Randy Shoquist

I woke up this morning with a memory on my mind.
Randy Shoquist was a great match sprinter, and he was this really humble bike mechanic.
The first time I met him, I was riding my Schwinn High Plains around Portland, and I'd tacoed one of the wheels. It was a $300 mountain bike I'd had since I was 12. I went to 3 or 4 shops and all of them said it would cost me $150 to replace the wheel. I was just a poor college kid making minimum wage on my summer break. Thne I took it into Randy at Coventry Cycles...
"And he bent it back for you?" Dennis asked.
"Yeah."
"I did that 3 or 4 times yesterday."
"Randy stepped on my wheel a couple times and handed it back to me, charged me $10 minimum shop labor. I was pretty happy.
"The next time I encountered him was a few years later when I started racing. He had the flying 200 record at Alpenrose. He held that track record for 30 years. It was amazing.
"Then a couple years after that, Mike Murray, who was in charge of the velodrome in Portland, said that Norrene, my racer friend who promoted and took a couple people to the London Olympics, did "more with less than anyone else he knew. And Randy Shoquist did less with more."
And I looked at him and I said, "Randy went really fast."
That was what mattered to me. The physicality of it. Not whether you were sponsored or traveled to a bunch of fancy races. Physical speed.

"Opening up a bike store, now, makes me feel kind of like Randy."
"And it's a humble kind of bike store."
"Yeah."

Photo by James Mason, http://www.pbase.com/image/129875942

Disciplines

What I do, I like to do well. I’ve had some success racing bicycles on the road, the track, and in cyclocross. I’ve won elite national medals on road and track, and a masters national medal in cyclocross.
Last year, I got back onto the velodrome after a decade of absence, and I combined that with road racing and cyclocross. I had some success. But I learned – the hard way, as I seem to learn so many things – that, though I can do any of those disciplines well, I can’t do all three disciplines at a high level in one season.
“Discipline” has as much to do with punishment and domination as it has to do with devotion, understanding, and a life of faithful practice. Depending on its inflection, “discipline” can give a life structure and purpose, or, like in an abusive relationship, it can leave a person broken, fragmented, shut down, wandering, and lost.
So which discipline is it going to be this year? Well, cyclocross. That choice has more to do with timing than anything else. After a three-discipline season in 2012, I was hammered, overtrained, molested by a long string of injuries and illness, burnt out, and sick of cycling. I tried to quit racing for good in April. By June I had discovered (the hard way) that I love and enjoy and want and need to race my bike. It’s the end of July and I’m just toeing my way back towards the discipline of riding. Cyclocross happens late enough in the year that I can still hope to get all the way up to speed before the season ends.
The pure intense physical endeavor of racing is fun and games and punishing pain and grim hard work and serious indolence and satisfaction. I’m, tentatively, stoked.

Free Range Human

What does it mean to be a free range human?



Being a free range human means that my life, my work, my income, my self-expression come naturally and develop organically in healthy relationships to other people and the world around me. It means that my routines are comfortable and have enough space to let me be myself, and enough structure to allow me to coordinate with other people and develop stronger disciplines over time. For years I tried to fit myself into other people's molds and ideas of excellence, for instance the full time job. The most fulfilled people I know might roam around and move stuff for a living; they might sit and think for a living; they might ride bikes and talk to people for a living. It's a different combination for every free range human I've met, as unique and recognizable as a fingerprint. It's a way of dancing with life.

I started racing bikes in 1997 out of Portland, Oregon, where truly elite level racing was kind of rare at the time. For better and worse, I was always strongly independent and suspicious of authority. I quickly racked up some impressive national level results, but I also racked up some physical issues. I quit racing for a couple years, and when I started my comeback, dealing with the injuries and nagging issues became a necessity. In 2006, at the urging of my friend and teammate Sonya King who was interning as a PT in his office at the time, I started working with Curtis Cramblett on some lower back pain that kept me from racing and training. He was a big help, and he helped me to resolve my low back pain.

Injury would rear its ugly head again during the 2012 season and the 2012-2013 winter, in the form of debilitating pain in my right knee and my right hip. That’s a full year and a half of right leg dysfunction. I worked through it on my own and managed a good late summer season on the road and track, and a good mid-season of cyclocross racing. Then my knee started bugging me again, then my hip, and I missed the most of the end of the cyclocross season. I had a dismal nationals and skipped world championship altogether because I could not train or race around the hip pain.

I am stubborn and it took a complete athletic breakdown lasting months to send me back to the physical therapist for help again. I emailed Curtis. Curtis is a busy guy who travels a lot, and he recommended his colleague at Revolutions in Fitness, Mark McMahon.

Mark does excellent work. He’s got skills – he’s like a Rolfer, a Chiropractor, a Physical Therapist, and a Bike Fit expert all rolled up in one. He refers to different techniques and modalities from moment to moment depending on what will be the most beneficial. He doesn’t waste time. Like Curtis, Mark is also a sweet and inspiring guy. Working with Mark, I was consistently back in training within 2 sessions – after the full year and a half of tenuous contact with the bike.

We’re continuing to work together to resolve the issues that I’ve accrued over the years. Be better than I’ve been, and let Mark help you work stuff out before it becomes debilitating.