San Diego Reader

The bike is brown. It’s light in my hands; I can lift it over my head, which I do, just to try it, and it’s easy. Walking it out of the back door of its home at the Velo Culture bike shop, I expend no effort. The thing is like a feather.

Out on the sandy gravel, I grip the handlebars, which are surprisingly short. I feel the squishy rubber against the pads of my palms. The seat is just the right height, even without adjustment, and I balance myself, going over what Sky Boyer, the owner of Velo Culture, has told me.

“Don’t stop pedaling,” he’d said, handing over the beautiful, brand-new cycle. “Don’t stop pedaling and you’ll be fine.”

When I ride under normal circumstances, I tend to go for speed, loving the feel of the wind against my body. Not today. Today I’m riding a $750 fixed-gear bicycle, and I have to be careful because, unlike Boyer and his staff and the other few thousand people who ride fixies in San Diego, I’ve no idea what I’m doing.

“There’s a connection between you, the bike, and the ground that you don’t get when you have a freewheel or when your bike is coasting,” Boyer tells me, as we talk, pre-ride. “Most people sit on a [fixed-gear] bike for the very first time, and they’ll feel that connection, because your body controls the stopping, the forward motion, the turning, the everything. It’s all connected to you. It’s something you don’t get on any [other] kind of bike.”

We sit at the back of his shop, tucked away in his office area, behind a row of exquisite vintage road bikes. The office is made up of a desk, two chairs, and a Mac desktop; the rest of the room is bikes. It’s warming up outside, but the store is refreshingly cool.

Velo Culture, a two-room storefront in Bird Rock, started as Boyer’s eBay business and soon evolved into a retail endeavor. Boyer and his staff sell only steel, mostly vintage, and collector’s-item cycles and frames, mainly fixed gears and road cycles with the occasional townie commuter thrown in. They’ll build you a bike from scratch or, for those on a budget or with a need for instant gratification, a factory-complete. The store has just reached its second year of business at the time of this writing and has not yet moved to its new South Park location. After the move, the shop name will be changed to “Velo Cult.”

Boyer is soft-spoken, clad in a black T-shirt bearing the words “E. Vill Doers” (more on that later) in neon yellow, and sports an impressive handlebar mustache. He’s been biking for nearly his whole life, hitting the track at the age of 9 in Los Angeles, racing in junior events as a member of the younger set. An injury he sustained at 15 curbed his track-racing career, and shortly thereafter, he turned to street riding and mountain biking. Overall, he says, he’s been racing all types of bikes for 17 years.

The differences between a fixed gear and a “regular” bike, construction-wise, are subtle, save for one major component: A fixed gear doesn’t have a “freewheeling” back wheel, as Boyer mentioned, meaning the back wheel does not spin independently of the crankset — crank arm, chain ring, and pedals — the way it normally would. When one moves, so does the other, which makes my job as the rider a bit more complicated: I cannot, as with a standard ten-speed, stop pedaling. The chain runs from a single cog on the back wheel to the chain ring on the crankset; this makes all the mechanical parts on the bike one solid, moving unit. As long as the cranks turn, so will I.

As soon as I take off and begin the initial pedal, I can feel it, the connection Boyer spoke of. The bike pushes forward with an easy grace, my legs and the bike’s mechanics a combined driving force that propels us on our path.

The gravel spits under my tires, and I’m off, heading for the road.

Everything is peachy until I, concentrating on the odd sensation of feeling almost connected to my back wheel, attempt to coast, forgetting Boyer’s cardinal rule of “keep pedaling.” My legs flop, propelled by the ever-pumping crankset, and I zigzag dangerously before recovering.

This, I think, as the road stops wobbling in my vision, is hard.

Despite what my flailing efforts may suggest, many have mastered the art and have taken to the street.

It all started — this fixed-gear business, that is — around ten years ago, as Richie Ditta, custom bike-builder and mechanic, tells me. We’re standing around the corner from the Adams Avenue bike shop where Ditta works part-time, relaxing in the partial shade from a nearby building. Ten years ago is when bicycle messengers began picking up velodrome track bikes at yard sales and using them to make their runs. Velodromes, I learn, are banked tracks on which cyclists race in timed events.

“Basically,” he says, “some of the old-school messengers that were track racers would start riding them on the street for training as well as because it was a bike that they had access to that was cheap. [Riding a fixed gear] was hard to do, not everybody was doing it, and it was a challenge, riding in traffic in New York.”

Ditta, a cycle-brand cap covering his red hair, squints into the sunlight that has temporarily invaded our corner. A former messenger himself, he used to do deliveries on the streets of both New York and San Francisco, before moving to San Diego with his wife, young son, and custom-bicycle-building business, Ditta Cycles.

“The better you get at [riding], the faster you can do deliveries, and you just fly, you sprint all day, sprint, sprint, sprint,” he continues, shaking his arm for emphasis. “Fixed gears slowly started creeping up and creeping up and creeping up, and from there, it went to the Messenger World Championships.”

The Messenger World Championships began in Berlin in 1993, around the same time Ditta started taking his fixed gear to the streets. The championships take place on a closed course, are hosted at a different location each year, and consist of several different events designed to “test a rider’s physical and mental limits,” according to the official 2008 website. While the championships are not limited to fixed-gear riders, fixie riders have historically been heavily involved, according to Ditta, who earned himself a second-place title in the 1999 Skid Competition.

Ditta continues.

“Some were just beginners, some had been riding for a couple of years,” he says of the people who participated in the early years. “Half the riders in the Messenger World Championships [have been] riding fixed gears since then. That was part of the catalyst as far as getting the subculture into the mainstream.”

“It just turned out to be that [riding fixies] was a lot of fun,” Boyer told me, during our talk at Velo Culture. “The trend just spread across the whole world. It’s in every major city in the world now.”

Ditta and Boyer are right, I’ve realized; fixed gears are everywhere now. Sit outside a café long enough, and you’re bound to see a stream of them pass by, or walk around town with half an eye out. There they’ll be, colorful and gleaming, locked to signs and lampposts outside coffee shops, restaurants, and bars.

They’re not cheap, these fixed gears. At the Adams Avenue bike shop, complete bikes fresh off the factory line start at $550 for a KHS Flight 100 and go up to $900 for a Specialized Langster. Bikes made “à la carte” (put together piece by piece) range from $800 all the way up to $3500 for a custom job with a Colnago Pista frame and fork set.

Still, they’re all over the street, riders streaking past at astonishing speeds, messenger bags slung over their shoulders, spoke cards flashing. Enthusiasts are crazy about them.

For Travis Clifford, it took one ride on his friend’s older brother’s bike to get him hooked.

“We all started [asking], ‘Dude, what is that?’ ” he says. “The first time I got on it I said, ‘I’m not so sure about this,’ because it’s got no brakes [and it’s] kind of scary. So I rode it around and almost crashed after, like, two minutes of riding, but as soon as I got on it I [thought], ‘This is awesome. You’re in total control of the bike.’ After riding it around for a few minutes I said, ‘I have to get one.’ ”

We meet at the Starbucks in Ocean Beach, sitting inside, behind a clot of map-toting Asian tourists. Clifford has wheeled his bike in. He leans it against the wall, looking over at it every now and again. It’s a 2008 Bianchi Pista, a factory bike Clifford has customized.

He bought it at the beginning of last October, he says, and has ridden it around Ocean Beach ever since he moved in May. An Oakland transplant, he works as a chef in both Point Loma and downtown.

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