Cruisers: The Unbound 200 on Beach Cruisers (Video)

When I was a kid, my mom once gave me a key piece of life advice:

“You can only control what you say. You can’t control how people interpret what you say,” she told me.

Parents dispense innumerable bits of advice to their kids over a lifetime. Some bits stick, and others fall on deaf ears. It’s anyone’s guess which will fall into either category. As an optimist, I hope the advice that needs to stick somehow does, and the things that don’t as much apply fade away. In my case, I needed the advice that my mom was dispensing. It quickly resonated with me and was borne out in my real-world experiences.

I’ve said so many things growing up and in my adult life, and so often, they aren’t interpreted in the way I meant them. Jokes most often fall flat because I’m not very funny. More seriously, compliments are sometimes taken as insults. Often, people just don’t get what I’m trying to say, or they just don’t get me, and that’s the outcome I most fear. I think we all want to be known and accepted for who we are, and many of us don’t find that very often, if at all.

Thankfully, since my mother gave me that advice many decades ago, I’ve had a bit of armor against the cruelty of being misunderstood or just disliked. In what may have been a passing statement for her, she gave me a gift that will last an entire lifetime: a paradigm.

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Back in June, Nick Gilroy, David Hornick, and I did a super silly ride at Unbound on beach cruisers that we had picked up, painted, and assembled about 30 hours before the start. Between us three, the ride was a continuation of a streak of experimental, adventurous, and occasionally dangerous rides we undertook as friends. This ride was par for the course for us but one more level up into the unknown. We genuinely had no idea if we would make it to the finish. Between us three, it didn’t have to be any more than an experiment.

But, somewhere deep down, my mom’s advice from three decades earlier was still ricocheting in my psyche. I knew that our ride, if completed, would be noticed and commented upon by any number of people. Wanting to be liked, known, and accepted, I hoped that people wouldn’t take the whole thing in the wrong way. We weren’t at Unbound to beat anyone. We weren’t there to throw shade on racers. We weren’t there to show anyone up. We were there to see if we could make it and to have as much fun as possible along the way.

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As soon as we had finished the ride, the reactions started. There were a lot of reactions because the ride ended up getting a lot of attention. Thankfully, quite a lot of it was positive. I think most people understood and interpreted our ride in the spirit that it was ridden. Some great dialogue was had both online and offline. The weeks following the ride were a total blur for me as the story got picked up by the cycling media. For those weeks, I wasn’t a very productive person. I mostly talked on the phone, answered emails, and did many interviews, all about the ride. People in the industry called what we had done “earned media,” which is defined on Wikipedia as “content relating to a person or organization, which is published by a third party without any form of payment to the publisher.”

Several marketing types reached out to me, and one, in particular, congratulated me on “one of the sickest activations I’ve ever seen.” Wow, thanks, maybe? When I think of something being “activated,” I think of a dormant robot being switched on, coming to life, and buying the first product they get target lock on. Is that what we all are to marketing types? Mindless robots being activated for the sake of consumption?

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Others were less kind with their feedback. “Stunt” was a term I spotted in comments strewn across various platforms. Someone else accused us of being copycats of some other person who had once done something similar somewhere else (there is nothing new under the sun).

The cynicism isn’t entirely unjustified. We’re all on guard against the onslaught of brands, stories, and causes vying for our finite attention these days. This is an attention economy, after all. I think a lot of us, myself included, pride ourselves on being nearly impervious to ad campaigns and economic manipulation. Even with our guards up, though, sometimes an ad gets through, cloaked in a story, and we get got. I’m infuriated when I get got. For some, our ride at Unbound was an ad cloaked in a story. I’m not sure what the ad was for since I am not a purveyor of beach cruisers. I’m a purveyor of sometimes obscenely expensive gravel bikes. If you’re cynical or guarded enough, this whole beach cruiser gag reeks of shill.

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A kind woman recently left a comment that said, “Y’all are a huge reason why I … bought a bike…”. This was a special comment for me because maybe it showed how the fun we had out there that day in June could be infectious in a positive way. Someone saw what we did and was inspired to ride more. For the record, she did not buy a bike from me.

Positive or negative, none of us has the control we want over how our actions are interpreted by others. With that in mind, maybe the only authentic thing to do is simply feel free to be who we are and let the chips land where they will. 

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If I could do anything all the time, I would live meaningful experiences and then try to tell meaningful stories of them. I do sell bikes for a living, and I really like my job. But before and after that occupational phase of my life and career, I was and will be just a cyclist. The desire to share and relate how I feel out on a bike ride is inseparable from who I am as a cyclist.

As David, Nick, and I drove from Denver to Emporia for this ride, I asked them to take video of whatever they chose throughout the weekend and to send me their clips when it was all done. My bigger ask was, “Could you please shoot everything in horizontal format instead of the typical vertical video social media format? I might want to share a film of this story if this ends up being a day we want to remember.”

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It turns out that the day was one we each wanted to remember.

I never looked back at any of our footage from Unbound until a couple of weeks ago when a deadline approached. I had promised to bring this film to a cycling film festival in Philadelphia, and time was running out. As I cut and edited furiously, I realized that putting this “film” together was an opportunity to say what I wanted about that day with my own voice, not through the voice of an interview or through the filters of the media.

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Say what you want to say. Share who you are. People will respond authentically in the context of their own experiences. Being able to share at all is a gift.

Further Reading

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