In the Spring of 2010, bicycle riders from all over the country will stage a relay race in the 8 western states of California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas and Missouri. Approximately 500 selected bikers will attempt to ride the actual Pony Express Trail as it exists today faster than about 500 veteran horseback Pony Express riders. The 2010 Pony Express Bicycle Challenge authentic head to head relay race is a separate event from the historic Pony Express Reride and will compete day and night until there is a winner. The goal is to ride the roughly 2,000 miles from Sacramento, CA to St. Joseph, Missouri in just 7 days, 16 hours.

Not for 150 years has there gone out across the country an urgent call for ‘wiry 18 year old’ riders. Today, the Pony Express Bicycle Challenge is looking for great young bicycle riders from bike shops, bike clubs, college racing teams, military personnel, noted individuals and racing pros. You need not be an ‘orphan willing to risk death’ to apply.



Horses are clearly favored when climbing and powering through soft soil conditions. Naturally, there are huge advantages horses have over bike riders climbing up the Sierra Nevada range and up the western side of the continental divide. Nevada's 40 mile desert and Utah's Upper Sonoran Desert have hundreds of miles of less famous but no less difficult terrain conditions. The single most advantageous factor for the cyclist is that much of the original trail has become gravel roads and paved highways. Horses must run on roads and are at a disadvantage here. Wind and weather will also be a huge factor. Ultimately, the real ‘horse race’ of this horse race is in the marginal areas of terrain where decades of horsemanship experience may trump technology.

Both racing groups have taken advantage of technology. Horses are bred for better blood lines. Bicycles have drastically improved on the simple concept of two wheels and a frame. We intend to use all types of human-peddled bicycles just as horsemen select from Thoroughbreds, Mustangs, Pintos, and Arabians.

In addition to the 80 lb Mochilla (mail pouch), Pony Express riders will carry 150 years of history as a virtual burden. Bicycles, on the other hand, will carry 150 years of history, literally! Their 20 lbs bicycle mochilla contains all manner of portable digital devices filled with the last 150 years of recorded history, including the genealogies of original riders and their horses.



The Pony Express Bicycle Challenge is a historic moment with public morale riding on it. In truth, the Pony Express Bicycle Challenge itself has little meaning in terms of actual accomplishment. Modern bikes with the best riders could not compete over the original Trail with the motivated horses and horsemen of 150 years ago. Mostly, the country needs to be reminded its own historic struggles as a strength and regain an optimism for the future to build on. Motivated citizens can make the unusual and the seemingly impossible happen. Cross country mail delivered in days instead of weeks by boat: imagine that! Elect a black President: imagine that. Bicycles beating horses at their own game on their own 2,000 mile long turf. Imagine that. What’s' next? Imagine it.

The theme of the challenge is “Men propelling themselves on machines at speeds rivaling horses”. But, man against beast has its own tantalizing appeal. Beyond that, 200 horsemen racing against 500 bicyclists is interesting, competitive and just plain fun. Certainly, competition on the grand stage of the original Pony Express Trail speaks for itself.

The race is on for 2010. The country needs a spark to get going again. This head to head match may light that fire.

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Now either this guy is a DWARF or this bike is a MONSTER! This guys name is josh bender and I ran across this picture after using a search term I have never used before. It yielded a MASSIVE AMOUNT of FUNK which I will be posting in the next week.
Josh Bender doing a 60 foot drop!



Josh Bender - 60 Ft Drop - Massive Crash - Click here for another funny movie.

This guy said it best in the above video when he said "Life is to short...you have to GO HARD!" Insanely eloquent and I say to Mr. Bender what my Marine Corps. Drill Instructors said to me years ago "Boy you are stupid and IGNORANT...but ya got GUTS and that IS ENOUGH!" Josh keep doing big things in the name of extreme Mountain Biking..I tip my hat to you friend :)

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This design resembles a freshly shaved bald head my friends....CLEAN!


This Columbia is unrestored and has its original head badge and stove enamel paint. When I obtained the bike, the front rim, which is made of wood clad with steel, was broken. I suspect it had not been ridden for over 50 years. A new old stock rim one was obtained and the front hub reconstructed by Keith Hellon. Except for the seat, the new single-tube original style tires from West Virginia, and one of the cork handlebar grips, all of the components are original. The hubs have straight pull spokes, proving that concept was not a recent innovation in the cycling world. The original owner did not order the optional spoon brake which pressed on the surface of the front tire. Many of these Columbia chainless bicycles are in museums, but this one is now ready to ride.

