubes, most of them Schrader, stacked behind the counter. Brian Ellison eyes me over glasses behind a nearby truing stand and saunters over, "Can I help you?"

excerpt from BikeMag.com, link to the full feature here

Bike Magazine, April 2019