velo sangha - part 1
Sangha /ˈsaNGɡə/
noun
noun: sangha; plural noun: sanghas
- a Sanskrit word used in many Indian languages, including Pali which means "association", "assembly", "company" or "community"
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about community and connection — more specifically the importance community plays in both the worlds of cycling and in mindfulness. In traditional Buddhist settings, a sangha is comprised of monks, nuns, and laypeople — essentially it boils down to a community of people with a shared common interest, in the case of Buddhism that’s the dharma, or teachings of the Buddha. The practice of mindfulness & meditation & the dharma brings people together from all aspects of life — to me that sounds an awful lot like the bicycling.
I grew up riding bikes casually like most kids. I remember saving up a bunch of my chore money to buy a red Schwinn Predator BMX bike like the older boys in the neighborhood. Living in the suburbs in a brand new development, there were a shit ton of open yet-to-be-developed lots all around. A bunch of the older “kids” probably in their late teens and early twenties at the point in time had put in the time and the effort to build out an entire BMX course in the empty lots that we affectionately referred to as “The Jumps”. It wasn’t uncommon in the Spring and Summer months to get home from school or wake up in the morning, grab my bike and roll across the street to The Jumps. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back now, this was the very first bike community I ever belonged to.
As I got older, my interest, along with most of the other kids in the neighborhood, in bikes started to wane. Before long, the cherry red Schwinn Predator was collecting dust in my parents garage and the next thing I knew, I was off to college. It wasn’t until after graduation that I stumbled back into the beautiful and frustrating world of bicycles. I was living on the New Jersey side of the Muhheakantuck (most know it as the Hudson River) and doing an internship in Brooklyn for a small record label. One of the guys working for the label had a little side hustle called Bike Slug. Essentially, he’d pick up cheap vintage road bikes on craigslist, fix them up, and then flip them for a profit — the cool part was he’d deliver the bike to your location, lock it up, and then get you the key. Before giving up on trying to live in Brooklyn and work in the music industry, I bought myself a BikeSlug bike that was a bit too big and brought it with me back to Boston and that’s where my true love for bicycles really started to kick-off.
I started commuting to work on what was essentially a single speed — downtube shifting plus plenty of wear on the chain and cassette made it easier for me to just keep it in a single gear. Wasn’t really a problem for me as Boston is flat and at the point in time my commute was less than 2 miles. Shortly there after, my roommate, Matt, started piecing together his own fixed gear bike in our living room. It got me thinking…this old road bike is a little too big and I only use one gear on it anyway, maybe things single speed/fixed gear thing was the way for me to go, too. Not knowing any better at the time, I ordered a brand new white single speed from from State Bicycle Co. — I was gonna go for an all white build until Matt quickly got me educated on what a ghost bike was…I ordered some blue Velocity Deep Vs instead. The closest local bike shop to me was a Giant Factory Store and I remember feeling super self-conscious walking in there for the first time. There was another shop around the corner, ironically where I’d end up working a few years later, that didn’t have the friendliest reputation in town. The whole crew at the Giant store was the next little foray I had into a sense of community built around bikes and from there it only flourished.
Over the course of the next 5 years in Boston I rode my fixed year EVERYWHERE. I had no car. Groceries? Bike. Bar? Bike. Work? Bike. Band practice? Bike. I started spending way too much time on r/fixedgear, attended my first Critical Mass, and in the summers, Matt and I would wrangle together some other fixed gear weirdos to meet up and ride around the city after midnight with no true destination in mind — just two wheels, vibes, and a bunch of drunk Bostonians stumbling out of the bars after last call and shouting, what I’m sure they thought were clever insults, about the Tour de France and Lance Armstrong. I started riding regularly with a small group of friends on the weekends — three fixed gear goons and one roadie rolling down the Minuteman Bikeway. We all living in wildly different places now, Los Angeles, Seattle, North Carolina, but we have a group text that’s pretty active nearly every day and we’re planning a 2024 long weekend of bikes and beers.
When I moved to Austin, TX I was initially worried about find a community of friends to ride with all over again…that anxiety was quickly aliviated one morning when I stopped into my new favorite coffee shop, Flat Track. It was a small little shop situated in the back of a used bookstore on E. Caesar Chavez. I walked in in a full kit with my fixed gear and a rather tall bearded gentleman introduced himself and made a comment about having not seen me around before. I explained that I’d just moved to town from Boston, MA earlier that month. As it turned out, that tall bearded man was Russel Pickavance, the owner of Cycleast and a pillar of the ATX cycling community — he welcomed me to town, bought my coffee, and told me all about his shop just down the street and that was that. I had a whole new family and circle of friends to ride with. No matter where I went, there was always a community of cyclists ready to welcome me into the fold.
When I left ATX behind for Los Angeles, the bike kind of stayed there for a little while, too. I tried commuting on my fixed gear in Los Angeles for about a week and I quickly realized where the whole “LA Sucks For Cycling” slogan came from. A little more than a year into my time in LA, I wandered into Golden Saddle Cyclery — a shop I’d been following on the internet for a long time, since I’d started riding in Boston, and I bought a bike with actual gears. Little did I know where that bike was about to take me and the community I would find in the process…
…to be continued.