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Story Courtesy of http://www.telegram.com/ and writer Mark Conti

Quicker than a kangaroo, Nelson “the Cheetah” Vails jumped at the opportunity to race in Australia. When the Harlem native was invited to compete in a series of track cycling races Down Under in 1985, more than 80 years after Marshall W. “Major” Taylor made his first trip to Australia, he was more focused on winning races than succeeding the 1899 world champion. “I was told I was following in his footsteps,” said Vails, the first black cyclist to compete at the world-class level since Major Taylor. “It was cool. It was good. I can appreciate that now, but at the time I was just a kid racing.” In 1984, Vails, who was called “the Cheetah” because he was the fastest cat on the track, captured the silver medal in the individual 1,000-meter sprint at the Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles. A promoter subsequently invited him to Australia to race at velodromes across the country, much like Major Taylor had done at the turn of the 20th century.

In the land of marsupials — kangaroos, koalas and wombats — the Cheetah was the star. Vails went from track to track, racing the champion of each venue. The tour promoted Vails as the next Major Taylor and described the event as retracing Taylor’s footsteps, including a race in Sydney, where Taylor’s wife, Daisy, gave birth to a daughter. She was named Sydney, after the city. As he traveled from Queensland to Tasmania, Vails heard Australian cycling enthusiasts talk about the achievements of Major Taylor and he was amazed how much they knew about “the Worcester Whirlwind.” Vails had heard comparisons to Major Taylor since he began winning races at T-Town, the Lehigh County Velodrome in Trexlertown, Pa., but the significance would not sink in for years to come. “People would always say, ‘Do you know of Major Taylor? You could be like that someday,’ ” said Vails, who will be attending the Major Taylor statue dedication with many other cycling legends Wednesday at the Worcester Public Library. “I was an African-American cyclist hearing stories about someone before me. People were saying you could follow in his footsteps.

I was young, I thought, yeah, that’s great,” Vails said. “It was really hard for me to harness until I realized I could be good at this.” Vails, a former New York City bike messenger who played a messenger in the 1986 film “Quicksilver” with Kevin Bacon, began to realize his world class abilities in the early 1980s, when he went from New York state sprint champion to a national championship contender. Vails would go on to win a gold medal at the Pan American Games in 1983, a silver medal at the ’84 Olympics, national championships in ’84 and ’85, and a silver medal at the ’85 world championships in Italy, among other cycling achievements. Though he was competing at a level Taylor dominated, Vails would never face the widespread racism confronted by the “Colored Cyclone,” as Taylor was sometimes called. “He did it before anyone. He accomplished something that black athletes won’t touch,” Vails said. Taylor, who was given the nickname “Major” because he wore a military uniform while performing bicycle stunts outside an Indianapolis bike shop as a teenager, moved from Indianapolis to Worcester with his employer and racing manager Louis “Birdie” Munger in 1895. Munger planned to establish a bicycle factory in Worcester but the move was also made because Massachusetts was considered a more tolerant region in the era of Jim Crow segregation. In his autobiography written in 1929, Taylor wrote: “I was in Worcester only a short time before I realized that there was no such race prejudice existing among the bicycle riders there as I had experienced in Indianapolis.” Taylor was refused entry in some races, and experienced threats and assaults from white riders, but he refused to get dragged down by the bias. He went on to set seven world records and win the 1-mile world championship in Montreal in 1899, not long removed from the Civil War and decades before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947. “I can see him excelling in that because he could. It was naturally easy for him because he seems to have been strong-minded,” Vails said of Taylor. “I never had to deal with any hurdles like that in all my travels,” he said. Though he didn’t face the racism of Taylor’s era, Vails said he was the only black competing at the national and international level when he was racing. After competing in races with other black cyclists at Central Park and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Vails found he was the only black racer at the world-class level. “It was never a black and white thing for me,” Vails said. “I wasn’t raised that way. I never had that issue. I never had a racial issue the entire time I was racing.” “People would say ‘doesn’t it feel strange to be the only black cyclist,’ but I never looked at it that way,” Vails said. Vails said he has learned a lot about Major Taylor over the years, especially when he raced in the Major Taylor Velodrome in Indianapolis. He is looking forward to seeing the statue of Major Taylor unveiled in Worcester and considers any comparison to him a great compliment.

“It’s pretty neat to be mentioned in the same sentence as Major Taylor. It’s an honor,” Vails said. “I did it for the love of the sport not because I was trying to follow in his footsteps. If he was alive at the time, it would have been nice to have him see me compete.” In returning to Central Massachusetts, Vails recalled that he competed in the Fitchburg Longsjo Classic at least three of four times and believes he won it as a Category 3 racer in the early 1980s. The statue dedication will take place at noon Wednesday at the Worcester Public Library at 3 Salem Square. Also attending the event will be three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond, former “Raleigh Boys” Bill Humphreys and John Howard, three-time Olympic medalist Edwin Moses, some of Major Taylor’s relatives, as well as state and local officials. There will also be a panel discussion at 7 p.m. at the library on “Race, Sports and Major Taylor’s Legacy.”

