I attended last night’s first annual Twin Cities Motion Picture ‘evening of bicycle films’ at the Pepitos Parkway Theater in Mpls, a benefit for the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition. They showed Bikes over Baghdad and The Cyclist, but the featured film was Salsa Cycle‘s Racing the Sun, a story about one of their sponsored riders, Tim Ek, and his participation in last year’s endurance gravel road race, the Dirty Kanza 200. (Tim’s blog post about the event: Racing the Kansas Sun.)
That’s Tim (AKA ‘Eki’) in between Salsa Cycle‘s Mike ‘Kid’ Riemer and QBP‘s Jason Boucher in the photo on the left. Tim’s wife, Amy Ek (also in the movie) is on the right in the photo.
More about Tim:
- Salsa’s Meet Tim Ek YouTube video
- Tim’s posts on the Salsa Cycle blog
- Tim’s website, Eki Chronicles: A “blue collar”cyclist’s adventures from the saddle of a bike
I was particularly interested in Tim’s Aug. 4 blog post, Learning to Fly, about his recent attempts to do more gravity-type riding in Duluth with his split-pivot Salsa Horsethief:
Yesterday I lubed up the chain, took the Horsey off the hook in the garage and pointed it toward my local trail system in Duluth, known as the Piedmont Trails. Piedmont has a whole section devoted to big drops and air. I’ve always avoided it, pretending to be too cool for it as us cross country guys need to get our laps in, there’s no time for goofing off. So, I skipped the work out for some “goofing off”. Thing is, for me it wasn’t playing around. I was dead serious and quietly worried that I would end up in the E.R. right in the middle of race season. Oh well, one can’t worry about getting hurt, because what would ever get accomplished? I spied the first jump, a boulder in the shape of a ramp jutting out of the middle of the trail. “That’s where I’ll start”, I thought. (continued)
A good piece of writing. Inspires me to learn to ‘fly,’ too. Gotta get me to Duluth soon.
Update 5 pm:
About 5 hours after I published the post above, my wife Robbie and I paid a visit to The Blue Door Pub where two of my sons, Graham and Tyson, are managers.
With no prompting, Graham, also a mountain biker, proceeds to tell me that he struck up a conversation with a Salsa Cycles-sponsored rider named Tim Ek who paid a visit to the pub a week ago and then again with his wife Amy yesterday, that Tim wrote up a blog post while at the bar, that he took Graham outside to show him his Horsethief, that he wrote the URL of his blog site on a napkin, etc etc.
I just stared at him, probably with my jaw dropped. A coincidence of sizeable proportions.