Clockwork Active Media Systems

Tell us about your bike.

My main commuter these days is an old GT Outpost that I picked up this spring.  It's old enough to have a horizontal top tube, and everything looked 100% original on it.  I put on 1.5" slicks and a rack.  Fenders come and go, depending on how I feel about wetness.

The thing you see clamped to the stem is a skewer for mounting an iBert seat up front, which is a great way to take my two-year-old on bike rides.  He really likes bike rides, and he likes working the thumb shifters to make us go "slower" or "faster".

My other bike is a Trek 7.6 FX.  That's for when I want to go especially far or fast.  The GT has to handle everything else: family rides, commutes, getting locked up downtown, and maybe one day some trail riding again.

All my bikes have gears.  I refuse to buy into the single-speed craze.

Tell us about your commute.

My ride is 15-20 minutes, through Seward, across the Mississippi, and through the U of M campus. The river valley is scenic, and it's always fun to see what the students or U2 are up to, but there are some dang fool drivers in U-ville. So many motorists are somewhere between oblivious and hostile to bikers, it's aggravating.

Some mornings I drop off the kid at daycare, four blocks from home.

Why do you ride?

It's fun, exciting, practical, and invigorating. I feel good about replacing car trips with bike trips, and choosing to live and work in the city to make that possible. It's my only real sport-like activity, and it's also rewarding to log the miles on dailymile.com.