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I came across the below story and picture (The best I have seen of Marshall Taylor) while researching a 19th Century Inventor. The below story and picture are courtesy of;

The New York Post

Writer: Harry Siegel

For a brief moment in America, the bicycle was king, and Major Taylor was king of the bicycle, one of the country's first black sporting heroes. As author Todd Balf notes, the papers dubbed him "the colored champion" and "the Worcester Whirlwind."In 1897, at the peak of its popularity, there were two million bicycles in the US, sharing the road with only 4,000 cars. It was the dawn of the era of individual speed, and men pedaled themselves to previously undreamable velocities: In 1898, the fastest car managed 39 miles per hour, while the bike record was 45 mph.

The men who rode these machines attracted tens of thousands to great new velodromes to watch them fight through nearly week-long endurance affairs that left the surviving riders literally hallucinating. While baseball at the time had capped salaries at $240, "Taylor had earned nearly that in a single two-minute-long exhibition race at Madison Square Garden," Balf writes.

Major Taylor's father was a former Kentucky slave who moved the family to Indianapolis. Major, the first member of the family born in the North, was adopted by and lived with his father's white boss, a railroad man, for three years. By the time his new "family" moved, he'd already been exposed to a culture that often excluded blacks, and to bike riding, at which he excelled from the start. After a few years of amateur racing, Taylor came to the attention of inventor Birdie Munger, a Jewish speed and biking enthusiast who became Taylor's friend, mentor and manager. Major first made a name for himself as a 16 year old when he set a new world speed record, lopping a full seven seconds off the previous best time. His reputation grew, and Taylor and Munger actually tried, unsuccessfully, to bleach his very dark skin, to ensure he could compete in Chicago's prestigious, whites-only Pullman Road Race. "For days and days we poured it on the lad," Munger later recalled, but "the mixture was poisonous in the extreme and we had to stop it."

Though unable to race in the South, and treated poorly throughout the country, Taylor became famous for his incredible bursts of passing speed, and held an amazing 200-12 record in high-stakes race matches. Teddy Roosevelt was a fan. Taylor set about constructing a public identity, a strict Baptist who refused to race on Sundays, even as his opponents colluded to move championships to exclude him, and the press called him racist names and mocked what they deemed his holier-than-thou posture. When he married, he and his wife concocted a fake past for her, so she could publicly match his upright standing in birthright as well as conduct.
The book culminates, along with Major's career, in Australia, 1904, where Taylor raced against his longtime foe, the racist rogue Floyd McFarland, who'd once appeared for a race against him to the strains of "All Coons Look Alike To Me." Badly injured in an earlier race, Taylor left his hospital room to race, even though he has to slice open his own badly injured leg just before mounting his bike to even complete a pedal stroke. Taylor won against a field of 10 racers, with eight of them colluding against him. Think Curt Schilling times 50.

Following this triumph and his subsequent retirement, the speed craze moved on to motorized vehicles and Taylor quickly receded from the public eye. There is little documentation of his post-racing life. We know that his business endeavors did poorly and his wife left him, and that he was buried, like his father, in an unmarked grave (though he was later interred and reburied by his racing comrades). Happily, his story has resurfaced, and numerous black racing clubs in his name have sprung up in places as South Central Los Angeles.

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(Old School Fighter) Over the last 1 year and a few months, I have been super busy sketching my bicycle designs. Although I have over 100 designs. I have settled on 10 designs to roll out my 1st line of Signature Bicycles by 'Marshall Taylor RYDZ'. I told all of you last year sometime, I am not an artist by trade, but I had to do SOMETHING to get my designs out of my head and on paper so I trained myself to sketch them as best I could. This was a very tedious process. Imagine if you will having over 100 designs and having to re sketch them all until they are just right add on top of that having to provide 4 viewing angles (Side profile, Top, Front and Rear).

I didn't stop there! I created my own Handle Bar Designs (they are hot!), wheel designs (admittedly my weakest area) tires patterns with colors and you can get a general idea of how much work that is. Nevertheless, I was to focused on getting proto-types produced that I had forgotten the ONE THING I have the ability to do myself, and that is produce a basic, funky, Hand Made design by myself. The title of this posting says it all, IT'S TIME TO FIGHT the Good Fight! I am going to Longmont, Colorado to pick an old frame up this weekend and get the process started. I will give you all something to chew on until my next post though. I am going to use a WILD lime green color, magenta highlights, plaid patterns, a tire that is going to freak you out, specially designed logo graphics, and a few other things. I let yall know!

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